Balticon and new book eve

[pbray]

Back from Balticon. The long weekend and drive back drained all functioning brain cells, so expect a longer post on this later in the week. For now, here's a quick recap.

The Good: met old friends and made new ones. Most of the panels I was on were very good, and today's reading from TFB was all I could hope for. I was intrigued to meet several students from Seton Hill University's Master of Arts in Writing Popular Fiction program. Maria Snyder, this year's Compton Crook winner, is currently in that program.

The Bad: programming was disorganized, to put it charitably. Among other issues--the pocket program only listed program titles, not descriptions, so both panelists and con attendees were left guessing as to the purpose of some of the panels. For the most part they'd also failed to identify moderators, which left panelists scrambling to choose a moderator as they were sitting down.

The Odd: there were actually two cons going on. The Neil Gaiman con, with a large contingent of his fans only interested in going to his events, and then the con for the rest of us. Preregistration was over 2,000 with many more registering at the con, yet when I was in the public spaces it had the feel of a much smaller con.


In other news, The First Betrayal goes on sale tomorrow. Which completely explains why BN.COM just sent me an email saying that my preorder would be delayed since the publisher had changed the publication date. I called the Ingram's stock line to confirm that the books were in the warehouses, and they are, so BN.COM appears to be experiencing the electronic version of a brain fart. It wouldn't be the first time. I always preorder copies of my titles from the online bookstores, just to check to make sure they are in the channel and shipping, and about half the time I run into a problem with at least one preorder being arbitrarily cancelled, outright lost, or receiving strange status messages.

Anyway, that's all the news that fits to print. More later this weekend, after I recover!

Comments

[larryhammer]

there were actually two cons going on.

Heh. I've seen this effect before.

---L.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Balticon keeps inviting me, and I keep turning them down because it's the same weekend as Wiscon. I sometimes think that I should throw caution to the winds some year and go, but I haven't exactly heard raves.

FWIW, they explained in the invitation that they were running way behind schedule, which kind of hinted that we could be looking at Torcon on a smaller scale.

[lindabg.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the heads up about First Betrayal. I'll give B&N a call today. I'm really looking forward to reading it, after that tantalizing glimpse you gave us at WFC. My husband says I shouldn't gush at writers I know, it makes me sound like a teenager, but I do love Devlin and I can't wait to get to know your new characters...

[libwitch.livejournal.com]

We have a bunch of your books in our backrroom, waiting to go on display =-)

[(Anonymous)]

receiving strange status messages

I bet none of yours beats the ones I found on my account page on Amazon.co.uk.

One they had dispatched was going to arrive on 30th December 1970.and another based on a TV show was going to be published in 1939!!!

[klingonguy.livejournal.com]

It was a pleasure being on a panel with you (even if you did call me "Larry" twice). I'm looking forward to competetive acts of wanton destruction at future cons.

And congrats on The First Betrayal.

[jaguarpaddler.livejournal.com]

As one of the Seton Hill students attending the con, I can easily say that we were just as intrigued by you.

It was unfortunate that the con was so disorganized, we found ourselves unable to attend many of the panels and workshops that we would've liked to. Then after we arrived we discovered that there was a writing workshop. But it seemed as if the organizers intended the workshop to be 'friends only' which is why it wasn't well publicized.

But it was a pleasure attending your panel. It was extremely informative and a nice change of pace from the Klingon Feasts and semi-nude warrior princesses.