Undead Anonymous

July 11th, 2011

I’ll be attending Comic-Con in San Diego from July 21-24 and will be appearing at the following signings and panels:

THURSDAY, July 21
Signing: Geekscape Booth (#4016)
1:00pm – 2:00pm

I’ll have bookmarks, postcards, and a limited supply of 11″ x 17″ posters of Breathers and Fated that I’ll be giving away. While I won’t have any novels with me, feel free to bring your copy along or you can purchase one at the Mysterious Galaxy Booth (#1119)

SATURDAY, July 23
Panel: Room 6A
1:45pm – 2:45pm

Vampires and Others – How to make a relationship work when you or your significant other lack a pulse, or face other mortal-challenged issues.

Relationship advice from: Patricia Briggs (The Mercy Thompson series), Nancy Holder (The Crusade series), Linda Thomas-Sundstrom (The Golden Vampire), S.G. Browne (Fated), Clay & Susan Griffith (The Vampire Empire series), and Christine Cody (Bloodlands).

Autograph session for the panel to follow:

3:00pm – 4:00pm
Autograph Area 8

At this point I don’t anticipate any additional appearances, so if you’re at the convention on Thursday and/or Saturday, swing by the Geekscape Booth or the panel and say “hi.”

Long Island Book Signing

June 9th, 2011

Next weekend, June 16-19, I’ll be attending the Horror Writer’s Association Bram Stoker Weekend at the Long Island Marriott Hotel in Long Island, New York. Although the majority of the weekend programming is open only to those who have registered for the convention, there will be a mass book signing the evening of Thursday, June 16th, that is open to the public.

Held in the Grand Ballroom of the Marriott, the Book Signing Meet and Greet will run from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm. There’s no guarantee that everyone at the convention will be signing or have books for sale, but here’s a list of convention attendees. There will be a special area for Guests of Honor, which include Peter Straub, David Morrell, Gillian Flynn, Douglas Clegg, and Dacre Stoker (the great grand-nephew of Bram Stoker).

While I will be in attendance signing books, unfortunately I won’t have any copies of Breathers or Fated for sale and I can’t guarantee that anyone in the dealer’s room will have copies available. However, please feel free to bring along your copy for a signature or just stop by to say “hey.” This will be my only appearance while I’m in New York.

Hope to see you next Thursday!

Long Island Marriott Hotel
101 James Doolittle Boulevard
Uniondale, NY
(516) 794-3800 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (516) 794-3800 end_of_the_skype_highlighting

WonderCon

March 28th, 2011

I’ll be appearing at WonderCon this weekend at the Moscone Center South in San Francisco for a couple of events.

April 1 – Signing
Geekscape, Booth #617
2:00PM – 3:00PM

On Friday, April 1, I’ll be signing 11″ x 17″ posters of the covers for Breathers and Fated, including the UK versions. Unfortunately, I won’t have any copies of my books for sale, but feel free to bring your copy to the Geekscape Booth (#617) and I’ll be happy to sign it.

April 2 – Interview w/ F. Paul Wilson
Room 220
2:00PM – 3:00PM

On Saturday, April 2, I’ll be interviewing F. Paul Wilson, bestselling author of The Keep, Black Wind, and the Repairman Jack Series, as well as numerous other novels, screenplays, and comic books. There will be an audience Q&A afterward.

Hope to see you this weekend!

ZomBcon

October 17th, 2010

This Halloween weekend, the zombie apocalypse will be in Seattle as the inaugural ZomBcon comes to the Pacific Northwest October 29-31.

With a guest list that includes George Romero, Max Brooks, Bruce Campbell, Ted Raimi, Chuck Palahniuk, Malcolm McDowell, and a number of authors of zombie novels (including yours truly), it should be quite a weekend.

The event takes place throughout downtown Seattle, including the Seattle Center, Barnes & Noble, and the AMC Pacific Place and will include author coffee chats, signings, panels, film festivals, and much more.

Check out the full schedule of events.

As for my scheduled appearances, they’re all on Saturday, October 30:

9:00AM Coffee Chat
Barnes & Noble

2:00PM Book Signing
Barnes & Noble Pavilion
Seattle Exhibition Center

4:00PM Panel
Zombies Are People Too
(w/Stacey Graham, Scott Kenemore, and Jesse Petersen)
Seattle Center NW Conference Room

I’m also planning to be at the Opening Ceremonies Friday morning at 10AM and at the VIP Meet and Greet Sunday at 4:30PM.

If you’re already attending, I’ll look forward to seeing you there.  If you’re not attending, then you’ll be missing out on a lot of zombie fun.

You Go To The Crypticon Convention…

June 21st, 2010

You fly up to Everett, WA, for Crypticon, a three-year-old horror convention, where you do a signing at Borders with F. Paul Wilson, John Skipp, Cody Goodfellow, and Nick Mamatas. No one comes to the signing. Well, almost no one. But you get to hang out with these other writers and have dinner with them at the Hunan Palace across from the Holiday Inn where you’re staying, so it’s okay. You don’t really want to sell any books, anyway.

You spend Friday hanging out with Tim Long and Jonathan Moon from Library of the Living Dead, getting pizza with John Skipp and Cody Goodfellow and Nick Mamatas in beautiful downtown Everett right across from Aladdin Bail Bonds, attending a couple of panels, and having drinks with F. Paul Wilson and talking about all of the annoying writers who pump out 2500 words a day on a regular basis. You’re joined at your table for drinks by Heather Langenkamp, Amanda Wyss, and Brooke Bundy from the Nightmare on Elm Street series. You give them Zombies Are People Too buttons, which is pretty cool.

