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July |
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Last year, my colleague Michael A. Stackpole and I, who had separately been teaching writing seminars for years, joined forces to present a comprehensive series of writing seminars at the 2009 Dragon*Con.
For 2010, we've added other conventions and venues to our seminar tour, and this month we'll be presenting it at the Dragon's Lair Comics & Fantasy® store in Austin, TX.
Details are available here at my web site and at the Dragon's Lair Comics & Fantasy® site.
We'll also be teaching the course at this year's Dragon*Con; please check my Appearance Schedule page periodically for updates.
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March |
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Dead But Hostile is now avaible for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
For details, please see the ArcherRat Publishing web site.
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March |
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The print edition of Dead But Hostile is now available for order from Blurb.com, a Print On Demand service.
You can get to the ordering page from the Dead But Hostile sales page at Archerrat.com, or from this link.
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March |
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In the tradition of "Caveat emptor," Latin for "Let the buyer beware," I'm looking for an accurate Latin translation of the phrase "Let the dreamer beware." Caveat somnium, perhaps? By "dreamer," I'm referring literally to one who dreams asleep at night, rather than someone with goals, aspirations, or half-cooked plans.
Any help would be, well, helpful. <g>
You can reach me at allston@aaronallston.com.
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March |
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Though it took longer than I expected, I've now released the first ArcherRat Publishing e-book.
Dead But Hostile is a collection of three short stories — a mini-anthology — about revenge. It includes two short-shorts (short stories around 1,000 words in length each), Dead Snowmen and Hostile Takeover, which are largely ironic, and Mikey's Coming Home, a longer story with a more serious approach to the theme.
Dead But Hostile will eventually be released in a variety of e-book formats. The first version is now available for the Amazon Kindle device, and the link at the ArcherRat site takes buyers to Amazon.com.
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March |
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The "Who is Aaron envisionin when he's writing Admiral Daala?" contest didn't take too long to determine. I posted the contest, went away for a fun weekend at StellarCon, came home, and there was a winner in my in-box — as well as scores of other entries, more than I anticipated.
A lot of fine actress were suggested. The most popular (in terms of numbers) suggestions were Glenn Close, Dana Delany, Marcia Cross, Mary McDonnell, and Michelle Forbes, all of whom would have been fabulous Daalas. However, none of them was the correct guess.
The person first to supply the winning answer was Lisa Schapira from Colorado, who correctly guessed that Lisa Edelstein, the portrayer of Dr. Lisa Cuddy on House, M.D., was my Daala muse. (That's a lot of different Lisas in the same paragraph.) Congratulations to Lisa Schapira; your Backlash will be in the mail shortly.
I offer thanks to everyone who participated, except perhaps Hothie, winner of the Mr. Star Wars competition at Dragon*Con a few years back, who jokingly suggested Vanna White, because that's just so wrong.
Please note that neither Lisa Edelstein nor any of the other actresses mentioned above had anything to do with this contest, nor should any approval, explicit or implicit, on their part be imagined, nor have I suggested any. In fact, it's a distinct possibility that not one of them would care for the notion that I spend any time at all daydreaming about them, even for purely artistic purposes, a notion which has been known to cause some people to file restraining orders.
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March |
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Late last week, I received my author's copies of Backlash, Book #4 in the Fate of the Jedi series. The full dust jacket is reproduced here. That's Ben Skywalker on the front cover, Natasi Daala on the back. I believe it's due to premiere next Tuesday, March 9, but don't hold me to that prediction.
Also new: I've updated my Appearance Schedule page to include my schedule for StellarCon, which takes place this upcoming weekend.
These two notices do tie together, as I'll have copies of Backlash to show off at StellarCon.
Speaking of Backlash, who'd like a free copy? I'm running a contest, and the winner will receive a copy of Backlash, sent directly from me to him or her, autographed and personalized (if desired). Foreign entries are welcome, but I may resort to surface mail to deliver the prize if an overseas entrant wins it. And the contest is void if for some reason the sending of Star Wars books to your address is illegal.
So, what's the contest? I sometimes imagine a specific actor or actress when I'm writing a character. It can be useful to see specific expressions characteristic of that performer, to hear dialogue in the exact voice of an individual. Such was the case when I was writing the Admiral Daala character in Outcast and Backlash, especially the former. Guess who the actress I was envisioning when writing Daala and the copy is yours.
