The Rain in Spain...




 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 front yard). But, it's a wonderful con, I had an amazing time - the big-name guest there was Brandon Sanderson, but there were a host of others: Kim Newman, Jay Kristoff, Lisa Tuttle... A well-organized, truly international con.
More later. I took the manuscript with me but spent an AWFUL lot of time sitting in cafes talking to friends until one in the morning, so it was probably better that I didn't try to do any serious writing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Happy New Year!

Image
  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.
Read more

New Further Adventures!

Image
    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...
Read more

It's official!

Image
  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!
Read more