You wake up Saturday at 6:30am to some ass slamming the hotel room door next to you and then turn on the TV to ESPN and watch some guy from The Netherlands soccer team flop like a little girl and writhe on the ground after getting accidentally slapped in the face.  This is why you hate soccer and the World Cup.  It’s filled with crybabies like this guy.  You can’t wait for football season to start.

You spend the rest of Saturday hanging out with Kelly Young and Jenna Pittman (who helped to get you invited to Crypticon as a guest, thank you very much), having a great conversation with a couple who dressed up as Andy and Rita from Breathers at your book signing last year in Seattle, hanging out with Mark Henry, sharing a standing-room-only panel with him and several other zombie “experts,” moderating a panel with F. Paul Wilson, John Skipp, and William F. Nolan, hanging out with Jeff Burk, Cameron C. Pierce, and Rose O’Keefe of Eraserhead Press, and attending a Bizarro performance of Help! A Bear Is Eating Me! by Mykle Hansen.  (The bear is played by Cameron C. Pierce).

You finish off Saturday by doing a reading of the first three chapters of Fated, followed by a reading of “Zombie Gigolo” (which will appear in The Living Dead 2 this September), followed by the questionable decision to sing “Fly Me to the Moon” at karaoke at the Hunan Palace, which reminds you why you’re not a professional singer. You also drink one too many greyhounds.

You wake up Sunday and turn on the TV and realize you forgot to pack your Advil. On ESPN, New Zealand ties Italy 1-1 in the World Cup and according to the announcer, this apparently is one of the great moments in the history of the World Cup. A tie. This is another reason why you can’t wait for football season to start.

You spend your Sunday hosting a couple of panels that have more panelists than audience members, the first one on Remaking Romero and the second on How To Survive a Horror Movie, but it’s fun anyway, especially when a dog starts chewing on a human arm, then you say your goodbyes to all of the wonderful people you met or who you had the pleasure of spending time with again before you catch a ride to SeaTac, which actually provides free WiFi, unlike SFO and LAX, which are capitalistic whores of airports.

You look forward to doing this all again next year.

World Horror Convention – Brighton

April 7th, 2010

The 2010 World Horror Convention took place this year for the first time outside of North America at the Royal Albion Hotel in Brighton, England – a seaside city on the south coast an hour from London.

The Royal Albion was like a maze, with twisting hallways that made it easy to get lost until you figured out where you were going.  And at night, when they closed all of the dual swinging hallway fire doors, I had to make my way through half a dozen of them on a circuitous route from the elevator to my room that made me feel like I was in the opening credits for Get Smart.

Before attending the World Horror Convention, I was booked both for a panel (about zombies, go figure) and for a reading. Bill Breedlove, co-founder of Dark Arts Books, was slated to read after me and contacted me to see if I was interested in doing a collaborative story to read just for the convention. I’d never collaborated before, and had only met Bill briefly last June, but it sounded like fun. So we came up with a fun piece about air raid sirens and vultures and werewolves that I’m hoping we’ll have video of at some point.

While the reading itself was definitely worth the price of admission, having the opportunity to work with Bill and to get to know him was priceless. Even if he doesn’t believe me.

The panel (attended by myself, Weston Ochse, Scott Edelman, and Michael Marshall Smith) was supposed to be a discussion about Zombies vs. Vampires, or Are Zombies the New Vampires, but it ended up being a panel about zombies, with nary a mention of vampires. Though we all agreed that neither vampires nor zombies should ever, EVER, sparkle.

While Weston, Scott, and I tended to be more in the camp of zombies branching out to discover their inner undead soul and tell a joke or two, Michael wanted his zombies slow and relentless, like a cancer that continues to spread and keeps eating away. Fast, funny, or sentient zombies weren’t what he wanted in the living dead. By the end of the panel, however, Michael had begun to have second thoughts and actually ended up walking away with a copy of Breathers. So hopefully that’s one more convert.

The rest of Thursday, which lasted until 2am, consisted mainly of conversation and beer, more of the former than the latter, with Bill Breedlove, Bev Vincent, Michael Knost (Stoker winner for Non-Fiction), and numerous wonderful Brits and Yanks in the hotel lounge.

The rest of the weekend went something like this:

A fantastic vegetarian lunch at Food for Friends with Martel Sardina; a panel and a reading here and there; a couple pints of Guinness (which is really more of a meal in a glass than a beer) and more conversation with Rocky Wood, Simon Clark, and others; a rocking party on the St. Pete Pier hosted by Heather Graham; dancing to 80s music spun by Bill Breedlove until 2am with Michael Knost, Karen Yoder, Suzanne Nash, Debbie Kuhn, Angel McCoy, and everyone else at the launch party for Dark Arts Books; hanging out with Paul Wilson, Weston Ochse, Stephen Woodworth and Kelly Dunn; and meeting Neil Gaiman after the Stoker Awards. That was definitely an unexpected highlight.

As for the Stokers, I was relaxed about my nomination the entire weekend and didn’t feel any anxiety until about an hour before the banquet, when the sense of calm I’d been feeling revealed itself for the facade it truly was. All during the banquet I could hardly eat and wished they would just get it over with.  It didn’t help matters that the award for First Novel was the next to the last one given out.  And I had to pee.  But while I didn’t end up taking home the Stoker, I still had a fabulous weekend. The well-earned honor for Outstanding First Novel went to Hank Schwaeble for his debut Damnable.

That’s about it.  Or at least all I can remember and fit into a reasonable blog entry.  While I’m sure I left out something and someone relevant, I can say without a doubt that this was the most enjoyable convention I’ve attended. Thanks to everyone who made it so.