I’m going up the mountain for the next week, and so posting here may be a little thin.

But before I go, I thought I’d pass on some good news.

Alan Smale (Taos Toolbox ’11) has sold a three-book deal to Random House/Del Rey.  The first book was one he workshopped at Toolbox.

And Fran Wilde (Taos Toolbox ’12), has just got herself a high-powered agent in the form of Scovil, Galen, Gosh Literary.

Congratulations to the both of them!

And I may just give myself a little pat on the back in the process.  Because this is more evidence that Taos Toolbox works.

And it so happens that there are still a few places left for Toolbox 2013, which takes place July 28-August 10.  So click the link, make your application, and set forth to conquer the world of writing!

While I’ve been traveling and working and livin’ large and otherwise engaged, my DVR has been recording hours and hours of stuff.  Is it worth watching?  You tell me.

I have a good many episodes of Defiance stored up.  I’ve watched the first half of the pilot, in which high production values were matched with an utter lack of originality.  Generic post-holocaust future, generic aliens with generic Star Trek forehead bumps, and a great deal ripped off from Alien Nation, assuming of course that Rockne S. O’Bannon can rip off himself.  Does it get any better?

My DVR has also been recording Vikings.  Are the wholly fictionalized adventures of Ragnar Hairypants worth a look?

Ditto Ripper Street.

And while I’m asking, should I break my longstanding tradition of avoiding films with “3″ in the title and see the new Iron Man?  Because the precedents set by other superhero films hat were third in the series are not encouraging.

Y’all let me know.

I’ve updated my interview page with every online interview I could track down.    Including one in which I speak absolutely perfect French.

So now you can find out everything about me that I’m willing to talk about.

You’ll just have to infer the rest.

Taos Toolbox grad Catherine Schaff-Stump has put up an interview about my writing process.

Check it out.

This is the new Lamborghini.  It’s called the Egoista, which means just about what you think it does.  it’s got a 5.2 liter V10, lots of carbon fiber, and room for only one person.   (I’m guessing, from the appearance of the vehicle, that it’s intended for the Dark Lord himself.)

The driver compartment is detachable.  Like an ejection seat.  Just in case, y’know, you need to leave the vehicle for some reason, like maybe James Bond has got a bead on you with his rocket launcher.

I’d really like one.  Just so I could get all egoista on y’all’s asses.  Don’t ask me for a ride, because there’s nowhere to put a passenger!  Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! Dark Lords only on this trip!  Prepare the missile pods!

Elsewhere in the world of motoring, Rolls Royce is sponsoring the Bloodhound Project’s attempt to break the land speed record by going 1000 miles per hour— with, of course, a Rolls Royce Eurojet EJ2000 jet engine (plus a pack of solid-fuel rockets).  Bloodhound’s design will be supervised by engineer Richard Noble, and the car will be driven by RAF Commander Andy Green.  (The two of them already hold the land-speed record, having built and driven the world’s first supersonic land vehicle.)

It has to be said that I feel no urge to drive a Bloodhound myself.  Solid-fuel rockets just have this sense of finality to them.  You can’t shut them off.

Plus, I’m not too sure about the design.  It looks as if the jet will inevitably suck the driver’s head into the intake.

Still.  Who says there’s no more adventure in the world?

This anecdote is perhaps best accompanied by the above video, which will give you an idea of the sounds, and the volume, which I regularly endure.

Last night I went out to close the gate leading to our single-lane dirt road, as I do every night, and I saw that one of the neighbor’s guinea fowl had got stuck on our side of the fence.  It was dashing frantically back and forth across the same ten-foot stretch of fence, making its desperate barking cry in hopes that its flock would somehow rescue it.  (I think of this noise as a “bark,” and I described it as “barking” in The Rift, only to be mocked by David Langford in his “Thog’s Master Class.”  So, class, how would you describe these noises?)

The thing is, if the guinea fowl had only dashed another fifteen feet to the left, it would have encountered the gate and simply been able to walk home.

So I tried to encourage it to move in that direction.  This involved me fighting my way through several branches of an apricot tree, only to have the terrified guinea dart around me and return to its original stretch of fence, barking in an ever-more-frenetic way.

Now the thing is, guinea fowl can fly.  Not brilliantly, but well enough.  The guinea could have flown up and over the fence any time it wanted, or rather, any time it remembered, through its terror, that it could actually fly.  Which it didn’t.

I decided to do something else for a while and hope the guinea found the big hole in the fence that I’d left open for it, but it never did, and the noise continued.

