David Lee Summers's Blog, page 13

Bubonicon 55

Bubonicon 55 will be held this weekend from August 23 through 25 at the Albuquerque Marriott Uptown near the intersection of Louisiana Boulevard and I-10. Bubonicon is New Mexico’s longest-running Sci-Fi & Fantasy literary and arts convention, started in 1969. Join me in Albuquerque for a great weekend of fun! There will be panels and presentations featuring great authors, artists, and scientists, a costume contest, art show, dealer’s room, charity auctions, fan programming, and much more! This ...

Vampi

Today finds me at Las Cruces Comic Con at the Las Cruces Convention Center. If you’re in town, I hope you’ll come by. This is my first event since my cancer surgery and I’d love to catch up with people.

Over the last couple of months, while recovering from cancer surgery, I’ve been doing a lot of writing and reading. One batch of reading I especially enjoyed was delving into a series Tom Hutchison of the indie comic book company Big Dog Ink introduced me to called Vampi. Published by Harris ...

Las Cruces Comic Con 2024

It’s time once again for our home town convention. Las Cruces Comic Con will take place at the Las Cruces, New Mexico Convention Center on August 17 and 18. The hours of operation are Saturday 10am-7pm and Sunday 10am-5pm. Las Cruces Comic Con is a community-based pop culture experience for all that reflects today’s fandom. At Las Cruces Comic Con you’ll get to indulge in all your favorite fantasy, sci-fi, and other pop culture genres, such as comics, games, film, television, books, and more...

The Last Man

This summer, I’ve been tasked with writing a story based on the works of Mary Shelley. I’ve long been a fan of her 1818 novel Frankenstein, but I have to admit, I wasn’t terribly familiar with her other works. After some searching, I decided to dive into her 1826 novel The Last Man, which introduced some concepts that would become more commonplace in later science fiction. The Last Man is, in effect, a post-apocalyptic novel set in the late twenty-first century between the years 2073 and 2100.

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Beyond Mystique

This past month, I’ve been recovering from prostate surgery. Overall, I feel pretty good, but I have had strict limits for how much weight I can lift and there are some physical and mental challenges that come with having one’s prostate removed. Still, I’ve been working to get back to a point where I can return to work at Kitt Peak National Observatory so I can seek out strange new worlds and map the universe for real. During this past month, I’ve been doing my best to hone my mental focus again...

Pirate Queens

I have long been fascinated with pirates. As I’ve noted before, in past centuries, law abiding sailors were subject to brutal discipline and received minimal rewards for their labor. On a pirate crew, you voted on the captain and often on the ship’s articles. You took a much more equitable share of the profits you made. I can see how it must have seemed much less oppressive, even if it was a criminal enterprise. A pirate’s life appeals to that part of me that has issues with outdated rules that ...

Explore New Worlds!

At Kitt Peak National Observatory, I’m proud to support a NASA-funded instrument called NEID deployed at the WIYN Telescope. NEID’s job is to gather data on known exoplanets, getting better information about orbits, sizes, and masses, plus following up on some exoplanet candidates initially detected by space-based telescopes such as Kepler and TESS. Steve Howell, who served as Kepler’s Project Scientist, was at one time WIYN’s Telescope Scientist. He came to me a few years ago and wondered if we...

Traveling Through Time and Space

Summer is a great time for travel in the northern hemisphere where the days are long and there’s time to get out and explore. While traveling, I like to load up my e-reader with great books. If you’re in the southern hemisphere, it’s winter. Still a great time to have a good book ready for a long night. The Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale continues and today I present one title that will take you on an adventure through time and I present another title that gives you an opportunity to travel to a ...

Monster Deals on Books with Monsters

Today, I continue highlighting books published by Hadrosaur Productions, which are on sale during the Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale Event. The sale gets its name because it’s summer in the northern hemisphere and winter in the southern. If you’ve not purchased from them before, Smashwords is a great place to grab ebooks. They’re available in pretty much any format you can imagine and they’re all free of digital rights management, so you can read them on any device you have.

Today, I’m offerin...

Meet the Clockwork Legion

The Clockwork Legion series came about from three things happening around the same time. While walking through my neighborhood, I happened upon a family of burrowing owls. Each day I passed, I lingered a little longer and crept a little closer—I knew I started to get a little too close when they whistled at me and grew agitated, moving from foot to foot, almost like they were dancing. Right around that time, my neighbor told me the story of a witch, supposedly buried in one of the local cemeteri...