Some guidelines:
- Only one copy will be awarded — the first correct entry wins the prize.
- Only one entry per e-mail address per day, please.
- Only one actress suggestion per e-mail, please. Entries with two or more suggestions will be discarded.
- Send entries to allston@aaronallston.com.
- The contest will continue until March 15 or until someone wins, whichever comes first.
- The name — at least, the username and city — of the winner will be announced on this web site.
There, wasn't that helpful?
Ladies and gentlemen, start your guessters.
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February |
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I've made a couple of updates to my Appearance Schedule page.
The bad news: I won't be able to attend ConDFW this upcoming weekend.
The good news: I will be able to attend StellarCon next month. (This appearance has been in the works for some time, but I've been too distracted by work to update my web site to reflect the fact.) Timothy Zahn, Michael A. Stackpole, and I will be co-Writer Guests of Honor at this convention.
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October |
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As you can see, I've done a visual and organizational redesign of AaronAllston.com. I do this every two or three years to brush the dust off neglected pages and as a relief to anyone who's gotten tired of the previous design. The new organization is simpler than the old, putting the four or five most often-visited pages on the menu bar at top and moving the less-visited pages to a subdirectory.
On the menu bar, you'll see a "Store" link. My new web store, which is to be located at ArcherRat.com, is not yet live; there's only a placeholder page there now. When it goes live, in a few weeks, it will sell e-books, starting with a collection of revenge-oriented short stories.
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March |
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Outcast Release and TourMarch 24 is the street release date of Outcast, first book in the Fate of the Jedi series, which I'm co-writing with Christie Golden and Troy Denning.
I'll be doing a booksigning tour to promote the release; see my Appearance Schedule page for details.
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April |
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Get Betrayal For FreeStarting yesterday and ending on May 13, folk can download Star Wars: Legacy of the Force #1: Betrayal from LegacyOfTheForce.com in three e-book formats and one audiobook format. If you haven't tried the series, here's a very economical way to do so.
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March |
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Sometime in March 1988, my first novel, Web of Danger, was published. Spin-off fiction from the Top Secret/S.I. role-playing game produced by TSR, Inc., it and the other entries in the Double Agent series made very little splash. But it was my foot in the door.
So here's to anniversaries, and to trying not to feel old.
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November |
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Fury Premieres; Texas Monthly
PreviewsFury, #7 in the Star Wars: Legacy of the Force series and my final contribution to the series, will arrive on bookstands in three days, on November 27. I hope everyone enjoys it. I've certainly enjoyed working on the series.
In anticipation of Fury's release, Texas Monthly has interviewed me for a sidebar to their reglar book column. The interview appears in the December 2007 issue, which went on sale on November 22 — look for the very Texan "Steak" cover (pictured to right). The short form of the interview appears on page 74, and the long form appears on the Texas Monthly web site, at www.texasmonthly.com/2007-12-01/webextra3.php.
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August |
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Exile Cover OnlineThe cover for my next Star Wars book, Exile (#4 in the Legacy of the Force series), was announced yesterday at the starwars.com web site. The accompanying article also provides the most up-to-date release schedule for the novels of the series.
Speaking of which, the second novel in the series, Karen Traviss' Bloodlines, officially hits the bookstores today. Congratulations to Karen!
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July |
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One of the sadder things about having been out of the game-writing business for so long is the process of watching the games and supplements I've written fade away. Most went out of print years (if not decades) ago and have become harder and harder to acquire since then. I occasionally get e-mail from gamers who, after years of looking, still haven't been able to find some of them on eBay.
But within the last few months, three sets of my game supplements and articles have found new life as .PDF files offered for sale over the Web. These are two of my GURPS supplements, offered by SJ Games' e23 service, my contributions to Autoduel Quarterly magazine, also offered by e23, and my Mystara-based Dungeons & Dragons supplements (excepting Karameikos: Kingdom of Adventure, which was branded for 2nd Edition AD&D, and Wrath of the Immortals, for reasons I don't yet know), offered by Paizo.
