Announcements

Find Me This Weekend at Salt Lake Comic Con!

I’m at Salt Lake Comic Con this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday!

Schlock Mercenary merchandise will be in booth 1600, but that number is misleading. We’re at the west end of Aisle 700, right across from The Pie Pizzeria booth. My full schedule is below, but the booth will be staffed the whole time the expo hall is open.

THURSDAY

  • 1:00pm-5:30pm: Expo Hall, Booth 1600 – I’ll sign and sketch in books at no charge. If it gets slow, I’ll be penciling and inking strips. Come watch me work!
  • 6:00pm-6:50pm: Room 251 – Choose Your Own Apocalypse! It’s an audience-participation game show type thing in which each of the panelists tries to woo the audience over to their point of view.
  • 7:00pm-8:00pm: Expo Hall, Booth 1600 – signing, sketching, and working on the comic.

FRIDAY

  • 10:00am-noon: Booth 1600
  • 12:00pm-12:50pm: Room 150G – XDM: Xtreme Dungeon Mastery and the Xtreme Player Codex, with Tracy and Curtis Hickman
  • 1:00pm-1:50pm: Expo Hall, Booth 1600
  • 2:00pm-2:50pm: Room 255C – Inside Schlock Mercenary! All that behind-the-scenes stuff… ask me anything!
  • 3:00pm-4:00pm: Expo Hall, Booth 1600
  • 5:00pm-5:50pm: Room 251a – Writing and Mental Health with Robison Wells.
  • 6:00pm-8:00pm: Expo Hall, Booth 1600
  • 8:00pm-8:50pm: Room250a – Guardians of the Galaxy: Post-Mortem (I guess my movie reviewing makes me an expert?)

SATURDAY

  • 10:00am-11:00am: Expo Hall, Booth 1600
  • 11:00am-11:50am: Publishing, Marketing, and Making a Living from a Digital Comic Book
  • 12:00pm-3:00pm: Expo Hall, Booth 1600
  • 4:00pm-4:50pm: Room 255F – Writing Humor: Learning to be Funny on the Page
  • 5:00pm-6:00pm: Expo Hall, Booth 1600
  • 7:00pm-7:50pm: Room 255F – Writing Excuses Unplugged, with Brandon Sanderson and Dan Wells. 

It’s going to be a very busy show for me. I’m sharing booth space with Brian McClellan, so even when I’m not on stage I’ll probably be goofing off in entertaining ways.

I probably shouldn’t promise that. But come see us!

Reviews

Shipstar by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven

BowlOfHeavenLast year I read Bowl of Heaven by Benford and Niven, and really enjoyed it. The book had lots going for it, and my biggest complaint was that it ended pretty much in the middle of the story. Sure, local threads got wrapped up, but the overarching crisis had not been resolved.

Shipstar resolves it nicely. Shipstar

This is science fiction like the kind I grew up loving, in which the scale of engineering evokes sense of wonder, and the setting is a critical player in the story being told. The second volume adds of detail the setting and depth to the characters, and of course it finishes the story much more satisfactorily.

Thanks to Writing Excuses I’m pretty interested in the process of creating the things that I like, and I was delighted to find afterwords by both authors. These essays by Benford and Niven were fascinating, not only for what they said (lots of cool things about designing BDOs, B-“Smart”-Os, and eon-spanning civilizations), but for what they didn’t say. In particular, they made no mention to specifics in designing characters. I’m sure that’s something that the authors did, but for some reason that’s not what they thought would interest us in the essays.

I wish they had, because the alien characters were interesting and distinct, and the human characters got a lot deeper with the second volume. I’d love to know what went into making that happen.

At the end of Bowl of Heaven I was pretty sure I knew what Shipstar‘s big reveal was going to be. I got the reveal right, but it wasn’t the big one. I’m quite happy to have been mostly wrong. Shipstar had a bunch of new things in it (something to shop for in a new book, obviously,) and I found the reveals very satisfactory, right down to the surprising-yet-inevitable bits.

Announcements

Me and Rob: Mental Health Panel at Salt Lake Comic Con

Salt Lake Comic Con is less than a week way. I still don’t know my actual booth number, mostly because Sandra handles that stuff and I wasn’t paying attention, but it’s not the booth I want to call your attention to.

Robison Wells and I will be doing a panel together called “Writing and Mental Health.” We did this at SLCC Fan Experience in April with Peter Wacks and Bree Despain, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. I did a reading from “No. I’m Fine.” which was not yet publicly available.

NoI'mFine-CoverIt’s publicly available now.  Whether or not you’re going to be at Salt Lake Comic Con, you can find all the ebook versions right here. And if you are going to be at Salt Lake Comic Con, you should consider attending Writing and Mental Health at 5pm on Friday in room 251a.

This will be a very open discussion. The Q&A we had in April was an amazing experience–definitely the sort of thing we want to have happen again. We’d love to see you there.

Writer, Illustrator, Consumer