WonderCon 2015 Wrap-up

It was good to get back to a convention finally. I didn't get to spend as much time at WonderCon as I would have liked, but still got check out a few panels on Friday and Saturday. Here's a quick recap.

Friday wasn't too crowded. I walked the main exhibit hall with my wife and we met up with spec-fic author Craig Comer to check out a panel on trans-marketing creative projects. The highlight of the day for my wife was catching close-up glimpses of Lou Ferrigno and Margot Kidder. For me, it was just fun to see everyone dressed up and the spectacle of it all.

Drill Sergeant Preacher
doesn't approve of Cthulhu

Saturday I went solo. It was much more crowded and security was amped up, partly, I assume, because of the militant Christian evangelists there. One guy, whom I dubbed Drill Sergeant Preacher, took exception to my Cthulhu fish t-shirt and screamed at me, "I SEE THAT YOU LOVE YOUR FALSE PROPHETS MORE THAN YOU LOVE JESUS!!!" I just smiled and snapped a photo. I'm not sure what exactly he was hoping to accomplish. Do fire and brimstone sermons still work in the 21st Century?

Inside the convention center, I caught the panel on Fantasy Fiction, moderated by Maryelizabeth Hart from Mysterious Galaxy and featuring Arwen Elys Dayton, Todd McCaffrey, Naomi Novik, and Greg Van Eekhout. The conversation got started with the panelists responding to

Find me at Wondercon 2015

WonderCon 2014 was the last convention I attended. :(

Between getting engaged, getting married, moving, and writing Souldrifter all in the last twelve months, I haven't gotten a chance to attend any conventions or conferences in quite a while, so I'm excited to attend this year's WonderCon as a professional attendee. Here's the panels I'm hoping to catch. If you'll be attending too, follow me on Twitter for live updates throughout the weekend and make sure to introduce yourself and say hi..Despite my grizzly-bearded visage, I promise I won't bite!


WonderCon 2015. Anaheim, California. April 3-5.

FRIDAY

12:30-1:30 Comic Arts Conference Session 1: Supeheroes before Superman. Room 210. I didn't even know there were superheroes before Superman and the Golden Age of comics, so this should be

A Name Change and a Change of Heart

Last month I submitted the manuscript for the Dreamwielder sequel to my publisher, Diversion Books, and after a bit of discussion we decided to change the title from The Faceless Enemy to something more in line with the title of the first book. The title we came up with is... wait for it... Souldrifter. It's got a nice ring to it, and hopefully it'll be something that captures readers' imaginations.

The tentative release date for Souldrifter is late summer 2015, and the Diversion team, my agent, and I are busily at work on all the little production and promotional aspects that happen before the release of a book. One of those aspects is wrangling up book jacket blurbs, and I'm happy to announce that the first of them is in, from none other than Wendy Wagner. Wendy is author of the Pathfinder Tales novel Skinwalkers, and also an editor extraordinaire with Lightspeed magazine who played a huge role in putting together Women Destroy Fantasy last year. Needless to say, I'm honored and proud Wendy agreed to say something nice about the book. Here's what she had to say:

"Packed with sorcerers, spies, and high-stakes intrigue, Souldrifter is a real page-turner, and Makarria is a teenage heroine who does more than just kick butt: she's smart, powerful, and surprisingly believable for a fourteen-year-old queen. A good read!"

The next bit of news for the book will likely be the cover art. As soon as I get it, I'll be sure to share it.

In other news, I've been doing a good bit of research for other writing projects and the classes I'm teaching, which more often than not tend to overlap. A case in point is the new short story I'm working on, partly inspired by a class I'm teaching—Innovation Inspiration in Speculative Fiction—and partly inspired by

The Faceless Enemy by the Numbers

The  sequel to Dreamwielder has 

more action, more airships, and 

more of Makarria kicking ass!

(Dreamwielder art 

courtesy of Patrick Williams)

(Update: After a bit of debate, my publisher, agent, and I decided to change the name of The Faceless Enemy to Souldrifter, so as to better tie-in to the first novel, Dreamwielder. 3/23/15)

My new fantasy novel, The Faceless Enemy, is done and sent off to my publisher! As you might expect, it feels good to be done, and I'm excited for the book to get into the hands of readers. In the interim, though, here's some details on how the book came about for those of you who are interested in the writing process or just like to break things down by the numbers.