These newly raised-from-the-dead titles include:
- GURPS Fantasy: Harkwood
- GURPS Supers: School of Hard Knocks
- Autoduel Quarterly Volume 1, Number 1 PDF (including my North American Road Atlas and Survival Guide article on Midville, OH)
- Autoduel Quarterly Volume 1, Number 2 PDF (including my North American Road Atlas and Survival Guide article on Austin, TX)
- Autoduel Quarterly Volume 1, Number 3 PDF (including my designer's notes on Autoduel Champions)
- Autoduel Quarterly Volume 1, Number 4 PDF (including my article on anti-cycle gang tactics)
- Dungeons & Dragons: Hollow World Boxed Set PDF
- Dungeons & Dragons: Poor Wizard's Almanac & Book of Facts PDF
- Dungeons & Dragons: Rules Cyclopedia PDF
- Dungeons & Dragons GAZ1: The Grand Duchy of Karameikos PDF
- Dungeons & Dragons GAZ6: The Dwarves of Rockhome PDF
- Dungeons & Dragons Gazetteer: Dawn of the Emperors — Thyatis and Alphatia PDF
- Dungeons & Dragons X12: Skarda's Mirror PDF
(Follow-up, 2009: At the request of Wizards of the Coast, owner of the rights to the D&D titles above, Paizo has ceased distributioin of those .PDF products.)
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July |
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"You like me, you really like me!"Unlike Sally Field, picking up her Oscar for Norma Rae, I wasn't on hand to accept a statue and make a memorably mockable acceptance speech. But I suspect my giddiness matches hers.
Because at the 2006 Origins convention, held last weekend, I was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design Hall of Fame.
Though I'm still writing the occasional role-playing game supplement, it's been about a decade since gaming was my main occupation, so it's very gratifying that I've been remembered this way.
A full list of Origins award winners appears at GamingReport.com. I'd like to extend congratulations to all this year's winners, particularly my fellow HoF inductees: Jolly R. Blackburn, Rodger MacGowan, Dennis Mize, and Mike Pondsmith.
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April |
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The Resurrection of Lands of
MysteryThis will chiefly be of interest to people who are familiar with my work for Hero Games and the Hero System role-playing game. In late 2007, Hero Games will release a new, vastly updated version of Lands of Mystery, a supplement I wrote more than twenty years ago — it was originally released in 1985.
The original Lands of Mystery, a supplement for the Justice, Inc. hero-pulp role-playing game, explained how to create and run campaigns in the style of the "lost world romances" of Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, and other writers. In addition to the how-to material, the supplement described a campaign setting, Zorandar, populated by Stone Age tribesmen, Roman legionnaires, dinosaurs, intelligent lizard-men, and courageous adventurers from the "modern" Earth of the 1920s and 1930s. When I was writing it, I knew I wanted to do a good job with it, but its critical reception at the time of its release and for years afterward suggested to me that it was one of the best gaming works I'd written, and it has a good reputation even today.
The new version will retain and update the how-to material. It will vastly expand the Zorandar setting, incorporating much of the material added to the original campaign in the twenty years of intermittent playing that occurred in that setting. In addition, the bestiary of prehistoric animals and monsters appearing in the setting will be expanded and brought up to Hero System Fifth Edition standards.
I'll be the chief writer on the project, with game-mechanics material and additional writing being provided by Hero Games guiding light Steven S. Long.
Preliminary product details appear on, and presumably will be updated on, the Hero Games web site page for the 2007 release schedule.
(Follow-up, 2009: Sales of the Hero System Fifth Edition supplement Pulp Hero ended up not warranting supplements of its own, so the Lands of Mystery revival ended up being canelled. But it is moribund rather than dead, and several parties are still interested in seeing it happen. Perhaps some day...)
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April |
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As announced yesterday on StarWars.com, my next book in the LotF series now has a name — Exile. And, as with Betrayal, the word is deeply intertwined with the story's theme and characters. It will be released in paperback form in February 2007.
Karen Traviss' follow-up, Book 5, the centerpoint of the series, also had its name announced: Sacrifice. It's scheduled for release in hardback in June 2007.
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March |
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At Stellarcon last month, Michael Stackpole, Timothy Zahn and I sat down for a podcast interview with the good folk over at Requiem of the Outcast. The result is up at the RotO Episode 29 page; click the link labeled "LISTEN" for an mp3 download. The mp3 file is about 10.5 meg and runs for an hour.
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March |
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Deadbacks Web Site OnlineLast year, I produced and directed a low-budget horror film from my own script. It's currently in post-production. While it was being shot, I put up a preliminary web site; more recently, I've updated and upgraded that site from "skeleton" to "skeleton with some skin and bones" status. You can find it at deadbacks.com. An accompanying LiveJournal blog, in place but not really begun yet, is at deadbacks.livejournal.com.
