DUNE 7 BLOG

Friday, August 25, 2006

World Science Fiction Convention

It was a day off from running to bookstore after bookstore, but we still did plenty of work promoting HUNTERS OF DUNE. Brian and I attended LACon in Anaheim, the World Science Fiction Convention. We had been based in the convention hotel for a several nights, while the lobby was filled with science fiction fans, editors, writers. Friday was the first day we actually attended the con activities.

I started out at 10 AM with a reading of HUNTERS for a group of very interested fans, then I met my friend Mike Resnick -- many-time award-winning author -- for lunch. Afterward, we joined a great many other authors for an autographing of SPACE CADETS, a limited-edition anthology published by Worldcon. That autographing had a line for about two hours until it was finally closed off, at which point Brian joined me for our autographing line. I was signing books for a total of three hours, before we had to rush off to do an hour-long panel on DUNE. After that, Brian and Jan went off to dinner with their friend, writer Bruce Taylor. Rebecca and I still had one more panel, on the Business of Writing, before we went out to dinner at a local Mexican restaurant with Jaime Levine, my editor at Warner Books.

At dinner, Rebecca, Jaime, and I had a long discussion about METAL SWARM and the whole "Saga of Seven Suns." Since they both had read the previous draft of the manuscript, I got a lot of feedback, and we brainstormed some parts that could be strengthened or tweaked. (I've been doing some fixes and revisions during this book tour, but it's very difficult to get more than a half hour of concentration time here and there.) After dinner, Rebecca and I briefly visited several parties, one for Lydia Van Vogt (for whom I completed A.E. Van Vogt's last novel, SLAN HUNTER), one for the Writers of the Future contest, and one for Escape Pod, a SF podcasting group that is producing some of my short stories.

Then, before midnight, we got back to the room, where I had to pack up. Rebecca is staying at the convention until Monday morning, but Brian, Jan, and I left Anaheim at 7:30 AM to drive up north to Half Moon Bay on the San Francisco peninsula. Right now, I'm typing this in the back seat of our rental car, rolling up California's Central Valley, with fields and fields of almond trees on either side of the highway. Jan is driving, Brian has his laptop open in the front seat, editing SANDWORMS. We just stopped at an In-n-Out Burger for an early lunch and got back on the road.

Tonight, we sign at Bay Books, where we always have a good turnout. Then on Sunday we drive up to Sacramento, for the last official signing of the tour.

-- KJA

PS -- some of you have asked questions about the new Dune story, "Treasure in the Sand," which is available electronically from Jim Baen's Universe magazine (see the August 14 blog). Currently, in order to read the new short story, you have to subscribe to the magazine, for about $30. Some fans, though, just want to be able to read the new story. I spoke with the editor of Universe yesterday and asked about it; he said that they are working to change the ordering process so that readers can just pay for individual stories. That should be up and running within another month, so please be patient. However, if you do subscribe, within the next year, Universe will be publishing not only the Dune story "Treasure in the Sand," but also another original story of mine, "Newts," and they are serializing the whole novel SLAN HUNTER, so you'll get plenty for your subscription fee.