Balticon 46 will take place May 25-28 at Marriott’s Hunt Valley Inn, and as usual, I’ll be there. Here’s where you’ll be able to find me officially; that is, when I’m not simply wandering the dealers room or con suite and schmoozing.

Reading
Saturday, 1:00 PM (Pimlico)
with Danielle Ackley-McPhail and John Mierau

The Walking Dead
Saturday, 6:00 PM (Parlor 1041)
with moderator David Silverman, Chris Evans, Michael D. Pederson, Ethan H. Wilson and Robert E. Waters
Panelists discuss the show whose success took AMC completely by surprise. Was Season 2 as good as the first season? What direction would we like to see the third season take?

Once that Walking Dead panel is over, I plan to head for dinner to the Man v. Food-recommended Chaps Pit Beef, which is about half an hour away (but worth it!), so if you want to tag along, let me know.

Balticon 45 ran from Friday through Monday, but as usual for this local con, I only attended for a single day, Saturday. But on that day, I managed to squeeze in three panels, a reading, an autograph session, and on top of that—a durian feast!

My 1:00 p.m. panel, “Fantastic Books Presents,” was hosted by Ian Randal Strock, owner of (you guessed it) Fantastic Books, which published my collection of science fiction short stories, What We Still Talk About. While Ian explained why he does what he does, a few of his authors (me, Walter H. Hunt, and Daniel Kimmel) talked up our books, and actually managed to sell a few copies.

At 2:30, I read my short story “Goobers,” which originally appeared in The Book of More Flesh and was collected in my all-zombie collection What Will Come After. You were probably not there, but in case you wish you were, my performance has been preserved below.

Immediately following my reading, I rushed to the 3:00 p.m. panel, “Name-Droppers,” during which I was supposed to talk about my “personal contacts with the field’s departed giants,” along with Michael Swanwick and Ian Randal Strock. I shared anecdotes about my early encounters with Gordon Dickson, Nelson Bond, and Ted Sturgeon, while Michael talked about R. A. Lafferty and Ian discussed meeting Isaac Asimov. But mentioning only the dead turned out to be a bit depressing, so we moved on to sharing our stories of the living, too. (Including an extremely embarrassing encounter I had with Chip Delany when I was only 17.) (more…)

When I arrive at Balticon tomorrow, I will be bearing two durian with me. If you’re not familiar with this exotic fruit, you should know that it is banned on public transportation and in many hotels in Singapore, ingesting one has been described as like “eating custard in a sewer,” and I’ve read that, “You can kill a person by throwing a durian at his head. It’s just like a ball of spikes.”

Take a look at a boy and his durian. You’ll note that due to those lethal spikes, I’m holding it with a leather glove.

What else do you need to know about durian? How about the fact that it has thrice defeated Andrew Zimmern, the host of Bizarre Foods, eater of everything from lamprey to bats to stinky tofu? Check out one of his failures below.

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If you’ll be heading to Balticon this weekend, and would like some advice on where to eat, I can think of no better guide than Adam Richman of Man v. Food. He hasn’t steered me wrong yet. So check out his Baltimore episode below, and think about whether you want to tag along to Chaps Charcoal Restaurant when I put out the call.

Haven’t decided whether I’ll make that trip before or after I carve up the durian, though …

Balticon begins Friday, and now that the pocket program has been released, I can finally let you know where to find me.

So if you’re up for my particular brand of pontificating, here’s where you’ll be able to get a hefty dose of my hot air.

Fantastic Books Presents
Saturday, 1:00 PM
Moderator: Ian Randal Strock; Panelists: Scott Edelman, Walter H. Hunt, Daniel Kimmel
Fantastic Books is a publisher of quality new and reprint speculative fiction. Some of our authors have been publishing and winning awards for decades. Others are brand new, and welcoming the arrival of their first books. Publisher Ian Randal Strock will present the titles he’s recently published, try to explain why “Animythical Tales” and “Jar Jar Binks Must Die” are the company’s two best-selling books, and reveal the exciting books coming in the future. He may also be available to discuss small press publishing with potential authors.

Name-Droppers
Saturday, 3:00 PM
Moderator: Scott Edelman; Panelists: Ian Randal Strock, Thomas B. Talbot, Phil Giunta, Michael Swanwick
Our panelists tell their most colorful stories about their personal contacts with the field’s departed giants. What were they really like?

