Barbara's Blog

  Just a quick check-in. Just got back from the Celsius 232 Festival of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror in Aviles, Spain - a WONDERFUL festival, and unlike any other convention I've been to. It's not in a hotel, but bookshop kiosks are scattered all through the 17th-century Old Town. This was the hotel they put me up in - a 17th-century nobleman's palace (that served REALLY fine breakfasts!) (The other picture is of me in front of an old fountain). Soft gray weather. One day it did drizzle. Two days there was a religious festival - the Virgin of Carmen, who guards all vehicles, fishing-boats in this case - with parades of drummers and a life-size Madonna carried through the streets. In the evening everyone in town walks their dogs. The final notes from my editor on 'Death in the Palace' are due in a week, and I will post at greater length then. (I am also having the house re-piped, so there are plumbers in and out and for a week there was a back-hoe in my fron...

  Father's Day memories of a Classic '50s Dad: kind, responsible, worked hard for his family and his Church, loved nature and took us hiking and camping and to museums (and to Disneyland - back when it was affordable! - even though he hated crowds!). Loved us. Loved my Mom. Like the animals in the wild that he loved, he believed in teaching his young to survive on their own (bank accounts when we were in our early teens, "always have an emergency fund.") Fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Roman history, Zane Gray; told us about the Iliad and the Odyssey (and got us the Classic Comics versions when they came out). Like Hector in the Iliad, who says of his baby son, "I would like one day to hear men say of him, 'He's a better man than his father.'" Knowing him - having him as a mentor - was one of the greatest gifts of my life. Love you, Dad! In other news: The next Benjamin January novel, "Murder in the Trembling Lands", will be out next month...

  HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE! Here is a deeply unflattering picture of me on the beach this morning, wearing 4 layers under my gi and looking like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, after doing 1100 sword-cuts with my iaido group at sunrise, a dojo tradition of "spirit training." After the Misogi - as it's called - we walked down to the ocean, to watch the waves materialize out of a horizonless gray eternity of fog.

    Finally, I've had the time (and the mental energy) to thrash through the tiring and complicated process of uploading two new further adventures onto Amazon Kindle! I will upload them onto Smashwords (or its new twin, Draft-2-Digital) in a few days. It's been a very stressful couple of years, between tight deadlines, a summer of travel, assorted pressures from the Outside World, and some necessary house and car repairs. (I feel like I'm just starting to come out of the first phase of grief over my mother's passing, almost three years ago, and that slows everything down.) But, the stories are up on Kindle and people tell me they've downloaded them successfully, so I didn't screw that up. There have been a couple of changes to the Amazon-Kindle system in the past couple of years and I wasn't sure I was doing the upload properly, but evidently even the Table of Contents in Cat's Paw works. (I had my doubts). Cat's Paw is John Aversin and Jenny Wayn...

Dad in his Marine days. Prior to that he was in the Army at the end of WW-2. He served in China, but would never talk about it. A salute to America's Veterans.  

  In honor of Halloween - though this picture of me and my dear friend Allan Rothstein was taken a day or so after Thanksgiving, sometime in the '80s, at a LosCon in LA. We competed in the Masquerade as Hades and Persephone. In other news, I finished the 22nd Benjamin January mystery - working title "Chalmette" (since it deals with a long-cold case of a disappearance, and with Ben's service in the Battle of New Orleans). The editor says the title doesn't say "mystery" to her and it will probably be changed. I'll keep you posted. I was very pleased when my preliminary research for the mystery at the core of the plot turned out that the hypothetical situation I'd come up with actually existed: there really WAS a villainous mastermind behind nefarious deeds! I turned the manuscript in Monday and have been in severe post-partum depression ever since - which usually happens when I turn in a manuscript. Here's another picture of me at a Costume-Con...

  It's official! I will be one of the eight Guests of Honor at the 2026 World Science Fiction Convention, held in Anaheim, August 27-31 2026. (And I get to celebrate my 75th birthday at the con!) https://www.lacon.org/ Other Guests of Honor include artist Tim Kirk (whose work I've loved since the early '70s!), screenwriter and producer Ron Moore, cartoonist Colleen Doran, engineer Dr. Anita Sengupta, Stan Sakai (Go, Usagi!), fan GoH Geri Sullivan, and Toastmaster and illustrator Ursula Vernon - truly amazing company to be in. I am sort of speechless - and just very glad that people think my work is good. Thank you to the con committee!