Rebecca and I were guests of honor at two conventions in the past three weeks, SheVaCon in Roanoke, VA, and MidSouthCon in Memphis, TN. We had never been to Roanoke, and as we flew into the valley with the beautiful and snow-covered Blue Ridge Mountains, I was immediately impressed, made me thinking about hiking some sections of the Appalachian Trail. We traveled with our assistant Diane, all our suitcases loaded with books; Diane would help us watch the table in the dealer's room when we were on panels. We met a lot of fans at our table, and we also...
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I'm reading Jack McDevitt's novel Cauldron, another installment in the Priscilla Hutchins series, and I'm enjoying it—as I have always enjoyed Jack's work. Jack recently asked me to write an essay about his work for his guest-of-honor appearance at Con*Stellation 2009. I've reprinted it below. If you haven't read any of Jack's work, you should—he's one of the best science fiction writers working today. JACK MCDEVITT: An Expose’ for members of Con*Stellation 2009 Jack McDevitt is a showoff. That’s the first thing you should know. He doesn’t mean to be, and he certainly doesn’t let it go to his head, although...
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New Website Facelift
Five months in the making. What a pain in the butt. Our www.wordfire.com website was getting old and out of date, held together by so much programming duct tape that we could do very little of the updates and site maintenance ourselves. We finally summoned the courage and the energy to tackle the revamp, and started in late September with a “crack” website design team that came highly recommended. We met with them, showed them our own site, discussed in detail what we wanted done, and they warned us that because our site was so complicated (it is—I’ve got over...
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Sunday Panel List for Writing Seminar
These are the sessions that wrap up the third day of our Superstars Writing Seminar next month. 24 hours of straight-talk and no-nonsense information of what you need to know as a professional writer. SUNDAY 9:00 New Media: Using It to Get an Edge (Brandon & Rebecca) Understand the potential of new technologies to open up unexpected avenues for promoting your book and advancing your career—blogs, websites, social networks, podcasts, e-mail blasts. 10:00 E-Publishing (Eric) Online publishing is a direct way to bypass paper, printing, and distribution costs, but in many ways it is still uncharted territory. Learn the basics...
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