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November |
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Terminator Hunt Paperback ReleasedI just received a boxful of the paperback edition of Terminator Hunt, which was published in hardback a year ago.
The paperback is ISBN 0-765-35093-9 and retails for $6.99 US ($9.99 Canadian).
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November |
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Betrayal Cover RevealedTo the right is the cover for my upcoming Star Wars novel, Betrayal. Due for release in summer 2006, it's the first novel in a nine-book series titled Legacy of the Force. Three writers — myself, Troy Denning, and Karen Traviss — are each writing three novels within the series, and trading off (I'm first, Karen is second, Troy is third, and so on).
The cover for Betrayal was revealed on starwars.com in articles titled "An Early Look at Betrayal" and "A Closer Look at Betrayal".
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August |
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Terminator Hunt CoverTo the right is the cover for Terminator Hunt; I've had it for a few days but preparations for this unusually busy convention attendance season kept me from putting it up for all to see.
The novel is still scheduled for a December 2004 release, meaning that it will be on the shelves in the last week of November. The paperback edition of Terminator Dreams, which was released in hardback last December, will be issued at the same time.
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July |
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At Comic-Con just a few days ago, Lucasfilm's Sue Rostoni announced my participation in a post-NJO Star Wars novel series. I'm now getting some questions from fans who weren't at the Star Wars Continuity panel where the announcement was made, and as news spreads concerning the series, the "grapevine effect" is causing misinformation and confusion to be distributed as well.
This is a nine-book series set after the events of the New Jedi Order series and after the upcoming trilogy from Troy Denning.
The series will be written by three authors — Troy Denning, myself, and a writer to be named soon. Our respective contributions will not be trilogies; we'll be trading off, each doing one novel at a time, as the series progresses.
There's no point in asking questions such as exactly when it will take place, exactly which characters will have prominent roles, and so forth -- those details have not yet been established. We're glad you're interested and curious, but we have no answers for you at this time.
Here's hoping you enjoy the series.
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May |
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At last March's StellarCon, Timothy Zahn and I did an interview for the Requiem of the Outcast internet radio show. It's now online at their web site.
The download is a 16-megabyte .zip archive containing an only-slightly-compressed .mp3.
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February |
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My next novel will be Terminator Hunt, the follow-up to Terminator Dreams, and it will be followed by a trilogy of novels set in the world of the Deus Ex computer game series.
(Follow-up, 2009: For various reasons, I ended up not being the writer on the Deus Ex novel series.)
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January |
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League of Spies Now In PrintMy subscription copy of Star Wars Insider #73 arrived the other day, and in its pages is my new Clone Wars-era short story, League of Spies.
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December |
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Terminator Dreams Now AvailableFriends and colleagues have reported to me that Terminator Dreams has been sighted in their local bookstores and is shipping from on-line bookstores.
So do consider putting it on your Christmas list, or picking up a copy or six when buying Christmas presents for others...
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November |
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Two items about my next novel:
I received advance copies of the book last Friday, so it looks to be on schedule for street release within the next couple of weeks.
And it has been reviewed in Publisher's Weekly (my first review in that magazine, I think). The review appears in the November 10, 2003 issue, on page 47. It's basically a positive review, concluding, "Arnold's adventure fans, rejoice; this is the stuff that role-playing dreams are made of."
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October |
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I'll have a short story in Star Wars Insider #73, which arrives on magazine stands around January 13. The story, League of Spies, is a follow-up to The Pengalan Tradeoff, and features Joram Kithe in another situation not suited to a competent Intelligence operative... or an incompetent one.
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May |
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My next novel to see print will be Terminator Dreams, a spin-off from the Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines movie. I can't say too much about the project at this time, except that I should point out that this is not the Terminator 3 movie novelization (Amazon.com's listing for the book currently has information relating to the novelization rather than to Terminator Dreams).
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January |
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My subscriber's copy of Star Wars Insider magazine #65, which includes my Clone Wars-era short story, The Pengalan Tradeoff, arrived in my mailbox this afternoon; I hope everyone who sees it enjoys it.
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November |
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I have two Star Wars pieces just out or coming soon.
The first of these, a humor piece entitled Spam From A Galaxy Far, Far Away, was just published in Bantha Tracks #1. Bantha Tracks is the newsletter of the official Star Wars Fan Club, and is included with issues of Star Wars Insider sent to fan club members.
