In which I’m planning my nerdery and also I’m stupid

On February 27, 2020March 9, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek2 Comments

We’re heading to Chicago for C2E2 tomorrow; we only bought tickets for the Saturday part of the show, but we’re going to stay with my brother on Friday night so that we don’t have as long or complicated a drive to deal with on Saturday morning. I spent some time tonight looking around at who was planning on being there and trying to wargame out who I wanted to see and how much standing in lines I thought my eight-year-old might be willing to tolerate. Which is … probably not too much, honestly.

I have a handful of people on my list: two comics writers, Gail Simone and Al Ewing, both of whom should be easy enough to find at their Artist’s Alley tables, Noelle Stevenson, who my wife also wants to meet and who is responsible for the excellent Netflix She-Ra program, and a few science fiction authors: John Scalzi, Sam Sykes, Robert Jackson Bennett and S.L. Huang. I have absolutely no idea whatsoever how difficult it will be to get autographs from these people, and I’m not about to subject my kid to lengthy lines, but is Sam Sykes gonna have a long line? I mean, probably not, right? Who the hell knows. There’s also the minor decision needed about whether I’m gonna bring stuff with me for autographing, which takes up space and requires me to carry said stuff around, or if I’m going to plan on buying things for signatures, which, okay, it’s our anniversary so I’m gonna splurge a bit, but I don’t know how many extra books I need just for signatory purposes. I mostly want to just meet these folks; the signatures are frankly all sorts of secondary to that purpose.

Now, take all that, whip up a bunch of unnecessary COVID-19 related paranoia, and pour said paranoia all over my plans like some sort of infection-based gravy. There have been sixty damn cases of the novel coronavirus in America, and I know how to wash my damn hands, which is the best way to avoid it. I’m just not super eager to be northern Indiana’s patient zero when I contract this shit and then spread it all over a damn middle school. Am I going to let this change my plans? Hell no, although I’m probably going to spend a smidge more time with my hands in my pockets than I might otherwise, and there’s definitely going to be more hand-washing than usual. But it’s in the back of my brain anyway, because stupid, and because oh right I have an actual anxiety disorder and anxiety disorders love this shit. Like, there’s nothing an anxiety disorder loves more than going to a 100,000-person-strong nerd convention during the opening weeks of a pandemic. Loves it.

Unrelated to anything: I am listening to a Kesha album right now, on purpose, and I’m rather enjoying it.

Anyway, I’ll post tons of pictures– pretty sure I can’t be infected with anything through my camera– and the usual end-of-month posts will be happening as usual. Whee!

It is decided

On February 22, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

For our 12th anniversary, my wife and son and I will be attending C2E2, which is a huge show that I attended once as a vendor several years ago. This will be the first nerd convention that I have been to in years where I will actually get to be a fan and an attendee and not trying to hawk books, so it ought to be a lot of fun, although I’ll probably need all of Sunday to recover afterwards. I have important decisions to make during next week now, mostly along the lines of how much money am I going to allow myself to blow at this thing and when I find a giant sword that I want, should I consider buying it, or am I past the point where I should be buying giant swords?

I mean, realistically I know the answer to that, but still.

There will be tons of pictures of cosplayers, of course, and there may be pictures of me taken with a handful of my favorite authors, as John Scalzi, Sam Sykes, and Gail Simone are all going to be in attendance. I will absolutely go meet Gail; Scalzi and Sykes will depend on the length of lines, as we’ll have the boy with us and I feel like C2E2 is not an optimal place to “meet” people who I might want to talk to for more than ten seconds. We’ll see, though.

Finally! A plan!

Call for author recommendations

On December 24, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading7 Comments

8:45 on Christmas Eve is totally the best time to do this, right? I’m sure I’ll get tons of responses.

One of my focuses for my reading next year is going to be on books by women of color. I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to set it up; a percentage of my overall books is a possibility, as is simply setting a raw number of books that I want to read– I’m tempted to say 52, a book a week, but that’s going to mean a pretty good number of new authors.

