Astronomicon

Live from the Radissson Hotel in Rochester NY, its...Author Guy!

Please, please, hold your applause, just throw money.

So here I am at my first ever Astronomicon, trying as always to get my deserving books into the hands of deserving readers. We got snowed on, on the way up here. My wife was so jealous when I told her about it last night. Out on LI we don't get nearly as much snow as we'd like.

We got in at around 4 and immediately set up our tables. My daughter, Julia, got a chance for a shower last night, but did I? Nooo. And guess who comes by--last night--taking pictures of everybody for the archives. On the other hand he also recorded a brief interview with me that he said will be podcast sometime in December.

I'm torn between calling my books epic fables, or new mythology. I don't think 'fantasy novel' really groks the essence, man. I've been trying for 7 years now to figure out how to describe my books in a 30-second sound bite or a short paragraph, and I still can't do it.

I've got other interviews that I did a while back on the Destinies Radio show on WUSB, and the show archives are on CaptPhilOnline.com somewhere. I wonder if I can post them on my website? In chunks. The first interview was almost two hours long, since the follow-up DJ didn't get there in time. Fortunately I was able to speak coherently and extemporaneously for an additional hour, at midnight, until she finally got in. Howard had some good questions, so I had something to talk about.

Anyway, back to last night. It was steampunk night, and here I was without a single copy of Echelon's new steampunk novel, Thomas Riley. Lots of people in steampunk costumes too. As often happens at these sorts of events, we had a lot of browsers, and few buyers. Most con guests will browse the dealer's room several times before making selections, and then they don't actually buy them until the last day, so they don't have to carry around a lot of stuff. So I was able to spend a goodly amount of time with several people, talking extensively about my books in particular and Echelon books in general. Most seemed surprised that I could describe the stories so well, even though I read them a long time ago. Maybe that's the pronlem with both my reading and my writing, I don't just read, I work at it, so I read more slowly and lesss often but I know the book when I'm done. If I was able to just put words on paper I'd also get more words written but I don't know if they would be as good as the words I write now.

I got to shake hands with Robert Sawyer, the science-fiction author. Several of the other dealers are also panelists and such so I expect I'll meet a few more luminaries in the field before the weekend is out.

Time to see about breakfast.