Two more pieces of book promotion for y’all to chew on.

First, I’ve been interviewed by Shaun Farrell for the Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing podcast. It’s a rather lengthy interview — 30 minutes or so — and it covers everything from whether Natch is the “hero” of Jump 225, why the series is titled Jump 225 in the first place, what is the nature of Natch’s drive to succeed, and why Moonwatcher from 2001 was in a way the first Natch.

Stargate writer and producer Joseph Mallozzi posted my answers to his book club questions about Infoquake recently. The group really seemed to delve into the book and had a very insightful discussion, not only here, but during several days of preceding blog posts. Topics covered include my favorite character, how likely I think the Infoquake future is, and why (or whether) the book ends abruptly. Excerpt:

Iamza writes: “I’m not so sure I really understand MultiReal. As outlined by Margaret, it sounds kind of great — a chance to have things turn out exactly as you wanted. But what happens when the batter wants to hit a six and the bowler wants to get his tenth wicket for no runs (hah, take that, baseball analogies! Give me cricket any day of the week). Whose reality ultimately wins out — or do both batter and bowler split off into separate universes, each achieving their individual goal? For every individual who’s installed the MultiReal program, are there a zillion universes in which things go wrong, and only one in which everything is golden.

DLE: Now you see the big dilemma with MultiReal technology. One of the main subplots in book 2 is how to resolve conflicts very much like you describe. Natch, Jara & Co. discover that there are a lot of broad sociological implications in how MultiReal resolves these conflicts. For instance: how do you charge customers for all those realities? Do you charge a flat fee, or do you charge for each alternate reality they pick? If you choose the latter, does that mean the rich would automatically win every argument?

(Admit it, you’re just making these funny cricket terms up. “The batter wants to hit a six”? “Getting his tenth wicket”? Surely you should not be using such language on a family blog like Mr. Mallozzi’s.)

I’ve managed to carve out enough time from all of the diaper changes, spit-ups and late-night feedings to conduct two new interviews in support of MultiReal. (And don’t even get me started about the babies.) <rim shot>

Fast Forward, the Arlington, VA-based cable science fiction TV show, conducted a 19-minute interview with me a couple of weeks ago. (Video requires QuickTime 7, but there’s an audio-only version available too.) Interviewer Tom Schaad really seems to have read Infoquake and MultiReal carefully. In our discussion before the cameras started rolling, he picked up on a number of hints in the margins of the books that nobody else has remarked on. (Hint: In which orbital colony did noted philanderer Marcus Surina die? And in which orbital colony was a certain fatherless character born?) Topics in the interview proper include MultiReal, technological paradigm shifts, the difficulty of writing the middle book in a trilogy, ethical systems in a post-religious world, and how the Jump 225 Trilogy is all about trying to find balance.

And blogger Fábio Fernandes has posted a seven-question interview with me on Post-Weird Thoughts. Topics covered include the influence of Dune and William Gibson, my favorite novels, the timeline of the Jump 225 trilogy in relation to today, and Geosynchron. Quick excerpt:

What can we expect of Geosynchron, the next novel of the Infoquake series? (BTW, it will really be a trilogy or there will be other stories in that universe?)

Geosynchron will definitely be the last novel of the trilogy. (I’m not precluding the possibility of writing additional novels in this universe down the road, but this particular story will come to an end at the conclusion of book 3.) As for what’s in store in the final book… You’re going to see the characters go off to places we haven’t been before, like the Pacific Islands and the orbital colony of 49th Heaven. You’re going to meet some of the Pharisees. You’re going to see a lot more of Quell and delve into his relationship with Margaret Surina. And you’re going to see a big ending that involves military strikes, philosophical debate, and (of course) creative marketing techniques. I think I can promise that it’s going to be a very, very unique conclusion. Currently the schedule is for the book to hit the stores in early 2010.

I’m told that Post-Weird Thoughts will have reviews of Infoquake and MultiReal up shortly as well.

Go. Watch. Read. Contemplate. Comment.

So I didn’t win the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, as you might have noticed by now. Conventional Wisdom said the award would go to Scott Lynch, but Conventional Wisdom has a tendency to tease people like that. Instead the Campbell tiara went to my good friend, the short story writer Mary Robinette Kowal (seen below onstage wearing said tiara). Shows you that the Campbell Award contest has just devolved into a crass competition of who has the most friends. Oh, and the most talent. And the best writing. And the most promising future, and the record of giving back the most to the SF community.

Jeez. Screw that.

At the Hugo ceremony, me and my buddies Lou Anders, Ian McDonald, John Picacio, and Paul Cornell went 0 for 5 on awards. But I was encouraged to discover that, according to the official numbers (PDF), I received the second most number of Campbell nominations (only behind Mr. Lynch) and I came in third in the final tally out of a field of six. Not too shabby considering that I published absolutely nothing in 2007, the year under consideration.

But aside from that, how was the con? I hear you asking. The answer: I had a terrific time at Denvention, in spite of the con’s many challenges. Challenges such as being spread out over a convention hall so large it took you twenty minutes to get anywhere. Such as having all the parties and some of the programming in various hotels several blocks away. Such as having a dealer’s room far away from everything, which sat half-empty most of the time.

Highlights of my Denvention experience included:

• Hanging out at the Hyatt bar and the nearby 24-hour diner until the wee hours of the night with the aforementioned Lou Anders, Ian McDonald, John Picacio, and Paul Cornell, not to mention Chris Roberson, Allison Baker, Deanna Hoak, Sean Williams, Daryl Gregory, John Scalzi, Alan Beatts, Jay Lake, Matt Jarpe, David J. Williams, John Joseph Adams, Rani Graff, and Jetse de Vries.
• Meeting the lovely and hilarious Liza Groen Trombi, Executive Editor at Locus, and discussing all things Locus and all things parenting. I don’t think I quite managed to flirt my way into a cover article, but I’m still working on it.
• Chatting with io9 head honchos Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, the latter of whom is currently reading Infoquake for an io9 review. (Did I mention how lovely, charming, interesting, and articulate these two are?)
• Attending the Pyr panel hosted by Lou Anders (and featuring fellow authors Kay Kenyon, Chris Roberson, Sean Williams, Mike Resnick, and Alexis Glynn Latner) and the Pyr party in honor of Brasyl author Ian McDonald.
• Talking the ins and outs of publishing with Paolo Bacigalupi, who writes some namby-pamby liberal environmental crap in his new SF collection from Night Shade, Pump Six. Turns out he’s hysterical, interesting, and even nice.
• Meeting fantasy author and fellow SFNovelists.com member David B. Coe in the flesh, and discovering that we have very similar outlooks on life and senses of humor. We now have matching tattoos on our upper thighs.
• Attending one of the best sushi dinners of my life with the hilarious Doselle Young, the fabulously sexy Alethea Kontis, the talented Mary Robinette Kowal, the aforementioned David B. Coe, the delightful Misty Massey, and the almost-unbearably nice Eric James Stone, and one other person whose name is eluding me right now. We spent most of the time prying into Alethea’s love life over sake and offering her unsolicited commentary and suggestions.
• Sharing several panels with Warren Hammond, author of KOP, who is really much too friendly and unassuming to have written a book with a cover like this one on the right.
• Finally meeting and chatting about the writing of second novels with fantasy powerhouses Patrick Rothfuss and Ken Scholes at Joe and Gay Haldeman’s Rising Stars reception.
• Meeting newly minted SF novelist brothers Eytan and Dani Kollin, whose upcoming The Unincorporated Man features a future Earth where free market capitalism has run amuck. Which means I should either be welcoming them into the fold of economic SF writers, or hunting them down and killing them as potential competitors.
• Gabbing at the Aussie party about foreign rights with fantasist Pamela Freeman, who really seems much too nice to be in this business.
• A raucous dinner with (among others) Mario Acevedo, author of The Undead Kama Sutra and admitted deranged mind, Jeremy Lassen, unflappable zoot suited impresario of Night Shade Books, Irene Gallo, keen-eyed Art Director for Tor Books, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jetse de Vries. John Scalzi may brag about being in the group that thought up the market segment of “unicorn bukkake,” but I was in the group that dreamt up “YA zombie porn.” (Interestingly enough, Paolo is the only person who was part of both groups…)
• Breakfast and con story swapping with the ever-interesting, ever-gracious Alis Rasmussen, aka Kate Elliott.
• Watching the unending line of signature seekers in the dealers room for Elizabeth Moon, while I sat in the next chair over and smiled pleasantly at the half-dozen who decided to seek out my signature. (Ms. Moon seemed almost embarrassed about the disparity, and assured me many times that she had been in my shoes before.)
• Post-con recapping over beer at the Denver airport with fellow DC area writer David J. Williams.

