The fall convention season is upon us, and my first novel, the post-apocalyptic-steampunk-circus Mechanique, comes out next year. Those two things combined mean that I’ll be giving some readings from Mechanique in the next few months, and you should totally come and hear them!

So, in order to keep things moderately organized (and to give me an opportunity to use this totally bitchin’ graphic*), I present:

THE CIRCUS TRESAULTI READING TOUR
(For certain values of “tour”. Also, of “circus.” The “reading” part is pretty solid, though.)
OCTOBER

Saturday, October 23: Capclave, Rockville, Maryland. 7:30pm (Room 304)

Sunday, October 24: Steampunk Indie Mart Literary Corner, Brooklyn. 1:30pm (Not sure exactly, but the corner filled with literature, I am assuming)

Saturday, October 30: World Fantasy Convention, Columbus, Ohio. 1:00pm (location TBD)

I’m so excited about having the chance to share the book with people, and I’m really looking forward to these readings. Hope to see some of you there!

* This totally bitchin’ graphic is part of the totally bitchin’ circus-ticket bookmark that the amazing Kiri Moth has put together for me. You can look forward to more of her art in the book itself, because I am incredibly lucky.

Obligatory: I will be at WisCon as of tomorrow! I will see what looks like 65% of you there.

Also obligatory: I will be part of the Lightspeed Launch Event!

Lightspeed Magazine Launch Event, Saturday, 10pm, Conference Room 2

Join us to celebrate the launch of Lightspeed Magazine (www.lightspeedmagazine.com), a new online science fiction magazine published by Prime Books (publisher of Fantasy Magazine). Lightspeed editors John Joseph Adams and Andrea Kail, along with publisher Sean Wallace, will be on hand to discuss this exciting new venture, and will present readings by the authors.

Alice Sola Kim, Genevieve Valentine, Vylar Kaftan, Cat T. Rambo, John Joseph Adams

I will be reading my story “The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball,” which is scheduled to be in the magazine this summer.

And when I get home, I have an awesome Bollywood epic to talk about! (I probably should have been talking about it since last year, but then it wasn’t available on DVD and I didn’t have Netflix yet, and so I forgot about it for a year before I thought to look it up again. When I am off the clock, my brain is pretty much a blank canvas with movies playing on top, and sometimes one slips through the cracks. Sorry, movie!)

I would be talking about it today, except that all my screencapping time last night went to laundry, and then a lot of staring at my clothes as I realized with dawning horror that I am completely unprepared for anything higher than 65 degrees. I foresee a lot of staying indoors, and/or little scuttling bursts from shade to shade as I hold up the collar on my all-black casual businesswear and hiss at the monstrous sun like an angel extra in The Prophecy.*

* Which is a straight-up awesome movie. I’ll go to the mat on this.

This weekend was the Steampunk World’s Fair, where I read for the first time from my upcoming novel (exciting), saw a lot of great costumes (very exciting!), and had the usual problems with some elements of the subculture (Me? Have problems with something? Surely not!).

Overall, though, it was great, and I’m still beyond thrilled to have been invited. There were some wonderful costumes, both subtle and flamboyant. There was also a baby with a mustache glued to its face; every time I saw it, it was wearing exactly the expression you would imagine from a baby that has been brought into a huge room full of people and had a mustache glued to its face.

Pictures are still coming in (I didn’t take any of my own, because they would have been a series of nicely-accessorized blurs), but this shot is my favorite so far:

The subtle colorway, the texture, the pose, the face – it reminds me of a Sargent painting or something. Call me a nerd, I just really like it.

Bonus: while I was at the World’s Fair, I received some good news: my story “So Deep That the Bottom Could Not Be Seen” will be appearing in the Way of the Wizards anthology! That was a nice cap to the weekend, for sure.

Now back to the grindstone, with a new goal in life: to get some Dr. Scholl’s in my zombie-fighting boots pronto, because those things get PAINFUL. Wow. Flat boots are supposed to be more comfortable! Why do you have to make a liar out of me, boots?

I’ll be on Hour of the Wolf tomorrow morning from 5-7am, along with some of the Interfictions crew and a cup of coffee the size of which you cannot imagine.

If you’d like to tune in, that would be awesome! I’ll be reading To Set Before the King, which appeared in the Interfictions Annex, and at some other point in the show (and this is just a guess) relating a topic of conversation to a movie I saw one time.*

*Guess is based on every other conversation I have ever had in my life.

Good things about this book cover, from someone who is not a designer:

- White space draws the eye!
- Cameo necklace sets time period* for even a casual browser!
- High-contrast red splashes on graphic black and white is visually appealing!
- Typesetting looks dandy, everything well-placed.

Bad things about this book cover:

I’m sorry, Mr. Darcy’s a what?

* Sure, it’s the WRONG time period, but it’s a time period!