Catching Up

Last week’s prep for the Newburyport Literary Festival left me a little frazzled to blog, but let’s bring y’all back up to speed!  The Literary Festival was a wild ride, in the Mr. Toad’s sense.  Lit Fests, it turns out, are quite different animals than cons.  I went the entire weekend without seeing a single ironic slogan t-shirt.  We had a very cool crowd—shoutouts to Jennifer Entwhistle, Nichole Bernier, Sarah J Henry, Pete and Denise, Maryanne O’Hara (Massachusetts Must Read 2013 buddies!) and bunches of other folk who endured my company with humor and aplomb.  Ethan Gisldorf and I delivered an excellent panel on fantasy as literary genre and as a way of life (ranging from D&D to video games to LARPS and the SCA), with an engaged audience and some great questions including the big one, which I’ll abbreviate to Wither Science Fiction, and which I will certainly try to answer in a detailed sense on this blog soon, because I think we’re all (or almost all) thinking about the differences between genres in the wrong way.

I meant to write that longer essay yesterday and today, of course, but what I thought was going to be a nice tight Craft Sequence-adjacent novella is growing before my eyes and beneath my fingertips into something longer… and awesome.  One of the funny things about being two novels ahead of the readership is that I’m really excited to be exploring the backstory of events my readers barely know about yet, making life miserable for the parents of characters only my beta readers know.  This produces a much more Long Game version of the Killer GM feeling.

And don’t worry, dear readers, I have had it out for you from the beginning.

Muahaha.