Anyway, I need y’all to give me some names of authors to read. My rather considerable booklist on Goodreads is here, and I’m not exactly coming at this from a place of complete ignorance (you can leave out Octavia Butler and N.K. Jemisin, to start) but there have got to be lots of women of color out there that I don’t know about and I want to know about them. I generally prefer speculative fiction, as you probably already know, but any genre, fiction or nonfiction, is just fine. Recommend some books!

(Also: if you know of authors of color who identify as nonbinary, or genderfluid, or basically anything other than male, go ahead and toss their names in here. So JY Yang, who was AFAB but currently identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, counts, but Yoon Ha Lee, a trans man, does not. If you’re not sure if someone counts go ahead and tell me about them and I’ll sort it out myself later.)

#REVIEW: 5 Critical Things for Successful Book Signings, by Adam Dreece

On May 19, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews, WritingLeave a comment

Calling this a “review” might be overstating the case a little bit, I dunno. Think of it more as a public service announcement for those of you who are authors who do book signings:

Pick this book up, and read it, (it’s only about 130 pages, so it won’t take terribly long) and internalize its teachings. The meat of the book is right there in the title, so there’s not a whole lot of need to go into details about what the book covers; just be aware that Adam is really good at this sort of thing and the advice in the book is spot-on.

Necessary disclosures: I got to see an early ARC and provided a blurb for the back cover and the Amazon description, and even before then I’d been stealing ideas from Adam since my first show at InConJunction several years ago. That said, he rejected my first blurb– which is fine, as I suspected he was going to, and provided him with the one he actually used a few minutes later. That said, since this is my blog, and not his book, here’s the first blurb I tried to get him to use:

“This book gives you all the advantages of Adam Dreece’s knowledge and experience without the mess and effort of hunting him down and consuming his brain and living soul. Highly recommended.”
—Luther M. Siler, author of THE BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES

Can’t imagine why he didn’t use it.

Anyway, if you’re an author, this will be money well spent. And you can even write it off on your taxes! So everybody wins.

In which I need you to share my excitement

On September 13, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy2 Comments

Okay. I need y’all either to actually be comics fans or at least be willing to pretend to be on my behalf for this post. You can do that, right? Yes? Good.

Miles Morales, in the seven years since he was first introduced, has become one of my favorite comic book characters. He’s up there with Iron Man, the Hulk, and Superman at this point. And when Brian Michael Bendis left Marvel and Miles didn’t immediately have a new series on the docket, I was genuinely worried. There was talk that the character was going to be renamed or reimagined; there was an especially gross rumor going around, one that was so bad that I actually wasn’t able to just dismiss it out of hand, that the character would be joining SHIELD and would henceforth be known as “Spy-D,” which would have meant I needed to go out and set things on fire, and that no court would have convicted me, because setting things on fire is a reasonable reaction to Marvel deciding that Miles Morales isn’t Spider-Man anymore and he has to be “Spy-D” now.

Saladin Ahmed just announced on Twitter that he’s writing the new Miles Morales book. Which is called “Miles Morales: Spider-Man.”

One of my favorite fucking writers is writing an ongoing series about one of my favorite fucking characters.

It was already a good day, guys. I was gonna come home and write a post about how I spent all day today and most of yesterday interacting with nice kids and it was something I really needed and I was in general happy and in a good place. And that’s before I got this awesome fucking news.

Interview with Darkfyre Entertainment at Starbase Indy

On December 28, 2015December 28, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing4 Comments

I haven’t actually watched this yet. Well, okay, I got through like my first sentence and then decided I couldn’t watch any more, because the sight of me on video is kind of terrifying.

But YOU can watch it if you want. My first video interview! Woo!

#InConIndy shout-outs, and some random stuff

On July 9, 2015July 9, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

Th 21017_851785958231182_1572197157379726322_n 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.