So I went out again, and once again thrashed through the apricot tree in hopes of moving the guinea to the gate.  Which I did, only to see the panic-stricken fowl run in panic right past the open gate and to another part of the fence, where it resumed its dashing back-and-forth routine.

By this time I was nearly helpless with laughter, and composing in my head a children’s book called The Guinea Fowl That Forgot to Fly.

My neighbor’s cute little button-eyed dog turned up at this point and stood in front of the gate and started to yap.  Normally it shows up just to chase my cat, but apparently the commotion attracted it.  I don’t know whether it was trying to guide the guinea back home, or just adding noise to the din for its own amusement.

At this point I was thinking that I should just maybe put the guinea fowl out of its misery, pluck it and cook it.  I had curried guinea fowl in London, maybe I could duplicate the recipe.  But if I did that, I know that my neighbor would walk out of his house at an inconvenient moment and see me slaughtering his bird, so I didn’t.

Besides, I was laughing so hard that I doubt I could have managed anything requiring physical coordination. I probably would have cut of my own thumb.

I arranged the leaves of the gate into a kind of chute to guide the guinea in the right direction, and started chasing it again.

The guinea ran frantically, encountered the gate, and was steered into the open road.  At which point it just stood there stunned for a while, staring at its home which was suddenly before it.  It ceased to cry, and its escort the cute button-eyed dog ceased to bark.  Both trotted home.  I closed the gate.

It— and several of its peers— are barking on my front lawn.  I wonder if it will remember the great big hole in the gate that it ran out last night, but somehow I doubt it.

Fly, guinea fowl, fly! You stoopid dinosaur.

The New Mexico Book Fiesta was, as I feared (and more or less expected) a desert.  Picture a giant convention hall full of booths and dealers.  Then picture a handful of people wandering around in silence, most of them authors and dealers just strolling over to say hello to one another.

If this had been a horror film, they would all have died in the first two reels.

I looked in at the talks and lectures, and none had an audience of more than half a dozen.

I began by being annoyed that they couldn’t think of anything more interesting to do with me than a signing, and left relieved that the event hadn’t consumed more than 60 minutes of my time.

During my signing I sold four books, which were the only books that Page One had sold that day.  The previous day they’d sold all of six books.

Every book I sold was sold to someone I know personally.

Sadly, it appears that New Mexico’s dwindling population of readers had found something else to do with their weekend.

I suspected that this might happen, because I attended the last book fair, put together by the same gent, back in 1986 or -7.  Nobody came to that one, either.

At that event, the teenage daughter of a friend had volunteered to dress up as Sarah from the cover of Hardwired, and walked around the festival holding a copy of the book.  Because I came with a visual aide, I got something like eight seconds of a TV interview that night, which deeply upset the poet I was signing with, who clearly felt that the subliterate trash that was science fiction had usurped the TV time that was rightly hers.

Hey, it’s TV.  You gotta think visual, lady!

I didn’t have a visual aid this time out, but that was okay, because there were no TV cameras.

So that’s two failed events I’ve attended in the last week.   It’s possible that I’m a human plague bacillus programmed to destroy literary events, but I rather think the events were destroyed before I ever got there.

Which reminds me of someone I met last weekend at the Jacksonville event. “I’ve read science fiction all my life,” he said, “and I’m the science fiction reviewer for the local paper.  And I’ve never heard of you.”

So, I thought, my thirty-four year career has come down to just . . . this . . . moment.

Just.  This. Moment.

Fortunately TSA hadn’t let my fly with my pocket knife, so I had nothing with which to slit my wrists.

And now I’m home, and contemplating the Albuquerque Comics Expo at which I’m a guest in June.  And thinking, “Hey, you guys better take your antivirals, just in case . . . “

I will be at the New Mexico Book Fiesta this Saturday, from 12:30-1:30, signing at the Page One booth.  Though there are a number of SF authors attending, all but one are signing only.  They seem not to quite know what to do with SF authors.

Which seems to be a theme this week,  since they didn’t know what to do with me at Jacksonville’s Sci-Fi Weekend, either.

They flew me in, and put me up at a very nice hotel, but then . . . not much.  I was scheduled for only one hour of programming the whole weekend, which suggested they had no idea what to do with a literary guest except to charge ten bucks for whatever it was he was going to do.  (They didn’t know, or inquire, what that would be.)

Normally at an SF convention, you register and are given a program book, which will include program items and a map (which the science museum in fact did).  Normally the program book will also feature essays about the convention’s various guests, which might, for example, include reasons to go see that guest.