In a couple of months, my short story The Pengalan Tradeoff will appear in Star Wars Insider #65. The Pengalan Tradeoff is set during the early weeks of the Clone Wars and has an all-new cast of characters.
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August |
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Gen Con, ArmadilloCon, and Champions
NewsI'm just back from back-to-back conventions — Gen Con in early August and ArmadilloCon the next weekend — and have bits and pieces of news to report.
The new Champions supplement did debut at Gen Con, selling out of the initial shipment before the first day of sales was done and going through most of another double-sized shipment over the next two days. The response of Hero System fans was quite positive, I'm glad to say.
I was also very happy to receive a present from Star Wars fan LissyB, aka Hobbie's Girl — this X-wing pilot teddy bear. It was the envy of my companions during the convention and now occupies a place of favor in my Star Wars collection. Thanks much, Lissy. The weekend after Gen Con, I attended ArmadilloCon, a local (Austin, TX) literary SF&F convention, where I had a good time. After an invitation extended to me a couple of weeks before the event, it was announced at the convention that I'll be the toastmaster at next year's ArmadilloCon. So now I have an entire year to figure out what dismay to inflict on the convention's guests and patrons...
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January |
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The long-awaited Hero System 5th Edition role-playing game will be released later this year, and I'll be writing Champions, its superhero genre book. Here's the press release from the Hero Games web site:
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PRESS RELEASE For Immediate Distribution January 11, 2002 AARON ALLSTON TO WRITE CHAMPIONS |
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December |
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Rebel Stand Cover Is Also OnlineOnce again, the official Star Wars web site comes through; the synopsis and cover for Rebel Stand are now online. Thanks to Kenny H. for sending me the heads-up.
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December |
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Dave Seeley, the artist who did the cover for Rebel Dream, has put up an online version of the cover without the various book and publisher logos; find it at http://www.daveseeley.com/Pages/sciencefiction_pages/RebelDream.html.
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November |
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Rebel Dream Cover Is OnlineI thought I had posted about this when it first appeared (around September 4), but apparently I hadn't: The cover and a synopsis for my upcoming Star Wars book, Rebel Dream, are online at the official Star Wars web site.
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May |
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Sidhe-Devil Appearing On Bookstore
ShelvesI'm now receiving e-mail alerts that copies of Sidhe-Devil have been sighted in bookstores.
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May |
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I've bowed to the demands of the modern Web era and set up AaronAllston.com as my new and (I hope) permanent domain. Though my io.com web address wasn't long or difficult to remember, AaronAllston.com should be even easier.
I'll be maintaining the www.io.com/~allston/ web address for some considerable time — it appeared on "About the Author" pages in several of my novels and I'll be using it to forward people here.
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December |
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Sidhe-Devil has been scheduled for release in June of 2001, according to the "Forthcoming Books" column in December's Locus magazine.
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August |
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Owing to unexpected demands on my time, I will be unable to attend the WorldCon this year. I regret any inconvenience this causes anyone who intended to see me at the convention.
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May |
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This Monday, May 1, I finished work on Sidhe-Devil, the sequel to Doc Sidhe. It came in at a trifle under 140,000 words, making it just a bit longer than Wraith Squadron.
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August |
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(Updated September 18, 1999)
Starfighters of Adumar has begun appearing on bestseller lists; I'll track its progress on the chart below.
| Week Of: | Placement: |
| 1999/08/22 | |
| 1999/08/29 | |
| 1999/09/05 | |
| 1999/09/12 | |
| 1999/09/19 | |
| Week Of: | Placement: |
| 1999/08/16 | |
| 1999/08/23 | |
| Week Of: | Placement: |
| 1999/08/11 | |
| 1999/08/18 | |
| 1999/08/25 | |
| 1999/09/01 | |
| 1999/09/08 | |
| 1999/09/15 | |
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July |
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Today I received two advance author's copies of Starfighters of Adumar. This suggests pretty persuasively that the book will make its August 3 release date.
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March |
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In the Good News/Bad News department:
As many of you know, I've been working on an update and expansion to the Strike Force supplement for a couple of years. The idea was to do a series of supplements (a lot of them) covering the Strike Force world and campaigns comprehensively, and my plan was to start out with The Circle — the first Strike Force Update supplement being an update of the first Hero Games supplement I wrote. Since the project began, I've written and assembled three and a half megabytes of text for the series, but without managing to complete the first supplement.
