Every once in a while, a news item comes through about “a massive pileup” on a highway somewhere. Conditions turned bad, there was too much congestion on the roadway, and a chain-reaction wreck resulted. Usually the item goes on to describe death, disruption, and/or injuries. Certainly, there are lots of mangled cars and trucks. It’s a bad scene for all involved. No, I wasn’t in a wreck like that (at least no so far, thank God!). But events over the…
Why should I write about a Local Author Fair? The Kansas City Metro area may not seem like a literary hub to people from other parts of the world, but this town is just crawling with writers. I encountered that fact again when I attended the Mid-Continent Public Library’s Story Center Local Author Fair, on November 15, 2025. I’ve tried to offer a glimpse of it in this post. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in the United States…
I had a great time at Archon 48. I stayed super-busy, and that’s how I prefer it. As I normally do, I displayed artwork in this convention’s excellent Art Show – and also brought selections from my late sister and brother-in-law’s art collection to display in the Resale Gallery. I had a full programming schedule. That meant it was a good thing I also had an excellent partner, K. R. Gastreich, to help share the duties at our dealers’ table!…
I had so much fun at DemiCon 36 earlier this month! It’s been a while since a whole convention felt quite so easy and joyous to me as it did at this year’s edition of the long-running Des Moines science fiction convention. It was an especially welcome experience because so many other things so far this year have seemed hard and unhappy. I’ve noted this before, in some of the few blog posts I’ve been able to produce in the…
It’s high time I shared some thoughts on FenCon XX, since Ty and I attended it a month ago! But then, this FenCon reflection is late for the same reason this is also the first blog post of the year. Since my sister died in September, I’ve been meeting myself coming and going between KC and Texas. Something had to give. This wasn’t our first FenCon – we’d attended several FenCons before the Pandemic. We liked the crowd size (bustling,…
One thing I can say at the end of my very sparse “sf convention season” of 2024: Archon persists. We’ve seen a lot of fan-run science fiction conventions bucking strong headwinds since the Pandemic. My “home convention,” ConQuesT, has gone on hiatus. The club isn’t ready to say it’s dead yet, but we didn’t have one this year. Another longtime mainstay, SoonerCon, also went through a bumpy transition this year, as I noted in an earlier blog post. We and…
The day came! You might remember that last week I wrote a blog post titled “Any Day Now,” about how long it was taking to get my latest book, Bone of Contention, into print. All the unexpected amounts of time things took. All the unintended mixups. Not to mention all the delays beyond my control! The waiting isn’t quite over yet – not all of it. But the day came, at least for one thing! My Amazon pre-sale promotion is…
Any day now, I’ll have a pre-sale to announce! Bone of Contention, the third and final novel in the XK9 “Bones” Trilogy, will be available for pre-sale orders in advance of its September 24, 2024 publication date. My plan (check back in a few weeks to see how well it went 😳) is to offer ebooks through Amazon, paperbacks through the Weird Sisters Publishing website, and both (if possible) through IngramSpark’s new e-commerce portal. Amazon doesn’t allow tiny publishers like…
Here at Weird Sisters Publishing, new visions keep popping up. Sometimes They are literal visions, AKA illustrations, of the sort I shared a few weeks ago in the post about a new way of approaching Warren C. Norwood’s adventure-filled Windhover Tetralogy. One of the new visions I’ll share for the first time in this post has been seven months in the making. Another came into being quite suddenly. And at the end of the post I’ll talk about a convention…
Our latest Weird Sisters Publishing project has turned into a series of illustrated books. Yes, my novel Bone of Contention is the next publication in the lineup as I write this (pub date: September 24, 2024). There’s still work to do for that one, but the XK9 “Bones” Trilogy isn’t the series I want to talk about in this post. It’s The Windhover Tetralogy. We’ve had plans to reissue some of my late brother-in-law Warren C. Norwood’s books since before…