Fans And Writers
Saturday, 6:00 PM
Moderator: Carl Cipra; Panelists: Michael D’Ambrosio, Scott Edelman, Douglas C. Fratz, Neal Levin
A panel of writers, fans and publishers discuss the pluses and minuses of the sometimes close relation between the creators of SF and its readers.

Autographing
Saturday, 7:00 PM
Scott Edelman, John C. Wright and Izolda Trakhtenberg

Unfortunately, even though I’d indicated early on that I was only going to show up either Saturday OR Sunday, I’ve been mistakenly scheduled for both. And since I’m only finding this out after the pocket program has been printed, without getting a chance to vet my schedule, and they’ve got me down for a Sunday night reading I won’t be at the con for, I’ll end up disappointing some folks.

Sorry about that!

Balticon is next weekend, and as usual with local cons (as local as a con two hours away can be), I tend to condense the experience into a single long day.

This year, that day will be Saturday the 29th.

Here’s where you’ll be able to track me down.

3:30 p.m.: Reading. (I’ll probably read the original story from my zombie collection What Will Come After, which I don’t think I’ve read before at either Balticon or Capclave.)

5:00 p.m.: What’s Love Got To Do With It? (What is the place of love in the stories you like to read? What does it do for the reader? with Elaine Corvidae, Maria V. Snyder, and Anthony Stevens)

See you there!

I seem to have abandoned new media for newer media, or old new media for new new media, or however you want to describe it, as can be easily discerned by anyone who’s been following me here as well as on my Twitter feed. I used to make posts on an almost daily basis—44 in December ’08 alone, for example—but since starting to tweet, that’s fallen way off. I’ve only made two LJ entries in May, not counting this one.

Instead of posting mini-essays here, I’ve been using twitter multiple times per day, and letting those updates transfer to my facebook page. Here, for example, is what you would have seen had you been following my twitter feed yesterday while I attended Balticon. (more…)

I received my schedule for Balticon 43 yesterday, which will be held May 22-25 at the Hunt Valley Inn in Baltimore.

All of my programming takes place on Saturday, May 23.

If you also plan on being there, here’s where you’ll be able to find me:

10:00 a.m.: Autographing (with Steve White)

12:00 p.m.: Submission Faux Pas (with Michael Kabongo, Joshua Palmatier, and Angela Render)

5:00 p.m.: Are Short Stories Still Worth Writing? (with Larry Hodges, Tom Doyle, and Robert R. Chase)

See you there!

Just one final post about Balticon to let you all know that my photos from the con are now up on flickr, joining all of the other photos I’ve posted there since early 2007.

That’s me having dinner below at the Sakura Japanese Steak and Seafood House with James Patrick Kelly, Oz Whiston, Bonnie Freeman, and the four others at the table whose pictures you’ll only see if you click through on the link above.

The next convention on my agenda is Readercon is mid-July. I hope to see some of you there!

First, a confession: I tend to treat local conventions Balticon and Capclave as one-day cons. (Even though each is about two hours away, I still consider them local.) Unlike with Readercon or a WorldCon, at which I tend to eat, sleep, and breathe the con, for those first two I generally ask the programming committee to squeeze all of my panels into a single day, schedule meals for that one day, hang out from around 10:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m., and skip any late-night partying. So what follows is basically my personal 12-hour mini-convention, as opposed to any attempt to explore what the four-day Balticon was really like.

After my encounter in the parking lot with David Louis Edelman, I began by wandering the dealers room, as always. I chatted with (among others) David Hartwell about the smell of old fanzines, Michael Walsh about the new Howard Waldrop collection he’ll be putting out through Old Earth Books, Stephen Segal about Wildside Press, and Roberta Rogow about Philcon’s move to New Jersey. (No more dim sum in Philly’s Chinatown. Sniff!)

I was supposed to have lunch with Karen Newton, Charlie Newton, Sandy Stewart, and Risa Stewart, all of whom I know from the local writing workshop I was a part of until Science Fiction Age magazine took over my life about 15 years ago. But Sandy was feeling under the weather, which meant that the Stewarts bailed on Balticon, and so Karen and Charlie and I wandered over to Jesse Wong’s Kitchen on our own. (I hope that you’re feeling better, Sandy!) As we ate from the Thai, Chinese and Japanese buffet, the three of us talked of—what else—our writing. (more…)