Notes about the upcoming Comic Con signing, from the coordinator:
“For this panel, there will be a Limited Signing – Drawing for a line ticket at 11:00 am Thursday.
Depending on how many fans pay attention, this means there may not be tickets left for people who check after the panel ends. There should be plenty of tickets given out, enough to cover all participating authors’ fans, but no one should be caught by surprise.
The drawing will be in the Autograph Area.
Please note that the convention’s Autograph Area is upstairs, under the sails. Also please note that AA in this email designates the Autograph Area table, not to be confused with the AA tables in the Exhibitor’s Hall downstairs in the convention center, which are the Artist’s Alley tables.”
Thursday, July 26, 2:00 � 3:00 pm Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance: Sub-Genres Readers Love: Where are the borders between urban fantasy and paranormal romance? How did paranormal romance grow from a subgenre of romance to its current popular cross-genre status, and what does the future hold? Authors Laurell Hamilton (Best-selling author of the Anita Blake and Merry Gentry series); Jeanne Stein ( Anna Strong Vampire Chronicles); Laura Anne Gilman (The Retrievers series); Carrie Vaughn (Kitty Takes a Holiday); Marjorie Liu (Soul Song); and Samantha Sommersby (Forbidden: The Awakening) talk about love and monsters. Moderator: Maryelizabeth Hart of Mysterious Galaxy.
Autographing: Thursday (AA4)—3:00 pm – 4: 00 pm
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Oh, my peeps—if you or your friends are interested in being paid extras in THE BATMAN MOVIE (and who would not?), then check this out, with haste. Heck, even I’m tempted to submit an application. Chicago isn’t that far away. Buwahaha…
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Here is an excerpt from one of my favorite books, Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto by Anneli Rufus. It’s at the Salon website, posted in 2003, but I remember picking up the book at Borders because the title intrigued me, and man, was I glad afterwards. I would say that writers are, in general, a solitary lot—but the same is true for others, to varying degrees. And this book is gem for folks who don’t like the crowd. And it strokes our egos!
We are the ones who know how to entertain ourselves. How to learn without taking a class. How to contemplate and how to create. Loners, by virtue of being loners, of celebrating the state of standing alone, have an innate advantage when it comes to being brave—like pioneers, like mountain men, iconoclasts, rebels and sole survivors. Loners have an advantage when faced with the unknown, the never-done-before and the unprecedented. An advantage when it comes to being mindful like the Buddhists, spontaneous like the Taoists, crucibles of concentrated prayer like the desert saints, esoteric like the Kabbalists. Loners, by virtue of being loners, have at their fingertips the undiscovered, the unique, the rarefied. Innate advantages when it comes to imagination, concentration, inner discipline. A knack for invention, originality, for finding resources in what others would call vacuums. A knack for visions.
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Also from Salon, this interview with Amy Tan:
Other Asian-American writers just shudder when they are compared to me; it really denigrates the uniqueness of their own work. I find it happening less here partly because people are more aware now of the flaws of political correctness—that literature has to do something to educate people. I don’t see myself, for example, writing about cultural dichotomies, but about human connections. All of us go through angst and identity crises. And even when you write in a specific context, you still tap into that subtext of emotions that we all feel about love and hope, and mothers and obligations and responsibilities.
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According the Smart Bitches costume generator, I should wear a “skin-tight hot pink catsuit with Hello Kitty emblazoned on the back” to my next signing. Which, eerily enough, would suit my personality perfectly.