Believe it or not, those are just the highlights. My apologies to anyone whom I may have hung out with/chatted with/drank with/gotten tattoos with and didn’t mention here, but there’s only so much time I can spend recapping this stuff.

Update 8/11/08 @ 10:08 pm: Can’t believe I forgot to give a shout out to my buddies at Solaris, George Mann, Christian Dunn, and Mark Newton, among whom I spent many hours drinking and schmoozing. Always good to see those guys.

Life moves fast, and this MultiReal promotion stuff is zipping by like an F-16. Here’s a passel of news about book stuff, which I’m just going to lump here behind bullet points for lack of any better idea.

• Chat with Me on LibraryThing: From now until next Friday, August 1, I’m participating in my own LibraryThing Author Chat. Which basically means that any LibraryThing member is free to post questions to the author in an open forum, and I’ll answer them. Somebody please log on and ask me something so I can prop up my frail, stunted ego.
• SFFWorld MultiReal Review: Rob Bedford of SFFWorld has given MultiReal what can only be called a rave review. Remember that this is the guy who called Infoquake “THE science fiction novel of the year, if not the past five years,” and said that “the genre might not be quite the same after this book.” So I’ve been looking forward to what Rob has to say. Excerpt:
  

  MultiReal is on par with the previous volume for Edelman’s ability to change the game a bit and still maintain what made Infoquake such a great novel; his growth as a writer is most evident in the characters themselves. If anything, MultiReal may be a bolder novel… MultiReal is also not a “treading water middle book” of a trilogy… it really drives home much of what Edelman was setting up in the first volume and leaves the reader eager for the next volume. David Louis Edelman has crafted another winner with MultiReal… I for one can’t wait to see where Edelman takes the conclusion of this [thus far] spectacular trilogy.

• Listen to My “Key to Publishing” on Audio: The popular podcasts Adventures in SciFi Publishing and I Should Be Writing are jointly holding a Keys to Publishing Contest. Not only will they be giving away copies of Infoquake and MultiReal, but they’ll also be giving away books by my buddies Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, Sean Williams, and Kay Kenyon (as well as Brenda Cooper, whom I’ve not yet had the pleasure of meeting). As part of the contest, they asked the authors to contribute short audio pieces on the key to getting published. Here’s my contribution, on I Should Be Writing 94. The whole podcast is worth listening to, but for reference’ sake, the intro to the Keys to Publishing sections starts at 3:40, and my audio piece runs from 4:50 to 7:36.)
• Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist Contest Winners: Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist has announced the winners of their MultiReal giveaway contest, which ended up being an Infoquake/MultiReal giveaway contest. (In case you’ve forgotten, Pat called Infoquake “one of the very best science fiction debuts I have ever read.” And he hasn’t reviewed MultiReal yet, so I’m very interested in making sure he’s happy. Can I FedEx you a pillow, Pat?)
• POD People Review: Chris Gerrib of POD People has reviewed MultiReal and given it a rating of 10 out of 10. Says Chris (a self-published SF author in his own right):
  

  MultiReal is a deep book, full of plots and counter-plots, with a stunning vision of the future. It manages what seems to be impossible, making the act of computer programming exciting, while reflecting on the nature of government and business. This is high science fiction at its finest.

  Which prompted this amusing reply from one baron_waste on the LiveJournal mirror of the article:

  In ten years, that book is going to be as embarrassingly dated as any 1950s “Atomic Mutant Vegetables Conquer the World” story. I mean, look at it. Maybe he won’t care — royalty checks are their own currency, in the literal sense of the word — but this ain’t exactly The City and the Stars you’re describing here.

  Fine, baron_waste. Not only do you pick on my book, but you make fun of the title for my next book, Atomic Mutant Vegetables Conquer the World. See if I care.

This is the final week of my big summer giveaway contest. So if you’re looking to win the David Louis Edelman ouevre, it’s your laaaaaaast chance.

Last week, I challenged you to create the dream presidential ticket with one of the current candidates as president and a comic book superhero as veep. I’ve awarded the prize to Yaron Davidson, who feels that a McCain/Kal-el ticket would be a success. (And no, I’m not rewarding Yaron just because he complained about the unfairness of the Americocentric topic last week. He really did have the best entry.)

McCain should pick Superman as his running mate because:
A. America is looking for strong leadership, and who is stronger than the Man of Steel?
B. Shows that he doesn’t have a problem with illegal aliens, as long as they’re polite, useful, don’t want to be paid for their assistance, and look white.
C. The soldiers in Iraq could use the help with the next surge.
D. With his x-ray vision, Superman could help find oil wells on U.S. soil, and then could immediately drill in to test them.

He also had some good reasons why Superman should campaign with Barack Obama. Which apparently makes the Man of Steel some kind of Joseph Lieberman figure.

Obama should pick Superman as his running mate because:
A. He could finally stick to a position against illegal wiretaps. Superman could listen to all the suspicious conversations by himself, and no good liberal would object to letting anyone use his innate ability freely.
B. Shows that Obama really values diversity, and doesn’t just play the race card for political reasons.
C. By flying people and equipment around, Superman could help to drastically cut the oil consumption of the public sector.
D. Superman can blow a lot of cold air, and help delay global warming.

First runner-up in the contest is clearly Sophia Ahmed, who believes that Obama should be doing his terrorist fist bump with Joseph Dredd.

“Vote Dredd/Obama: The Innocent Have Nothing To Fear”. New! For the first time, compliment your democracy with a totalitarian dictatorship. Next time some creep is violating your rights, know that Hope carries a Lawgiver. Judge Dredd is completely unbribable. His knowledge of the Law is complete and exact. Citizens and perps alike will always get justice. Instant results! No lawyer fees! PLUS — Dredd draws potential assassin fire away from the President, because making a successful hit on Dredd would be the crime coup of the millennium, in any reality! Vote Dredd/Obama, and know your country will always be prepared! Extra-dimensional threats a speciality.

This entry came in from Cindy Blank-Edelman. (No relation.) (Except, you know, she’s my sister.)

Clearly, Barack Obama should choose Wonder Woman as his running mate. Not only will this placate the many Hillary Clinton supporters who are threatening to vote for McCain, but it will give him a cool invisible plane to fly around in to make campaign appearances. Also, she has a great patriotic costume.

But Cindy wasn’t the only one who picked up on the Obama/Amazonia meme. Mick Summer believes that Wonder Woman’s lasso would be a great asset (though exactly how it’s going to help with Fox News, I’m not clear).

Barack Obama’s ideal 2008 running mate would be Wonder Woman, not necessarily because she would be America’s first female vice president; nor because it would set a precedent for gender equality in American society; nor because she would make a positive female role model for the whole world as well as America; but primarily because her Magic Lasso, which can make anyone tell the truth, would prove extremely useful in the White House, the Supreme Court, and on CNN and Fox News, in cutting through all the political red tape once-and-for-all, and providing all the truth that American citizens are entitled to. The lasso would also make an excellent (and humane) interrogation tool for use on any commander, official, employer, or other suspect, American as well as otherwise.

Not everybody stayed within the same confines of the mainstream. Stephen Stull writes:

(First Comics’) Badger should join McCain’s ticket. They’d almost surely lose, but Badger would get a nice public opinion boost, since he’d finally get to stand next to someone who made him look sane by comparison.

So endeth week 3.

*

For week 4’s contest — the final contest — I’m going to go back to two sources which (hopefully) should be familiar to everyone reading this blog: Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. And I’m going to ask you the eternal question that has been boggling my mind since fifth grade:

Who would win a deathmatch smackdown fight: Gandalf or Obi-Wan Kenobi, and why? (Or better yet, how?)

Keep in mind that both white-haired old mentors have a way with a sword/saber. Gandalf’s got the Valar on his side, but Obi-Wan Kenobi’s got the Force on his side. And both of them seem to have a facility for coming back from the dead. So tell me who’s gonna win, and why.

Same contest rules apply as before. Email your response to dedelman@gmail.com with the subject line “Summer Giveaway Contest 4″. Entries are due Sunday, July 27 at 11:59 pm Eastern Time. Contest is open to anyone around the world. Submit as many entries as you like. Winning entry gets:

• One signed copy of the Solaris mass market of Infoquake
• One signed copy of the Pyr trade paperback of MultiReal
• One signed copy of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Two (containing my story “Mathralon”)
• One signed copy of the new Overlook Press edition of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone (containing my introduction)

My Readercon is off to an auspicious beginning. I’ve just arrived, and I’ve already left the only copies of Infoquake and MultiReal I brought somewhere in Logan Airport. I think I probably left them sitting at the courtesy phones for the rental car shuttles.

Here’s my schedule, for those who will be in Burlington, Massachusetts and want to catch up with me:

Friday, 2:30 PM: How I Wrote Infoquake and MultiReal.
A 30-minute talk by yours truly. I haven’t entirely figured out what I’m going to say, but at this point I’m planning to talk about how I wrote Infoquake and MultiReal.

Friday, 4:00 PM: I’ve Seen Things You People Wouldn’t Believe: The Influence of Blade Runner.
David Louis Edelman, Glenn Grant, Matthew Kressel (L), Geoff Ryman, Diane Weinstein.
This year saw the twenty-fifth anniversary release of the definitive version of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, a film universally recognized as one of the two or three greatest achievements of sf cinema. The film’s groundbreaking (and insanely detailed) visual design has influenced everything from runway fashions to building architecture, and some would argue that the current “default” dystopian science fiction vision comes right out of the film’s dark LA streets. How pervasive has Blade Runner’s influence been on sf (both written and cinematic)? Has the film altered the way we look at ourselves and our future? Is it possible that its dark landscapes have discouraged us from envisioning a better tomorrow?

Friday, 7:00 PM: Economics as the S in SF.
David Louis Edelman, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Alexander Jablokov, Ernest Lilley (L), Brian Francis Slattery.
SF stories concerned with economics have predominantly been either satires of consumerism or arguments for libertarianism. But there are also sf stories that investigate economic principles in the way that traditional sf explores the physical sciences. Damon Knight’s A For Anything examines the impact of a new technology on our current economic system; Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom imagines an entire new system; and John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider does some of both. We’ll discuss these and other classics of the subgenre. Is today’s generation of writers more economically aware than their predecessors, and has there been an uptick in these stories as a result?

Friday, 8:00 PM: Kaffeeklatsch.

Sunday, 2:30 PM: Reading.
I’ll be reading from Infoquake and/or MultiReal and/or Hustler magazine. Yeah, it’s the last timeslot of the con. No, I don’t expect a heck of a lot of people to show up.

Sometimes when you’re trying to promote a book, you have to resort to some, uh, unconventional tactics. And so, I gave some of the characters from MultiReal my blessing to go out there and do some personal interviews on their own.

This afternoon, I discovered that Jara, the co-protagonist of Infoquake and MultiReal, has landed an interview on novelist Jackie Kessler’s website. Jackie, the author of Hell’s Belles, The Road to Hell, and Hotter Than Hell — not to mention a fellow member of SFNovelists.com — has given free rein to a former demon named Jezebel in a section of the website called Cat and Muse. Jezebel proceeded to ask Jara all kinds of questions about MultiReal, the Sigh virtual sex network, the rising cost of apartment rentals, who would play her in a Hollywood movie, and whether David Edelman is the epitome of all evil. (The answer to that last one, at least according to Jara, is no.)

An excerpt:

JEZ:
Well then, since we’re on the subject, what’s your romantic fantasy?

JARA:
Honey, why would I need to fantasize? You’ve got access to the Sigh virtual sex network as well as I do.

JEZ:
[BLINKS] Say what?

JARA:
Hundreds of thousands of channels of specialized programming at your fingertips. You can have any body or any scenario you want. And it’s all virtual, so there’s no messes and no hard feelings…

Personally, I’m a fan of a channel called Doppelganger. It’s easy. You send them a photo or a video of your lust object, and they use their algorithms to track down that person’s look-alikes. There are tens of billions of people in the world hooked up to the Data Sea — chances are that one of them is looking for someone who looks just like you too.

JEZ:
Sweet!

JARA:
The closer the match, the higher the fee.

JEZ:
Ah, nothing that good is cheap. Trust me.

I’m a little surprised to see Jara open up to some strange former succubus like this. Luckily she seems to have gotten in some good words about MultiReal, and she didn’t castigate me too badly for misrepresenting her character. I was all prepared to have her jump off a cliff in Geosynchron. Oh, wait, she already does, in the very first chapter…

Go visit Jackie Kessler’s website and blog, and go read up on her books Hell’s Belles, The Road to Hell, and Hotter Than Hell on Amazon, damn you.

I’m seeing a lot of people picking on Cory Doctorow for being a self-promotional whore, and it’s irritating the piss out of me. Here, go read this interview with Cory on The Onion A.V. Club. Now scroll to the bottom of the page and start reading the comments thread. You’ll find lots of stuff like this, from a commenter named Shanker:

Look, it’s very simple: BoingBoing is (often) great, and Cory Doctorow might be a great guy, but post after post after post after post after motherfucking post of his goddamn book readings just really get fucking old after awhile. Why they can’t just put these in a special “promotion posts” folder, rather than cluttering up the main page with the same report over and over is beyond me…

[S]ome of us are bored to fucking tears having to see his diarrheic advertisements on BoingBoing all the time–like with any advertisement deluge, you risk annoying the shit out of your customer base.

That’s just one example, but a representative one.

Putting aside the merits of Cory’s new book Little Brother (which I haven’t read) and putting aside any particular complaints people have about the man’s personality (which I can’t attest to, having only met him once briefly) and putting aside his controversial views on copyright (which I often disagree with) — the whole thing seems to come down to the fact that Cory’s got a big megaphone, and he’s using it. And why shouldn’t he?

Listen, folks. That twentieth century paradigm of advertising and promotion? You know, the paradigm where the content sits on one side of the page, and the advertisements sit on the other side of the page, and there’s a nice clear line separating the two? That paradigm’s dead.

We live in an Information Age, as Boomer journalists are fond of reminding us. It’s not about selling widgets in exchange for greenbacks you can put in your pocket anymore. It’s about pushing ideas into the deep end of the swimming pool of public discourse and letting them swim. If you’ve got great ideas and you spread them around effectively, you’re gaining currency. So there’s no more hard separation; the idea and the promotion of the idea have become in many ways one and the same thing.

