Boskone Day 2

Saturday was the busiest day for me. I started off with a 10am panel, Online Writing and Online Communities with Lenny Bailes, Tobias Buckell, James D. McDonald, John Scalzi, and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. We heard tales of experiences in the online world that started as far back as the days of 300 baud modems (who else lived though that?) and up through message boards and blogging. The word of the day was disenvoweling, the process of removing all vowels from an offending post. It’s much more effective than just deleting a post. It was a great panel with lots of insight into improving an online presence.

After the panel, John signed a stack of Old Man’s War trade paperbacks. He’ll be signing The Ghost Brigades for us too, but unfortunately I didn’t get them in time for the con.

After John left, I decided to drop by the signing tables since George R. R. Martin was scheduled. Much to my surprise, there was no one in line. I spoke to George for a couple of minutes and asked him if he would mind signing a small stack of A Feast for Crows for the store. Yes! I ran off, picked up the books, came back down, and there was still no one there. While signing, I asked George about the RRetrospective. He told me that a UK edition was in the works and that iBooks had wanted to do a two book version, but he refused. (good thing since iBooks just went chapter 11) He suggested that I bug Bill at Subterranean to do a second printing.

Afterwards, I caught up with Tobias. We had scheduled a time to take care of signing all the copies Crystal Rain that I had in stock and a good number of them were sold in preorder. After signing, we headed off for a quick lunch and talked about a variety of things. Turns out we’ve both been mistreated by universities we’ve worked for. He also made a very strong case for me to move to Ohio and open a brick & mortar store. The cost of living there is unbelievably low compared to NJ. Would be nice.

Next panel was Learning the (Small Press) World: A Dialog with Steve Miller and Ernest Lilley. This was geared towards people considering publishing books and they covered a wide variety of questions from the audience. It turns out that Steve sells a large number of Liaden Universe chapbooks and has been doing some for some time. Ernest was behind the Future Washington book announced at ReaderCon last year. Steve’s model for producing and pricing chapbooks made a lot of sense and talking with Ernest afterwards, it was clear that the chapbook model sounded good to him too. I accompanied Ernest back to the dealer’s room where I picked up a pile of Future Washington for the store and discovered that his other project SFRevu.com lifts their magazine covers from my site. I’ve offered them the original (unresized) scans if they need them.

The next panel was Technology Today! with Tobias Buckell, Cory Doctorow, Ernest Lilley, Edie Stern, and Alicia Kestrel Verlager. It was gadget show and tell time and Cory covered the table with toys. He easily beat the technology carrying capacity of all the other speakers, but that came as no surprise. He has all the cool toys. Other topics covered were technology for the visually impaired and dream technology innovations that people would like to see. I think Tobias hit the nail on the head with a new, cheap, and ecologically-friendly energy source. This is something that would completely change the world.

At this point, I figured I needed a break. Hit the Dealer’s room and picked up a few copies of Ken McLeod’s Giant Lizards from Another Star which was published by NESFA Press as the GoH book. Arms full, I returned to my room for a much needed break.

Later that evening, I ran into pgtremblay who invited me to join a bunch of HWA people. Some Clarkesworld Conspiracy talk (see ealier in my blog for details on this), but mostly discussing or joking about books and movies. Afterwards I hit some of the WorldCon parties and went back to day two of the BwB party. Met many people and talked about con’s, bookselling, and countless other things. By the end of the evening I was exhausted.

Day 3 wrap up coming soon…