I’ve been traveling quite a bit over the past few weeks. Now that I’ve caught my breath, it’s time to blog about my trips.
Because I was a previous winner in the Writers of the Future contest, I was invited to attend the August 18 awards ceremony for the most recent batch of winners. After deciding to go, I talked to Sarah at Galaxy Press (publisher of the WOTF anthology), who has been the person arranging most of my book signings. I suggested that I might be willing to share what I had learned about doing signings for the anthology, so I was invited to attend the workshop the day before the awards for that purpose.
I drove down to Carlsbad, California, arriving around lunchtime on Thursday. At lunch, it was great to see the main workshop instructors, Tim Powers and K. D. Wentworth, again. I also met author Steve Savile (a WOTF winner from three years ago), whom I knew from the Codex Writers forum but had never met in person.
After lunch, I met some of the new winners, including another Codexian, Diana Rowland. I had the chance to read Diana’s story, “Schroedinger’s Hummingbird,” months ago. On rare occasions, when I finish reading a story I say to myself, “Wow! I wish I’d written that story.” Diana’s story gave me that feeling. If you buy Writers of the Future, Volume XXII, you can read it and see why.
I sat in on the lectures at the workshop, and despite the fact that I’ve attended the workshop twice before, it was still a thrill to sit there and listen to authors like Jerry Pournelle and Kevin J. Anderson share their advice.
Due to a bit of confusion about scheduling, both Steve and I should actually have given our presentations the day before we arrived. But Sean Williams (Australia’s biggest SF writer) was kind enough to share his time with us, so we got to share our perspectives.
That evening, during and after dinner, I got a chance to chat with several of the new winners. I also found out that one of the workshop attendees was Mike Rimar, who was a winner along with me last year but was unable to attend at the time.
Either that evening or at some time during the next day, I also had a chance to chat with Kevin J. Anderson, Sean Williams, Todd McCaffrey, Larry Niven, Robert J. Sawyer (Canada’s biggest SF author and the man smart enough to have gotten the sfwriter.com domain name) and others.
Friday evening, I went to the awards ceremony, which was held in the San Diego Aerospace Museum in Balboa Park in San Diego. It was fun to attend the ceremony without worrying about giving a speech, which I had to do two years ago as a published finalist and one year ago as a winner. After the awards came the mass signing by the authors and illustrators. I spent a good while chatting with various people before finally going through and getting my book signed by most of the authors and illustrators.
Saturday afternoon, I was part of a mass signing at Mysterious Galaxy by the new authors and the judges. Anne McCaffrey is so popular that there had to be a separate line for her autograph. I sat next to Mike Rimar, and we ended up signing a few copies of the volume we were both in. (We also signed copies of volume XXII if requested.)
Eventually the time came for me to begin my journey home, so I said goodbye to everyone and left.
All in all, it was a fun time.