In recent months, my work slowed and I eventually realized that the problem was that I just didn't think that The Circle was the way to kick off the series... or that a series of dozens of reasonable-sized supplements would ever be completed. So I've restructured things. The series will now be organized as a smaller number of much larger supplements, and the first one will be Strike Force and the Shadow Warriors — four Strike Force teams, two Shadow Warriors teams, associates, civilian staffers, gadgets, vehicles, headquarters, personal enemies, histories and campaigning advice, the whole kit and kaboodle. Subsequent releases will cover topics such as The United States (the greatest concentration of super-powered weirdness), Magic and the Supernatural (that's where The Circle will end up), The World (super-activity in the rest of the world), The Multiverse (related dimensions), The Superhero Era (pulp heroes and supers from the world's history, from the 1930s to the early 1980s), and Known Space (near and outer space, alien races, etc.).
It's possible that the first manuscript will be ready in late 1999, but I'm not making any promises. However, I'm encouraged by the fact that, since I did this mental reorganization, I've been working productively on the series once again. So keep your fingers crossed. (Because I can't. It screws up my typing.)
(This announcement originally appeared on my Current Projects page.)
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January |
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A couple of author's copies of Solo Command, my third Star Wars: X-Wing novel, are now in my hands, so it is at last in print. This means it should be showing up in bookstores Real Soon Now.
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July |
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The official release date for Iron Fist, my second Star Wars: X-Wing novel, is tomorrow — July 7, 1998. I've also seen preview copies of the audiobook version, which should be out soon.
In addition, I was recently forwarded an advance copy of the cover of my third X-Wing novel, Solo Command. As painted by series artist Paul Youll, it shows a familiar-looking Corellian YT-1300 transported being escorted above an incredibly dense cityscape by an equally familiar-looking X-Wing.
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February |
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Wraith Squadron appears on the NY Times listing for February 22, debuting at #15. Until March 1 or so, you can see the web version of the listing at http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/22/bsp/bestpaperfiction.html. Need I say that I'm thrilled?
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February |
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The USA Today bestseller list that appeared yesterday listed Wraith Squadron as debuting at #20, and I hear encouraging rumors about another bestseller list to come.
This is my first appearance on any such bestseller list, and I am very pleased.
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February |
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I was informed yesterday that Wraith Squadron is on the shelves of at least one Austin-area bookseller.
In other news, I went to the movies Sunday to see Deep Rising, an unabashedly traditional monster movie, and only after I returned home did it occur to me that the actor playing Carlton, owner of the luxury liner, is Anthony Heald, who performed the audiobook version of Wraith Squadron.
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January |
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Yesterday I received a package of the audiobook version of Wraith Squadron. This is the first time a work of mine has been adapted to audio; it's an interesting experience to listen to it. Actor Anthony Heald, in what is essentially a one-man show, has done an admirable job of making each character distinctive.
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January |
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A couple of early copies of Wraith Squadron came to me by mail today. They look great, and since they're in hand in mid-January, I can only guess that they'll be in stores on or around the target date of February 2nd.
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January |
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A crash of my computer system between Christmas and New Year's caused me to reinstall Windows 95 from the ground up. This cost me a lot of time and a fair number of files — including most of the e-mail correspondence I received during Christmas week. So if you sent me e-mail at that time and I haven't responded, please send it again — especially the fellow whose name and address are now lost to me who asked about a photograph.
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January |
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Courtesy of the Christmas season, I'm now the owner of a Psion Series 5 palmtop computer. It's close to the same size as Windows CE machines, but runs its own proprietary operating system and has a slide-out keyboard that is touch-typable (at least for me; my fingers are fairly small). It coordinates extremely well with my desktop and I think it's a marvelously well-engineered machine. I heartily recommend it.
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September |
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I have just upgraded my computer. I was using a Zeos 486/33; I now have a Gateway 200-MHz Pentium with 32 megs of RAM, a 4-gig hard drive, a 17-inch monitor, an internal Zip drive, a Scanjet scanner... it should give me some growing room.
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January |
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In today's mail I received my author's copies of Wrath of the Princes, the sequel to Thunder of the Captains. It should begin appearing in the bookstores in the immediate future.