Sure, you’ll still find plenty of old school advertising around. You’ll find it on BoingBoing, off in the right column, separated by a nice clear line. (See pic below, slightly Photoshopped so the ads are above the fold.) You’ll find it in magazines and newspapers (but not books, though I don’t see why not). You’ll find it on television.

But sticking a glossy picture in a box separated by a nice clear line isn’t the way to move ideas. (And it wasn’t always very effective at pushing product either.) (And I suppose I’m guilty here of combining direct sales advertising and marketing, which are two very different things.) Which is why you see Doctorow’s editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden talking up Little Brother on his Making Light blog (and why you frequently see my editor, Lou Anders, talking me up on his Bowing to the Future blog). Which is why you see ARCs of Little Brother in the hands of not only reviewers and blurbers, but bloggers and tastemakers and potential customers. And which is why you frequently see Doctorow talking about issues raised in his books in his columns in Locus and the Guardian and such.

If you’re one of those people who claim to despise blatant advertising and promotion, complaining about authors like Cory Doctorow discussing their own work in a public forum is a waste of energy. Because this form of promotion is, in fact, the most honest, straightforward, and transparent form of promotion there is.

I’ve got a much smaller megaphone than Cory’s (snicker all you want, I’m talking about audience size, you losers), but I’m pretty sure the same thing is true for me as for Doctorow as for any serious author who blogs. We’re not promoting our stuff on our blogs because we’re hoping to sucker people into buying worthless product. We’re promoting it because we believe in it. Because if you’re interested in the things we say off the cuff on our blogs, you’ll definitely be interested in the carefully crafted and polished things we have to say in our books.

The blogs and the books are two sides of the same coin. So stop whining about excessive self-promotion. It’s a fact of life in the twenty-first century you’re just going to have to get used to.

Chaos and science fiction conventions go together like rum and Coke. Which makes Balticon about 180 proof.

Before I had even left for the con, the panel schedule was already messed up. The Balticon folks had mistakenly given me Scott Edelman’s reading slot and emailed me panel assignments that were at variance with the pocket schedule on the website. Things further devolved from there when it was discovered that my picture appeared next to Scott’s bio in the program book; my buddy Tom Doyle had been given two reading slots; and the schedule for at least one entire room seemed to have come unstuck in time, leaving plenty of people with double bookings, missing panels, or both.

Late Sunday afternoon, I discovered that my panel on “The Future of Cities” — which had been listed at 3 pm in the email I received from programming — and which the pocket program listed at 5 pm — was actually going to be held at 6 pm. Plus it was going to be short a moderator, considering that he was double booked. At that point, I just decided I’d had enough and bagged the whole thing. I was sick anyways.

Some cons are just like that.

But hey, just because Balticon was chaotic and organizationally challenged in places doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun. I go to cons for very specific reasons: (1) to catch up with friends that I generally wouldn’t otherwise see; (2) to soak up SFnal ideas and pour a few into the mix myself; and (3) to promote myself and my books. But most of the people wandering the hallways at Balticon seemed to have a different agenda. They were more interested in filking or dressing up like slutty Jedi knights or playing obscure board games until four in the morning. Which is fine. Personally, I’d prefer to listen to panelists discuss the ways in which Maud’Dib deviates from the Joseph Campbell mythical hero track, but that’s just me.

Add to this the fact that the Baltimore Marriott Hunt Valley Inn is a terribly nice place, perfect for cons with its abundance of labyrinthine hallways and nooks for display tables. The dealer’s room was enticing and not too crowded, the bar was inviting, and the conference rooms got a little too hot (but then again, when have you been to a con where that wasn’t the case?).

Will I go back? Maybe not every year, but… sure, I’ll go back.

Some of the highlights of my Balticon experience:

• A very nice dinner with fellow authors Jeri Smith-Ready, Maria Snyder, and David J. Williams, among others, during which we discussed our favorite topics (publishing and book promotion).
• A hyperkinetic reading by David J. Williams for his just-published debut novel The Mirrored Heavens. Let’s just say that watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was kind of a letdown in comparison. Indy may have had a nuclear bomb blast, giant killer ants, motorcycle chases, and a swordfight atop Jeeps cruising at 80 mph, but David’s excerpt had some SERIOUS FRICKIN’ ACTION. David mentions on his blog that one of the audience members fell asleep and began snoring during the reading — which is true — but hey, I’m sure there was some deranged sap who slept through the bombing of Pearl Harbor too.
• A joint signing with comic book artist and fabulously friendly guy Mark Wheatley, during which much discussion was had about Marvel Comics film properties (Iron Man, of course, plus the upcoming Captain America, Thor, and Avengers flicks) and Hollywood in general. That’s the cover of Mark’s Frankenstein Mobster on the right.
• A long discussion with Nathan Lilly and Diane Weinstein about William Hope Hodgson’s classic 1912 science fiction/horror novel The Night Land, which then segued into a discussion about H.P. Lovecraft, which then segued into a long complaint by me about how nobody’s done the kind of authoritative chronological trade paperback treatment for Lovecraft like Del Rey has done for Robert E. Howard.
• Reading chapters 1, 9, and part of 10 from my upcoming novel MultiReal and hand-selling a number of copies of Infoquake in the hallways. Supposedly the readings will be available on the Balticon podcast at some point, at which point I’ll link there.
• A very stimulating panel on “How Long Will It Still Be Called the Internet?” The panel’s supposed moderator (whose name I never caught) walked in two minutes after the hour, informed me and fellow panelist Angela Render that he was double-booked, and promptly hightailed it out of there. Since neither Angela nor I had prepared any questions, the panel soon turned into a lively free-for-all with the audience about net neutrality, government censorship, the changing nature of web client technology, and the sad state of email. The discussion quickly went over my head, but in a good way.
• Counting the aforementioned Internet panel, writer and web programmer Angela Render moderated no less than three of my Webbish panels this weekend. I think she deserves a metal of some sort. (No, not a medal. I think we should name an atomic element after her.) No offense, Angela, you did a good job, but I’m sick of you.
• Sampling the wonders of шљивовица with my official fangirl Danita Fries and my future wife Suzanne Rosin. (No, she’s not really my future wife. Not in this dimension, at least.) (What, you don’t read Cyrillic? That’s “Slivovitz.” Otherwise known as “fermented plum juice,” “paint thinner mixed with battery acid,” or “good shit” to you and me.)

Yes, this weekend I’ll be at Balticon 42, Baltimore’s premier science fiction convention. It looks to be a rousing good time, presuming I can valiantly hold off this cold for another few days or wrestle it into submission by Friday.

The last time I was at Balticon was in either 1990 or 1991. I was a junior at Johns Hopkins University at the time, and a bunch of my friends and me decided that Balticon would be an easy place to score some alcohol. We were right. I remember playing piano in a hallway, and drinking, and doing some debaucherous things in a stairway, and drinking, and getting the hotel security guards sicced on me, and drinking. When I finally realized that all my friends had left hours ago, I managed to convince a young woman named Kibbux to drive me 30 miles back to my house in the snow. I swear her name was Kibbux. Her car was covered with ice, and all we had to scrape off the windows with was a fork. And that, my friends, is about as wild and crazy as David Louis Edelman has ever gotten.

