Monday, July 27, 2009

Prose and Confluence

Just got back from Confluence this morning, don't know why I'm awake now. The trip home was a nightmare. It started out well, but then we ran into yet more PA highway construction, not that anything was happening, just that the roads had been closed off into single-lane highways for large stretches, and there was so much traffic on them that we lost an hour just sitting and waiting for the trucks to move. This was when we had left at 3:30 PM from Pittsburgh, and we live on LI, NY. It's already an 8-hour trip. By the time we got to NJ I was so sick of PA (which is an otherwise beautiful state, but not when it's dark and you can't see anything) that I had to go looking for a gas station first thing. It hadn't occurred to me that they would close, or that early, but I did find one and fed my car. Then there was the rain. Apparently a thunderstorm had gone through the state, so not only was the traffic slowed by rain, when we got to the George Washington bridge there was an hour-long backup at the toll plaza, which I think was due to a failure of their EZ-Pass system by lightning or something. Not sure. But we finally got into NY and only got held up a little at the toll plaza for the next bridge to LI. And I got no flat tires or anything. In the rain. Hooray!

Sunday morning I wanted to try to do a little writing on my current WIP, and found that the copy on my flash drive was missing two pages. Fortunately the latest version had saved to my home computer, so I'm able to continue with it, but that didn't help me then.

Now for the good news: Confluence is a great little convention filled with some really nice people who love books! Many of the books I sold were to people who bought books from me last year and were coming back for sequels and new stuff. Echelon Press has a new line for fantasy and scifi books so hopefully I'll have more in that line next time. This year I had several new young adult titles but nothing in the adult lines, in SF/F/H. We had the Missing! anthology, though, and I sold one of those as well. They love to read there, and it doesn't have to be SF/F. I'm tempted to get a second table next time and spread out every book I have. Right now I have a bookshelf for the straight stuff, which makes the books harder to find. I also picked up a stack of the new Triangulations: Dark Glass anthology. I sold 8 at the event, along with several copies of last year's anthology, which has a story by me in it.

It also turned out the guy next to me had a small press and an interest in werewolves, and he said I could send him some chapters of St. Martin's Moon to see if he'd be interested in publishing it. Several people understodd the concept of a catalyst novel once I explained my book to them (Amy Treadwell even came up with the term 'catalyst character' independently), but none had any ideas for how to create a new format to describe one.
The assistant manager at the Bob Evan's restaurant across the street was also a scriptwriter and expressed an interest in adapting my short story Chasing His Own Tale. I've had lots of people say that, though. Maybe this time it'll actually happen.

All in all, a most worthy an excellent adventure. Now I'm going back to bed.

No comments: