Hal-Con Preparations

In exactly one month from now the fourth Hal-Con will happen in Japan.

Some of the organizers of the Nippon 2007 SF worldcon in Japan wanted to stay in practice concerning international convention organization and running and started with Hal-Con in 2010. We’ve had illustrious international author guests of honor since then: Charles Stross in 2010, Robert Sawyer in 2011, Alastair Reynolds in 2012 and this year our guest of honor will be Joe Haldeman.

You can find out all about Hal-Con on their homepage. This year’s Hal-Con will happen north-east of Tokyo in Saitama prefecture’s Musashiurawa Community Center on the 27th and 28th of April .

Since 2011, I’ve been on program with one or two items. Twice, Hal-Con staff and I translated one of my short stories into Japanese and we discussed about the difficulties we encountered when translating from English to Japanese.

This year I’m planning for three programs and have started with the preparation of those:

1) Traditional Versus Indie Publishing.

I have two novellas published with North American small presses and have self-published two novels. In the program I will discuss the pros and cons of both methods.

2) Writing and Time Management.

I have a demanding full time day job and I am a writer. How do I balance those and what about work-life balance in general for a writer with a day job. Apart from talking about this topic, I will also hold short readings from the two books that got published since Hal-Con 2012: my indie-published Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung based novel “She Should Have Called Him Siegfried” and my recently small-press published “Lord of Water” novella, about a young man who can command water. I intend to ask the audience to film both readings so that I can put them up on YouTube like my 2012 “Dome Child” reading during Hal-Con.

3) Interview with Gay Haldeman

The third program in planning is an interview with Joe Haldeman’s wife Gay. I’ll ask her about what life is like with a writer and other things

I’ll hold all programs more or less bi-bilingually = in Japanese and English. Well, the readings will be in English only

The artist guest of honor for this year’s Hal-Con is Naoyuki Katoh. He is the cover artist for Robert Sawyer’s Japanese editions and for Joe Haldeman’s Japanese editions as well. I met him in 2011 when Robert Sawyer was our guest and asked him whether he would help me with my books too and so far he did! The amazing cover arts for “Dome Child”, “She Should Have Called Him Siegfried” and “Lord of Water” were all produced by Katoh san!

I’m looking forward to this year’s Hal-Con and meeting Katoh san the Haldemans again!