I don’t plan to do anything remotely that edgy this weekend. Instead I’ll be on panels and giving a reading from MultiReal. Here’s my schedule, along with the descriptions from the pocket schedule and the room names in parentheses:

• Friday, 5 pm
  Publishing Labyrinth (Belmont)
  Learn the ins and outs of this business!
• Friday, 7 pm
  E-Publishing (Derby)
  Let experienced people talk about this hot new trend!
• Saturday, 12 noon:
  Building a Website for Fun and Profit (Belmont)
• Saturday, 1 pm:
  Autograph Session (Hotel Lobby)
• Saturday, 6 pm:
  How Much Longer Will It Still Be the Internet? (Salon D)
  Some countries plan to create “their own” (most likely restricted) internets because they’re uncomfortable with the present halcyon freedom “on line.” What’s the future of www?
• Sunday, 11 am:
  Reading from MultiReal (Pimlico)
• Sunday, 6 pm:
  Future of Cities (Salon D)
  Are large cities sustainable in our modern world? Can green building and alternate housing keep them during global warming or our next ice age? Could they become utopias?

No, I won’t be bringing a ton of promotional goodies with me. I’ve been sick and haven’t had time to prepare. Deal.

So my question today is this: what do you find useful on an author’s website? I think we can all agree that excerpts help, and at the very least, having a blog doesn’t hurt. But what about the rest? Do you read additional material like chapter annotations, deleted scenes, and first drafts? Do you actually refer to online glossaries and the like? Does this stuff make you more likely to buy the author’s work? (And when you do buy her work, do you appreciate having lots of links to bookstores that carry it?)

Go ahead and join the discussion if you get a chance. Your input will be invaluable when it comes time to post the new websites for Infoquake and MultiReal. Really, people, I’m doing this all for you.

I’ve got a mini-essay (three paragraphs) up today in the new “Mind Meld” feature of SF Signal. The question was about how the Internet has impacted publishing and the author’s ability to sell more books. Quick excerpt:

But even more important, the Internet has allowed me to keep in touch with readers during the (too long) break between novels. Before the prevalence of websites and blogs, the only way for newer SF authors to keep their name in the public eye was to write gobs of short stories and spend a lot of time on the con circuit. Now I can have an ongoing one-on-one dialog with readers through the blogosphere and social networking sites, and keep them posted on news of my next book.

In addition to my response, you can also read responses to the same question from fellow authors Matthew Jarpe and Tobias Buckell, my editor Lou Anders, and book marketing expert Andrew Wheeler.

I had an ulterior motive for attending. I’m in the process of evaluating promotional ideas for my upcoming novel MultiReal, and the idea of doing a book launch on Second Life has cropped up in my discussions more than once. I created a Second Life profile many moons ago, just to poke around and see what the fuss was about. After a few days, I quickly grew bored with the whole thing and uninstalled the software from my PC. But yesterday, in the service of book promotion, I resurrected it and went exploring once again.

And after attending Paul’s Second Life event, I can now officially say I don’t get it.

This was no fault of Paul Levinson’s. I’ve shared a couple of panels at cons with him, and he seems like a friendly, intelligent, and interesting fellow. The reading itself was quite lively, and the book The Plot to Save Socrates sounds like that perfect combination of thought-provoking and nerdy cool. The plot in a nutshell: a grad student in the future decides to travel back in time to save the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates from drinking the hemlock. (Go read more about it on Paul’s website.) The interviewer herself asked pertinent, thoughtful questions.

But the Second Life aspect of the event basically went like this: I logged in and teleported to a virtual auditorium. I sat down in a virtual chair along with about 25-30 other spectators. The virtual Paul Levinson and the virtual moderator sat in virtual chairs on the stage, next to a virtual spinning copy of The Plot to Save Socrates. And then we all just sat there for an hour doing nothing while the two of them had a very interesting chat on audio.

So besides the novelty factor, what does Second Life offer to book promotion that you couldn’t get by holding your reading on, say, FreeConferenceCall.com or WebEx?

I’m not saying that Second Life is a bad place to hold a book event. If you’re the author, you get to see who’s attending the reading. You get a direct conduit to your own personal bookstore, along with all the tracking that entails. You get the potential of interacting with people who live in remote places you’re not likely to ever hit on the real-world book tour. Oh, and it’s free.

But as I sat in front of my computer and watched my avatar watch Paul Levinson’s avatar watching the moderator’s avatar, I tried and failed to figure out what potential Second Life has for literature over the next ten years. It’s kinda neat. It’s kinda fun. Is that it?

I tried to extrapolate, to think big. What if my name was Stephen King or Dan Brown, and someone gave me $500,000 and six months to put on a fabulous Second Life book event? What could I possibly do? Hire Second Life actors to put on a clunky little pantomime while I read? Create big virtual sculptures of the creatures in my book to hang over the stage? I have a difficult time imagining what I could do that wouldn’t just look silly. I suppose in 15 or 20 years when you can see 3D Hollywood-quality monsters zooming around while you read, that will be pretty cool. But Second Life is still a long way off. Right now they’re closer to King’s Quest IV circa 1988 than they are to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.

The problem is that literature is a very one-directional art form that doesn’t translate well into an immersive environment like Second Life. People are always talking about "updating" the reading experience, and so far it’s pretty much all been marketing hokum. Even if we all ditched paper and ink tomorrow and shifted over to Amazon Kindles or some other gee-whiz e-book reader, the basic reading experience wouldn’t change, only the distribution method. You’re still staring at a narrative of sequential words that you read from start to finish. What’s really changed about the narrative experience since the ancient Sumerians sat around the fire to hear The Epic of Gilgamesh? Only three things that I can think of: (1) writing, (2) paper, and (3) hypertext.

You often find people drastically overhyping the potential of new technologies to revolutionize aspects of life that haven’t changed for thousands of years. That’s no surprise; it’s human nature. But it’s surprising to me how much people still fall for this, even after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000-2001.

In addition to checking out an online book event, the other thing I made sure to investigate on Second Life was online sex. I mean, hey, I’m hip! I’m wit’ it! I can get freaky in the Multiverse, yo! So I made sure to check out one of Second Life’s red light districts to catch a glimpse of the future of sex. I saw a group of blocky, King’s Quest IV avatars standing around naked with their blocky, King’s Quest IV naughty bits on display. There were a number of virtual men thrusting blocky, King’s Quest IV penises into blocky, King’s Quest IV vaginas. The result was about as sexy as the X-rated mannequin sex scene in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police.

I tried to figure out how you might do that with the confusing hodgepodge of controls that Second Life gives you, but it seemed like it would take two, or possibly even three or four, hands to do it right. And what’s the point of that? To paraphrase Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski: there may be exciting new developments in online pornography right around the corner, but we still jerk off manually.

***

(A quick aside: Okay, I can think of one book that would lend itself well to Second Life promotion: The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. Which, in case you were wondering, is the greatest children’s novel ever written. Somebody needs to build a Second Life realm of The Phantom Tollbooth that allows you to travel to Dictionopolis and Digitopolis in your own little wind-up car. I’m willing to be convinced. Norton Juster, if you’re reading this, I’m waiting for your email.)

I’ve recently become aware of a fantasy author named Robert Stanek. Many of you reading this have probably already heard of him, but I’m a little behind the curve.

Why might you have heard of Robert Stanek? Because he’s an unparalleled master of the fantasy genre? Well, I haven’t read any of Mr. Stanek’s work, so I’ll reserve judgment about his “Keeper Martin” series of novels. Go ahead, check ‘em out for yourself. No, this sleazebucket is known for his tireless deceptive acts of self-promotion. He creates fan sites for his self-published work, writes hundreds of anonymous 5-star reviews for his books on Amazon, and invents online readers who compare his work favorably to that of J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling.