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January |
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The Austin, TX Borders bookstore (Research Boulevard at Great Hills Trail, 795-9553) hosts several reading groups, including one for science fiction and fantasy novels. On February 19, their topic will be Doc Sidhe, and I'll be on hand to provide commentary (or suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism, depending on how it's received). The activity begins at 7:30 p.m.; please call Borders for additional information.
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December |
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The day after Christmas, I received a happy holiday present: Contracts for Sidhe-Devil, the Doc Sidhe sequel. So that project is finally an official "go."
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July |
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I'll be signing Thunder of the Captains on Saturday, July 27, from 6 to 8 p.m., at Adventures in Crime and Space (609-A W. Sixth St., Austin, 4SF-BOOK).
I'll be in very good company, too. Also at ACS that night will be Martha Wells, signing the paperback version of City of Bones, and Susan Wade, signing her newly-released first novel, Walking Rain.
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June |
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I'm pleased to announce that Lester Smith and I will be the Guests of Honor at Gamicon Eta, February 21-23, Iowa City, IA. Gamicon is a gaming convention run by SFLIS, the Science Fiction League of Iowa Students, the fine folks who also run Icon.
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May |
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Today I received author's copies of Thunder of the Captains, my fantasy collaboration with Holly Lisle. It should become available in the stores in the near future.
For publishing information and a synopsis, please see my fiction credits page.
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March |
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At last year's New Orleans Science Fiction and Fantasy Festival, the convention committee asked me to be Toastmaster at the 1996 event. I held off making any announcement about this until official notice was issued, which now has happened.
I've been the Gaming Guest of Honor at other conventions, but the role of Toastmaster gives me a much greater opportunity to inflict myself on a large crowd. I'm looking forward to it with glee.
For those who are interested in NOSF3 but can't find information on it elsewhere, here are the pertinent facts (drawn from a flyer appearing at CoastCon 19):
Rooms at the Radisson: $70 per night, double occupancy. For reservations, call 504-467-3111 or 800-333-3333. |
I'll update the above details as I receive new information.
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September |
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New Cat on the BlockIn late July, my roommate Luray heard the frantic cries of a kitten outside. The kitten turned out to be a Siamese mix, probably from a colony of feral cats that live in the storm drains down the street, and in spite of bite injuries he healed up fine and without any associated illness. To make a long story short, after a futile effort to give him away to a friend who'd recently lost his cats, we did decide to keep him. Here's a look at him.
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September |
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I've installed Windows '95 on my home computer. This was mostly painless, and I've enjoyed the results, but it wasn't entirely trouble-free. I'll share some of the results in case anyone reading this runs into similar problems.
I did buy the CD-ROM version, and highly recommend CD-ROM installation of any large software package.
The basic file-transfer portion of the installation went well, but I ran into a hangup during the initial boot. I got an error message saying that Win '95 disabled direct disk access (meaning that programs able to make direct accesses to the disk, as many utilities do, just won't work any more); the system invited me to reboot. I did so, only to run into the same message again and again.
This suggested to me that there was a call to such a utility in my old AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS setup, so I used a bootable floppy disk to get my system up in DOS mode and looked at those files. One of the AUTOEXEC.BAT lines was a call to the Norton utility DS (Directory Sort), an innocuous program that simply re-sorted the contents of directories, but it seemed to be just the sort of util that would have direct disk access. I REMmed out that line and rebooted... and Win '95 came up just fine.
I mention this for people even less proficient with operating systems than I am -- it might not occur to a complete newbie to look in those two files for the culprit.
A later problem arose in that I couldn't get on-line to the World Wide Web. I'd been using Netscape Navigator 1.1N through Trumpet Winsock. After Win '95 was installed, Netscape would launch without difficulty, but Trumpet Winsock wouldn't come up. My guess was that something in the built-in TCP/IP support promised for Windows '95 was interfering with Trumpet. So I spent a fruitless 45 seconds scratching my head and called the tech support at Illuminati Online, my internet server.
And they had an instant solution. In the ftp directory at io.com, in the io-ppp subdir, are a utility called RoboDUN and a set of text files. The text files explain in step-by-step detail how to set up Win '95's TCP/IP support for direct dialing to internet servers; RoboDUN is a shareware scripting utility that works with the Win '95 dial-up networking functions in order to automate PPP log-ons.
So, if any other Trumpet Winsock users are going through the same trouble when upgrading to Win '95 -- and yet somehow reading this page — I recommend finding those files.