Posts Tagged ‘Book Signings’

Book Signing and Party for Three Messages and a Warning

Sunday, January 29th, 2012

I attended a signing at BookPeople for Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, co-edited by Turkey City’s own Chris Brown (formerly Chris Nakashima-Brown, now renamed after a long and painful de-Japanization process).

The event was fairly well attended, with about 40-50 people showing up.

Two of the authors flew up for the event: Pepe Rojo of Tijuana:

And Bernardo Fernandez of Mexico City (who also works as a graphics artist and teacher, as well as a crime writer):

(I’m not sure if you can tell, but Bernardo’s shirt features a robot (or possibly an android) and an electric sheep.) I believe he mentioned that he was working on a graphic novel about William S. Burrough’s time in Mexico. I bet it ends with a bang.

I also found it interesting that both of their fathers were engineers.

In attendance were also many members of the Austin SF community, including a few that my pictures of weren’t completely awful:


Stina Leicht and Sara Felix.


Jessica Reisman, a few moments before the police arrested her for the Hollywood scriptwriter they found dead facedown in her pool.

On Saturday, there was a party at Chris Brown’s newly opened East Austin hipster-pad-cum-1970s-science-fiction-movie-set. Sadly, none of my photos of the house (taken at dusk) came out well. But I did get a few pics of the party attendees:


Don Webb, who co-edited one of the most influential Spanish-language anthologies of speculative fiction, for which he was paid $50 and three bottles of Tequila.


Stina and Jessica redux.

The rest of my pictures were various degrees of crappy. (Hopefully Jayme Blaschke, who was there with a bigger, better camera, will put some up.) Sadly, one picture that didn’t come out was that of Bernardo wearing a t-shirt depicting Mexico’s most famous science fiction character: Bender Bending Rodriguez.

Finally, no expects the Spanish Steampunk Zeppelin!

The Signature Art of William F. Nolan

Monday, May 2nd, 2011

As previously mentioned, I attended the World Horror Convention here in Austin, where I moderated a panel with William F. Nolan. I cheekily had him sign some books while I was on the panel (all in good fun), but the real treat was grabbing several more signatures during the mass signing, as he likes to do drawings when signing. Here’s an example (or at least as much as would fit on the scanner) of the art he put on the blank page of “The Final Stone,” his story in Dennis Etchison’s Landmark Cutting Edge horror anthology:

Click to embiggen.

Thanks Bill!

The Onion on Book Signings

Saturday, April 16th, 2011

From the so-true-it-hurts category: “Author Francine Massey told reporters that she does her absolute best for everyone who comes out to see her, whether it’s just three people or a much larger crowd of nine people.”

Back when I would have Nova Express issue release parties at Adventures in Crime & Space, there were times when three people would have been an improvement…

(Hat tip: SF Signal)

Dan Simmons Signing Followup (With Pics)

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

I’ve been meaning to post about the Dan Simmons signing last Tuesday, but it’s been a busy week.

I hadn’t seen Simmons since he came through to sign at Adventures in Crime and Space for (IIRC) The Crook Factory. At the time I did an interview with him for Nova Express, except that I cleverly left the mini-cassette recorder in voice-activated mode, which meant what did get recorded was fragmentary and essentially useless, and Simmons couldn’t fill in the gaps because he was hospitalized for a while. One of the Great Lost Nova Express Interviews.

The BookPeople signing was reasonably well-attended, with about 35-40 people there (less than for Neal Stephenson or Michael Chabon, but more than for Jonathan Carroll). Fred Duarte and Derek Johnson were the only attendees I recognized.

Simmons read from his new book Black Hills, which features an Indian absorbing the ghost of the newly-slain Custer at the Little Bighorn, and later working on Mt. Rushmore. He said one of the reasons he wrote it because he wanted to explore the Genius Loci of a singe place.

Various bits from the QA session after the reading, quoted from memory and therefore no doubt horribly inaccurate:

  • On jumping between viewpoint characters: “I don’t like to run down the work of other writers, but I read a book whose title rhymes with The Bablinchi Toad, and the viewpoint jumps around horribly to every single character, even minor ones! A messenger enters the scene, and the writer even jumps into his head!”
  • He spent two weeks researching which way the World’s Fair carousel wheel rotated to write a scene, only to have one of his blog readers uncover engineering design schematics that showed it rotated both ways.
  • His next book will be a dystopian novel called Flashback, set in a future where everyone’s prediction of America going to hell (“left-wing and right-wing”) come true, featuring a drug that let’s people relive any portion of their lives for a rate of $1 for 1 minute. He said it will be SF, but not marketed as SF, so as to reach the widest possible audience.

      I also have a few signed Simmons first editions over on the Lame Excuse Books page.

Dan Simmons Signing at BookPeople, Tuesday, March 2, 7 PM

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Yes, that’s today. Signing his new book Black Hills. Only found out recently myself, and have been too busy to put up a link…