And if all that wasn’t bad enough, Stanek actually Photoshopped himself into a picture with renowned YA fantasy author Brian Jacques. Here it is, on the right. Take a careful look — hell, you don’t even have to take a careful look. Either Mr. Stanek is a contortionist, he’s a vampire from the waist down, or he forgot to Photoshop in a pair of legs underneath the table. Don’t take my word for it; the original is still up on the “#1 Robert Stanek fan site on the web.” Read more about this photo on CrapAuthors.com, including comments (supposedly) from Brian Jacques’ webmaster confirming it’s a fake.

(Oh yes, in case you’re wondering, I did in fact post this photo without permission, despite a right-click warning from the site. Why would I do that? Well, I figure that it’s a fairly good bet that Stanek doesn’t have permission to post it either. If Stanek tries to sic a lawyer on me — or a fake lawyer, which he has done before — I could get some pretty good mileage out of posting all the correspondence. Besides, do you think anyone would actually threaten legal action over a doctored photo?)

In Stanek’s defense, I have to say that I understand the desperation that leads to these kinds of self-promotional measures. You walk into Megacorporate Bookstore hoping to find your book on the shelves… and you do! One copy! Meanwhile, there are piles and piles of Crappy Author X’s books in a fancy display at the front of the store, not necessarily because they’re better books, but because Megacorporate Publisher Y paid to put them on a fancy display at the front of the store.

And I say all this as a new author who’s been extremely fortunate to have gotten lots of attention from the SF world online, to have a large independent publisher that’s been gung-ho about the book since the beginning, and to have gotten nominated for a major SF award. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to try to make it in this business without those things.

So lots of us smaller-fish authors will contemplate innovative (read: shady) promotional techniques to get noticed. We remind our friends again and again over e-mail that Amazon is still accepting reader reviews, should the urge strike them. We try to oh-so-innocuously slip a mention of the title of our books in the comments of more established writers’ blogs. We post trackback links to bigger fish in hopes that they’ll notice us. We have friends who will routinely turn our books around on bookstore shelves so the cover faces out instead of the spine.

I think most of us want to play by the rules. But what are the rules? Where’s the line drawn between enthusiastic self-promotion and unethical self-promotion? Sometimes it’s hard to tell, and every author seems to draw that line in a different place.

Here are the guidelines I try to follow myself in my own self-promotional efforts. I’d be curious to know where both readers and writers stand, so feel free to add your two cents in the comments.

1. Tell no lies. There are plenty of moral gray areas about what constitutes a lie and what constitutes a simple exaggeration. But some things we can all agree on. Don’t claim you’ve won an award if you haven’t. Don’t claim you’ve been nominated for an award if you haven’t. Don’t state your book has been translated into Japanese, Urdu, and Welsh if it hasn’t. Don’t Photoshop yourself into a snapshot of Brian Jacques in an attempt to convince people that you’re his buddy.

2. Make no patently misleading statements. Avoid the temptation to try to mislead through statements that are technically not lies, but might as well be. If your book gets a 5-star rating somewhere, but it’s a rating system that goes up to 10, don’t proclaim in bold type that your book was given 5 stars. If your book gets a rave review by William Gibson, but it’s William Gibson the plumber from Mississippi, don’t try to pretend otherwise.

3. Avoid glaring sins of omission. This is a difficult guideline to follow, because it’s very subjective. Don’t use ellipses to claim that your book is “an absolutely terrific… thriller” when the actual review states that your book is “an absolutely terrific example of what not to do when writing a thriller.” Don’t try to sell to a group of Vietnam vets by claiming that your book has a Vietnam vet in it, while conveniently forgetting to mention that said character gets run over by a truck on page 4.

4. You have no obligation to point out the negative. The converse of #3 is that you have no obligation to go out of your way to point out the bad stuff. There’s an understood bias present in all promotional efforts, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You’re paying for your promotional effort, so you get to focus on the parts that put you in a good light. (On the other hand, if you want to post your bad reviews as a nice little publicity stunt or a way to highlight the good reviews, there’s nothing wrong with that either.)

5. Don’t impose an unnecessary burden. Mailing postcards to strangers is an acceptable way of getting the message out about your book (though whether it’s effective is another question altogether). There’s very little burden to the recipient; they can tell within seconds if they’re interested, and it’s easy enough to recycle those suckers. Ambushing people in bookstores to try to sell them your book is crossing the line, because it puts the burden of refusal on the customer.

6. No means no. All of us males who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s are aware of that dating guideline which states that “no means no.” If you’re on second base and she’s simply not interested in exploring the wonders of third base, you don’t overpower her and steal that sucker anyway. It’s immoral, it’s illegal, and it’s just plain wrong. Likewise, you shouldn’t badger potential customers into buying your book. Once your potential reader actively says no to you — take me off your mailing list, stop sending me crap in the mail, please stop serenading my dorm room in the middle of the night with ditties about your novel — then you stop.

7. Respect the competition. Savaging another author’s book solely for the purpose of drawing attention to your book is a no-no. (I’ll make an exception for Mr. Stanek.) That doesn’t mean you can’t respectfully disagree with another author’s point of view. It means that self-promotion is not a winner-take-all game, and your promotional efforts shouldn’t be done at the expense of another author. The reader can buy that other guy’s book promoting the single-bullet theory of the JFK assassination and your book claiming that it was really Dwight D. Eisenhower who pulled the trigger. (Oh, you think Ike wasn’t bitter about his VP losing the election in 1960 to some Harvard pretty boy? Puh-leaze.)

8. Keep your promotional activities above board. Don’t post glowing reviews of your books on Amazon under assumed names. Don’t start up your own fan websites. Don’t go through the phone book and call bookstores anonymously asking if they stock this amazing new book you’ve just heard about. In fact, any time a marketing activity involves the use of pseudonyms, that should raise a red flag. You should be able to list your marketing activities in a public forum with your head held high.

9. When in doubt, abide by general community standards. That means both abiding by the standards of the audience and the medium. Hacking into people’s cell phones to send them promotional messages about your book might be a clever gimmick at the Black Hat hackers’ convention; it probably won’t fly when you try to do the same thing outside the local mall.

10. Don’t pretend your book is all-important. Yes, you should take your promotional activities seriously. But understand that you can’t take it too seriously. You can feel justified running red lights, parking in handicapped spots, and driving on the shoulder if your wife is in the back seat going into labor. But if you’re running 10 minutes late to a reading? Um, no. Have some perspective. No reason to compromise your ethics just to get ahead in the literary world.

I’ll admit that I’m fairly new to the science fiction con circuit, but having been to Readercon twice now, I have no hesitation crowning it my favorite. The panels are generally high-minded and intellectually stimulating; the guest list is always first-rate; and best of all, there isn’t a single dork with a Klingon outfit or a lightsaber to be found.

Of course, the flip side is that once the bar closes at 12:30 pm, there’s pretty much nothing to do but go back to your room and sleep. Peter Watts, Jenny Rappaport, and I tried to find a party after last call on Saturday, only to get accosted by a very angry woman asking “us people” to keep the noise down. When we did find the one open party in the hotel, security arrived two minutes later to shut it down.

