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is will be the last post about the con, I think, unless I come up with a reason to write another one, and I’ll try not to. I got very little writing done yesterday, and I need to get the juices flowing this morning so I may as well tell you about a couple of cool people.
Actually, let’s get the random stuff out of the way first: if you pay close attention, you’ve probably noticed the changes in the masthead over the last couple of days. If not, reminders are always good.
- First, because I massively overordered books for InConJunction, I’m selling autographed books directly from this website until my stock is depleted. You can get either Skylights or Sanctum for $12 plus another $4 to cover shipping and the envelope, or both for $20 plus the same shipping cost. Gratifyingly, I’ve already had a few orders. The initial cost is cheaper than you can get them from anywhere else; that $4 may push you a little higher depending on shipping cost. But: autograph! Click here to order books.
- Sending books to people meant that I needed a return address that wasn’t my home address, so I finally pulled the trigger on a PO box yesterday. Which means that I can have a mailing list! Do I know what I’m going to do with a mailing list? No, I do not, which means that signing up for it will not generate very much email for you. But sign up anyway.
So. Right. The con.
Let’s start with shout-outs. I spent the convention sitting in between James Wylder and TammyJo Eckhart, who are both awesome people. TammyJo was a veteran of the con, and had people coming over and saying hello all weekend. James and I were both first-timers, although he was coming off of a tour of a bunch of different cons. Both are writers. James, who was cosplaying as Dr. Who for most of the con, has written a poem for every episode of Dr. Who that aired between 1963 and 2013. You need to own this just so that you can say you own it. TammyJo writes edgy fiction; her big seller over the weekend was an omnibus edition of her last three books, so the two of us both got the fun of explaining what “omnibus” meant all weekend.
Another shout-out: cosplay is always a big feature of these cons, and one guy in particular stood out by bringing a bunch of different costumes and making sure to make the rounds in each of them. This is the guy cosplaying the Hulk below, but his Baron Zemo costume was probably my favorite of the weekend, as I’ve always had a soft spot for Zemo for some reason. His name is Marc Meeker; you can check out his Facebook page here.
I only really actually encountered two jerks all weekend, which given that I interacted with hundreds of people is pretty impressive. The most breathtaking of the lot was a dude who told me that he “didn’t read books,” which by the way is fine, right before going to TammyJo’s booth four feet away and…buying a book.
Humans! It is okay to not want to buy my books. There are three hundred and fifty million Americans and I have sold, at last count, about 1200 books. Mathematically speaking, that’s a rounding error, and no one wants to buy my books. It is okay if you do not want to buy books from me, even if I’m standing there asking you to! I won’t mind! I’ll just move on to the next customer, since you’ve made it clear I’m wasting my time. There’s no reason to lie about it, especially a really transparently obvious lie that you prove is a lie three minutes and four feet away. I see you, dude. You’re right there. Jackass.
A second dude, also talking with TammyJo, had a plastic grocery/Meijer bag with him that he was carrying purchases and swag in. While he was talking to her, he set his bag down on a stack of my books. This triggered an immediate and perhaps unwarranted burst of rage. Dude. Get your shit off my shit. Even if there wasn’t a copious amount of empty floor space at your feet where you could put your bag down, there’s empty table space right there.
I probably shoulda knocked his bag onto the floor, but I was trying to not get arrested at my first con.
Two other interactions are worth mentioning. One guy who had been sort of floating around being awkward for a few minutes toward the end of the first day ended his interactions with us by 1) telling me he’d be back for Sanctum and 2) pointing at the Skylights banner over my shoulder and saying “I’ve read that one already. It’s good!”
To which my immediate and automatic reaction was You’re lying. Which, okay, I know I just said that mathematically speaking no one has read my books, but someone has, right? I don’t know all of those people. He could have read Skylights. I don’t know!
I didn’t say anything, because he was already leaving, but it was kinda weird.
A second dude got really excited when he saw Sanctum on the table, telling me a little bit too loudly that he “really liked that” and was “excited that they were bringing it back.” I corrected him, pointing out that it was my series and that it certainly wasn’t “back,” then spent a few seconds frantically trying to figure out if I’d just mentioned Firefly to him or not and deciding I hadn’t, and then trying to decide if I was being rude and deciding that I wasn’t. I thought I had him convinced that he was thinking about something else, and he bought a copy of Sanctum anyway, then walked off again talking like he thought it was part of a preexisting, cancelled series.
Part of me feels like I ought to have stopped him until I was certain he knew what he was buying. I didn’t; it was the first copy of Sanctum I had sold and at the time I was far from certain that there were going to be more. The rest were less… fraught.
I have my eye on Starbase Indy, which takes place the Friday to Sunday after Thanksgiving. I’ve got an email in to see if they still have vendor tables since I may be a bit late in getting registered as a dealer. I’ll keep y’all updated, of course.
This is likely– nay, guaranteed– to be long and rambly because i’m gonna try and stuff everything into one post, rather than spreading them out forever. I may do a separate post for shout-outs and links because some folk really do deserve some recognition and I haven’t unpacked my business cards, but I’m gonna try to make that it.
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