No, in this case nuthin’.  The vast majority of attendees remained ignorant of me, or any reason to see me.  Or most of the other guests, too, I imagine.

In the end,  maybe seven or eight people turned up to see my interview.  I doubt any of them paid the ten bucks the convention charged to see me.  (I hope they didn’t, anyway.)  The event went well despite the size of the crowd.

What else to do with a literary guest, you may ask?  (I mean, I was there for the whole weekend.  Why not make use of me?)

Well, there could be panel discussions.  The event had a couple panels, both on cosplay.  Nothing wrong with that, but the event had (in addition to one rather bored author) some serious scientists, an engineer with more than a passing resemblance to James Doohan, and a special effects whiz.  Why not put some of all of these on a panel and have a talk about science and fiction and science fiction?  Talk about media SF, or literary SF, or whatever turns them on?

There could be a reading!  I not only write books, I read them, too!  I would have read!  For free!   (I did do a reading, as it happens, but at a separate event.)

My signing was as sad as everything else.  For one thing, it wasn’t on the schedule.  (I signed after my single event, figuring I already had about as big an audience as I ever would.)  The signing table was in a back room where no one went.  And the procedure for getting a book and having it signed was ridiculous.

At one point I was told that a bookstore would be on hand to sell my work, and was asked to send a list.  Then I was told the list was too long for the bookstore’s attention span or something, so could I cut it to three books.  Then I was told that Higher Authority had canned the bookstore, and could I bring books with me?  (Well, no, I’m not going to drag a sackful of books across the continent.  You obviously have me confused with one of those pushy self-published guys.  [Oh wait!  I am a pushy self-published guy!  Never mind . . . ])  But anyway, astronomy superstar Dr. Mike Reynolds called my publisher and got them to send books, and I did in fact sell a few in the particularly convoluted way demanded by Higher Authority.

You couldn’t just buy a book, oh no.  You had to go to a cashier and give hem the money for the book, and then get a ticket which you brought to me telling them that they were entitled to a book.  Which of course meant that you had to know where I and the books were, which was hard, because it wasn’t on the program or anything.

And what else?  No dealer’s room, though some of the exhibitors had some things for sale.  No art show.  And even though there were cosplay panels and plenty of people in costume, there was no costume contest— an obvious idea, really.

Apparently quite a number of sensible suggestions, by people who have actually attended science fiction conventions, were made to Higher Authority, but they were all turned down.  (Higher Authority did not show up in person for the event, either.)

On the positive side, everyone I dealt with personally was helpful and welcoming.  Folks kindly bought me some very nice meals.  The attendees seemed to be having a pleasant enough time

Normally I try to stay reasonably positive on this blog, except on those terribly rare occasions where my ire escapes me.  But on the other hand I found the convention a mere shadow of he terrific event that it could have been, and found that the sad result was pretty much the work of Higher Authority.

And really, what’s the worst thing that can happen if I make this public complaint?  Higher Authority doesn’t invite me to next year’s fiasco?

I can live with that.

On a completely contrary side, I’d like to mention the Astrogators’ Reunion.  the Astrogators were a sort of teenage astronomy club that romped through the Science Museum for several decades back in the day, and though I was not one of their number I was invited to join their fandango, and was even invited to give a reading.  Which I did, though I felt a bit like the teacher who has to call the kids to order during recess, and make them sit quietly and listen.   But they did in fact listen, and they bought copies of “The Boolean Gate,” and in general made me feel as if the weekend hadn’t been wasted.

So thanks to the two Astrogators, Dr. Reynolds and to friend of the blog Patricia Rogers, who provided the weekend’s high point, and a chance to meet some interesting people.

And Patricia also took me out to meet some real gators, of which more anon.

I’m pleased to report that “The Boolean Gate” has been nominated for a Locus Award.  Congratulations to the other nominees.  And more importantly, congratulations to meeeeeeeeee!

The Locus Award is one that anyone can vote for, so I encourage you all to seek out and read all the nominees, make an objective judgment, and then vote for “The Boolean Gate” like God intended.

If you haven’t read it, or wish to read it again, it’s still available for free at the Subterranean website.

I should mention that, among the other terrific nominees, I see that Throne of the Crescent Moon, by Taos Toolbox grad Saladin Ahmed, has been nominated for a third award this year, after the Nebula and Hugo.  For heaven’s sake, let’s make sure Saladin wins at least one of these, okay?  I mean, fair’s fair.