Highlights of my weekend include:

• Getting to ogle Mary Robinette Kowal’s steampunk laptop (as recently featured on Boing Boing) and listening to plenty of stories about her beaver. And how did I thank her for being one of the coolest people on Earth? By going into an unstoppable coughing fit during her panel on techniques for reading aloud and having to duck out of the room.
• Sharing many a beer, many a story, and many a laugh with George Mann and Christian Dunn of Solaris Books. The fact that George and Christian accepted my SF short story “Mathralon” for publication in their forthcoming second Solaris Anthology of Science Fiction helped my mood quite a bit too. I introduced George and Christian to Mary Robinette Kowal, which may have been a mistake, because the rest of the con they kept making obscure comments about clockwork monkeys.
• Continuing to confound the world by appearing at the same con with Scott Edelman (see photo to the right) and insisting that we’re not related.
• Sharing a panel on alternative points-of-view in fiction with (among others) Peter Watts (of Blindsight fame) and gossiping about the biz with him and Jenny Rappaport over beers until closing time. Turns out Peter is just a fabulously nice guy with a very wry sense of humor and a big ol’ Canadian accent.
• Gabbing over meals and beers with Matthew Jarpe, author of the David Hartwell-edited debut novel Radio Freefall, and listening to his humorous reading from same.
• Breakfasting with the divine Elizabeth Bear not once, but twice. I will even forgive her for accidentally calling me “Scott” during one conversation.
• Discussing J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin, among other things, with Realms of Fantasy slushmaster and all-around nice guy Doug Cohen.
• Watching fellow Pyr author Kay Kenyon promote the hell out of her new novel, Bright of the Sky, through readings, panels, talks, fliers, signings, ads, and who knows what else. I also got a chance to share drinks and a ride back to Logan Airport with Kay and fellow Seattle-area author Louise Marley.
  
• Meeting Infoquake fan Skott Klebe, discussing the life of an SF writer over drinks at the “Meet the Pros(e)” party.
• Getting pleasantly hammered at the “Meet the Pros(e)” party on pricey Scotch provided by Elaine Brennan.
• Chatting innumerable times with Slush God John Joseph Adams, who must have committed some kind of venal sin, considering he was wandering around the con with the Mark of Cain on his forehead.
• Actually getting a few words in edgewise on a panel about politics and SF that also included James Morrow, Paolo Bacigalupi, John Kessel, and guests of honor Lucius Shepherd and Karen Joy Fowler.
• Enjoying several beers, meals, and chats with Andrew Wheeler, SF reader/editor/blogger extraordinaire and late of the Science Fiction Book Club.
• Discussing the fine points of “You, Me, and Dupree” over drinks and dinner with René Walling, Matt Jarpe, and a very charming woman named Kristin, who despite the fact that I’ve met her two or three separate times now, I still keep forgetting her last name and made an ass of myself by confusing her with someone else.
• Publicizing Matthew Kressel’s Sybil’s Garage magazine by wearing a sticker on my badge that said “Sybil’s Garage” in Hebrew. This turned out to be such an effective promotional tool for Matthew that I think I talked about Sybil’s Garage more than I actually talked about my own books.
• Debuting two passages from my forthcoming novel MultiReal to a small but enthusiastic audience of people who were still around at 2 pm Sunday for the last slot of the con.
• Catching up with various other folks here and there in the hallways, including Craig Gidney, Eugene Myers, Ernest Lilley, Jim Freund, Hildy Silverman, Diane Weinstein, Lee Weinstein, Robert Legault, Ellen Datlow, Joy Marchand, Yves Meynard, and Tom Purdom.

For me, the defining moment of the Penguicon science-fiction-and-open-source-software convention this past weekend came on Saturday night in the bar. Nick Sagan and I wandered in already fairly blitzed from boozing in another bar, and were quickly joined by Tobias Buckell and his wife Emily. People started streaming in. And at one point, I found myself sitting halfway between a) Charles Stross talking about the socioeconomic policy failures of the John Major administration, and b) John Scalzi and Elizabeth Bear talking about Rob Sawyer in taffeta.

So there’s Penguicon in a nutshell, from my perspective: one part serious business, two parts goofy SFnal fun.

The programming seemed slanted towards the science fiction side of things, with relatively little in the way of crossover. There were panels on Explaining PostgreSQL and panels on Pirates, Ninja, Jedi, and Dwarves, but not a huge amount of mashup between the two. Luckily most of the SF authors on hand were technogeeks themselves (e.g. Charles Stross and Karl Schroeder) or at least pseudo-technogeeks (e.g. me).

But the folks wandering the halls seemed to lean heavily towards the SF fanboy (and fangirl) sphere. You had the Chubby Guy Who Dresses Like a Character from Tron (pictured to the right), the Chubby Guy Who Dresses Like Zorro, the Chubby Guy Who Filks Like a Zen Master, the Not-at-All-Chubby Guy Who Dresses Like a Jedi, and the Attack of the Thousand Chubby Women Showing Enormous (And Occasionally Inappropriate) Amounts of Cleavage. As for the technogeeks, occasionally you’d see some scrawny, bespectacled soul with a Linux advocacy t-shirt huddled over his laptop in the corner.

Of the half-dozen cons I’ve been to in this past year, Penguicon certainly seemed to be one of the most organized. The ops booth was clearly marked and continuously staffed, and the programming went off pretty much where and when the program book said it would. If there were glitches — and Programming Wrangler Matt Arnold assured me there were some of those — they were largely invisible to me. It definitely helped that the Troy Hilton was very accommodating. Penguicon seems to have taken up pretty much the whole place, and a number of rooms at overflow hotels as well. Which means that just about all of the programming took place in one long, curving hallway, with the room parties and the con suites one quick flight of stairs away. The only obvious snafu I could see was the fact that there were loud anime movies screening right next door to quiet discussions about Technological Singularities, and the panelists would have to speak up to be heard.

Among the folks I got to spend a lot of time with were John Scalzi and his wife Krissy, the former of whom is about to embark on a 492-city tour for his new novel The Last Colony; Tobias Buckell and his wife Emily, the former of whom is on Locus’s shortlist for Best First Novel; and Nick Sagan, screenwriter, SF trilogy novelist, and just fabulously and terrifically nice guy.

I got to listen to Charles Stross discuss everything from politics to sociology to airships on Venus. Karl Schroeder earned my eternal enmity by dashing just about everything I know about neurology to pieces within the first sentence of his “Brain as Computer” panel, but damn if he didn’t turn out to be a very nice guy anyway. I also got a chance to share a panel on Techno Thrillers vs. Near Future SF with Elizabeth Bear, and was so engrossed in our 2 1/2 hour-long conversation at the airport (with Nick Sagan and 3D printing guru Sebastien Bailard) that I very nearly followed Bear on to the wrong plane.

I also met a nice and ambitious Lulu-published author named David Crampton (author of The Remembrance); shared some book marketing chat with him and Sarah Shetterly; gabbed about writing, critiquing, and publishing in Anne Zanoni and Michael “Freon” Andaluz’s writing workshop (also present: Baen novelist extraordinaire Michael Z. Williamson); got to congratulate Sarah Monette on her Campbell Award nomination; gave away 50 promotional Infoquake CDs; and to top things off, got taken out to breakfast by Penguicon organizers John Guest and Matt Arnold.

And best of all, I got through most of the weekend without having to explain my ambivalent feelings about open source software and the fact that I run Windows Vista on my desktop.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) night, April 11, I’ll have the privilege of reading with a bunch of other science fiction folks in the Washington, DC area. It’ll be held at the Tenley Interim Branch of the DC Public Library at 4200 Wisconsin Avenue at 7:30 p.m as part of their National Poetry Month programming.

(Note that the reading is at 4200 Wisconsin, and not 4450 Wisconsin, which is what the Washington Post printed over the weekend. Darn that liberal media.)

Feast your eyes on this lineup:

• R.R. Angell
• Tom Doyle
• Stephanie Dray
• David Louis Edelman (i.e. me)
• Nan Fry
• Craig Laurence Gidney
• Nancy Jane Moore
• Benjamin Rosenbaum
• Anne Sheldon
• Rosemary Claire Smith
• Constance Warner
• Cecil Washington

In an effort not to overwhelm your delicate synapses, we’re each going to limit our readings to about 4 minutes apiece. I’m planning on reading a short passage from Infoquake which might just blow your synapses all by itself. Ooooooh.

This being a library, there won’t be any formal book sales table (as far as I know). But I will have signed copies of Infoquake on hand for sale if anyone’s so inclined.

See you there.

I arrived back late last night from my trip to New York for the Fantastic Fiction Reading Series at the KGB Bar. Co-organizer Ellen Datlow was kind enough to post photos of the event on her Flickr account.

The reading, I felt, went fabulous. At 40 people, the reading audience was both the largest and most attentive I’ve ever been in front of. I read my story “Mathralon,” which, as I told the audience, is the first science fiction short story I’ve finished since around 1991. Despite the fact that the story had no plot, no characters, and (almost) no dialog, it seemed to get a very good reaction from the crowd. A few laughs, a few smiles, a few people rushing up after I finished to discuss it. The 35 signed copies of “Mathralon” I brought disappeared in short order. I would post the story here, but I’m hoping to give it one more quick polish and then submit it for publication.

Carol Emshwiller, the main attraction of the night, was most fabulous as well. She read a surreal and somewhat tender story called “God Clown” which had the audience alternately laughing, smiling, and just staring around misty-eyed in appreciation. She was even nice enough to repeatedly lie to me by saying I was a tough act to follow.

Among the folks in the audience that I got to schmooze with were John Joseph Adams, assistant editor at Fantasy & Science Fiction, which would be a great venue for “Mathralon” (and have I mentioned what a dashing, handsome, intelligent fellow John is?); Douglas Cohen, who holds the same title at Realms of Fantasy; Jenny Rappaport, literary agent extraordinaire; Josh Vogt, an up-and-coming SF writer, frequent commenter on this blog, and as I discovered, very nice guy; Eugene Myers, another SF writer and Clarion graduate who put my name in front of Ellen Datlow for this reading in the first place; and Victor Klymenko, who helpfully pointed out some science flubs in “Mathralon” that I wasn’t aware of.

At dinner afterwards, my wife and I got to sit at the “grown-ups” table next to organizers Ellen Datlow and Gavin Grant. Other denizens of said table included Robert Legault, Gordon Linzner, Chris Fisher, Tempest Bradford, and Rick Bowes. Sighted at the other table were Liz Gorinsky and a nice, gregarious woman who I just knew I recognized and only just now looking at the Flickr feed do I realize was Kelly Link. My fellow DeepGenre blogger Constance Ash said she was going to show up, but she couldn’t make it, for which I will never, ever, ever forgive her until — okay, she’s forgiven.

I’m told that next month, KGB is hosting novelist Jon Armstrong, whose debut novel Grey I read on the train. It was a light, enjoyable read, and trippier than anything you’ve ever written. (Okay, not you, Jeff VanderMeer, or you, China Mieville. But trippy nonetheless.)

As a reminder to those in the New York area, I will be reading this Wednesday night at the Fantastic Fiction Reading Series at the KGB Bar in Manhattan. I’m essentially the warm-up act for the legendary Carol Emshwiller, she who hath won the Philip K. Dick and World Fantasy Awards and received multiple Nebula and James Tiptree Jr. nominations as well.

What will I be reading? I was told that organizers Ellen Datlow and Gavin Grant strongly prefer that readers read something complete, rather than novel excerpts. Fair enough. Problem is that I only have a single published short story to my name, and though it does briefly mention computers and Star Trek, it’s not even remotely close to science fiction. (The e-zine that published it in 1995 tried to pass it off as soft erotica or something like that, which is a laugh. Perhaps they assumed that any story which uses the “c” word automatically counts as erotica. They posted the story in their “Sex” section. For years, if you looked my name up on Yahoo or AltaVista, the top result said something like: “Urban Desires: SEX by Dave Edelman. Have you ever had sex with a stranger on a bus?”)

I’ve had many false starts trying to write short stories over the past few years. To me, short story writing is much harder than novel writing. I’ve been known to say that I solve every writing problem that I encounter by tacking on another ten or fifteen pages. You can’t do that with short stories. And so I have a handful of stories on my laptop that either aren’t finished or aren’t finished to my satisfaction.

Over the past week, I buckled down and more or less finished a true SF story called “Mathralon.” Those of you who attend this Wednesday’s reading will be the first to hear it. I will, in fact, be handing out signed printouts of “Mathralon” after the reading to all those who want them.

How did I manage to finish writing a short story when I’ve historically had so much trouble with the short form? It was remarkably easy; it just required a little change of attitude. The parts of the story I was having such difficulty with were the characterization, the dialogue, and the plot. So I wrote a story with no characters, no dialogue, and no plot. Simple. I couldn’t decide whether to tell the story from the first person or the third person, so I decided to tell it from a first person plural perspective (e.g. Greek chorus).

In short: “Mathralon” is much, much different from Infoquake, though it does touch on similar themes (in particular the effects of laissez-faire capitalism on the underclass). I hope it works, or at the very least, I hope I’m not carried out of the bar on a rail.

I’m told that Mobile Libris will be on hand selling books. Which hopefully means they’ll be selling Infoquake along with Carol Emshwiller’s books. So I’d be more than happy to sign your copies of Infoquake as well.

Hope to see y’all there.

Just a friendly public service announcement that just so coincidentally happens to pertain to, well, um, me.

The deadline to submit nominations for the Hugo Awards and for the John W. Campbell Best New Science Fiction Writer Award is not until March 3, 2007. Plenty of time. However… in order to nominate someone, you must have either been an attending or supporting member of last year’s WorldCon in Anaheim, CA or this year’s WorldCon in Yokohama, Japan by January 31, 2007.

In other words… if you didn’t attend WorldCon last year, and you don’t intend to trek out to Japan this year, you have until tomorrow, January 31, to pay for a $50 supporting membership if you want to submit nominations. The official nomination page says you must be a member “before January 31, 2007.” I assume that means “before the midnight Greenwich Mean Time that occurs between January 31, 2007 and February 1, 2007,” but like so many other things in science fiction fandom, that’s not clear.

And what a crop of potential Campbell nominees there is to choose from. The Writertopia Eligibility Page lists a number of deserving folks, including my friends Cat Rambo, Mary Robinette Kowal, Maria V. Snyder, and Joel Shepherd. Other names of note on the list include Brandon Sanderson, Naomi Novik, Justine Larbalestier, Cherie Priest, and Alma Alexander. And might I also humbly and with the utmost humility and graciousness suggest… me. Me! Mememememememe! Meeeeeee!!! Over here, look, me! [waves] [whistles] [hoots] [carries on shamelessly like this for another few minutes]

So how do you get a supporting membership? Go to the Nippon 2007 Registration Page, whip out your credit card, and plunk down $50. Reading this page after January 31? Don’t despair… according to the rules, you’re still eligible to actually vote for the nominees that make the ballot if you get a supporting membership and get your ballot in by March 3.

I will also mention that my book Infoquake is eligible for the Hugo for Best Novel. And that the book is still available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Booksense, Books-a-Million, etc. And that — [sound of giant Monty Python foot splatting blog author]

—

Meanwhile, I had an interesting moment this morning. I received a MySpace friend invitation from Dove, one of those fake women inviting me to have some fake webcam fun with her. As I was glancing through the profile to see if it was a real person or not, I noticed that some other fake webcam hottie named Avi had left a spam comment. Yes, the spambots are now being spammed by other spambots.

And now, because of this mention in my blog, if for no other reason, Google’s bots and Yahoo’s bots and who knows how many other bots will now be zipping over to read and catalog this spam.

Your assignment for the day is to identify all of the grammatical mistakes in these two sentences: “Anywayyyss I kinda wanted to know if you wanted to have some fun on my cam haha! I know that sounds kinda slutty I don’t care though.”