15 MONTHS. From start to finish—planning, writing, and revising—the book took me fifteen months to complete. I started the book during NaNoWriMo in November of 2013 and sent the final draft to my editors at Diversion Books here in February 2015. Considering it took me thirty-nine months to get through the same process with the first book in the series, Dreamwielder, fifteen months is pretty good. Considering also that I got engaged, married, and moved during 2014, and fifteen months really ain't bad!

97,200 WORDS. The final draft I sent to my publisher weighs in at a respectable 97K words, which is 4K words longer than Dreamwielder. The first draft of The Faceless Enemy was only 92K words, but was light on setting description, background exposition, and secondary character viewpoint. Fleshing those aspects out during the revision process accounted for the 5K boost.

4 PARTS. With Dreamwielder, I closely followed the 3 Act, 8 Sequence structure used for film scripts, but with The Faceless Enemy I instead loosely followed the 4 part structure Michael Moorcock prescribed in

The Story Behind Page Fault

I am very excited to announce the release of my novella, Page Fault, a high-concept mash-up of cyberpunk, fantasy, post-apocalyptic, and noir fiction. I can't take sole credit for the high-concept idea, though.

Two years ago, I taught a George R.R. Martin author study course at the Orange County School of Arts. As you might expect, the class was great fun. We read Martin's early horror and sci-fi, read one of his Dunk and Egg novellas, watched a few episodes of Beauty and the Beast from his television writing days, and even got a visit from the man himself for a private lecture.

Seeing as how the class was for the Creative Writing conservatory, though, I also wanted to include a writing component to the course. So one day the students and I round-tabled to come up with a shared world in which we could all write stories, a shared world inspired by Martin's writing across the genre spectrum. The result of our collective imaginations was Soteria—a computer generated world that harbored the majority of Earth's population in a post-pandemic future. The students were great, and by the end of the day we had an entire codex written for our shared world.

Page Fault was my contribution to the subsequent short story collection the class wrote; it started off as an introductory vignette for the collection, but there was something about the vignette that called for more, so I revisited it and expanded it once the course was over. The resultant story is the three part novella you have before you now. It's a story I'm very proud of, and one I couldn't have written without the rich imaginations of all my students. So here's a big shout-out and thank you to all the students from that author study course. Cheers!

-Garrett Calcaterra

Misty Massey and the Weird West Anthology

I'm very pleased to welcome a guest post from Misty Massey. You might recall, I interviewed Massey a few years ago to talk about her pirate fantasy novel, Mad Kestrel. She's stopped by today to talk about her newest project—this time in the role of editor.

-GC

Hey y'all! I'm delighted to be Garrett's guest today! My name is Misty Massey, and until last summer, I was a mere writer of fantastic fiction and author of Mad Kestrel (pirates and magic and adventure...oh my!). I say 'until last summer' because that was when things became slightly more crazy and exciting in my world and I agreed to be an editor. I was a guest at Congregate, and I had just finished a rousing session of Live Action Slush. I was in the hallway chatting with my co-conspirators Emily Leverett and Margaret McGraw when the subject of publishing an anthology of weird western stories came up. We all thought it sounded like great fun, so we started approaching authors we believed would add to the thrill of such a project. Nearly all of them said "Yes!" (okay, a couple were squealing with excitement, but I'm not going to try to spell that sound for you!), so we started querying publishers. Danielle Ackley-McPhail of eSpec Books snapped us up, and before we knew it, we were running a Kickstarter to fund the project.

What is weird west? It's fantasy or science fiction set in the world (or the aesthetic) of the American western frontier. Movies like

I'm Back!

Yes, I am still alive, although you wouldn’t know it judging by my inactivity in the online world the last several months. What can I say? It’s been a momentous time in the real world for me. I got married, moved, somehow kept up with the five writing classes I’m teaching, and still managed to finish writing The Faceless Enemy, the sequel to Dreamwielder. Something had to give (in addition to sleep), and that something was blogging and curating my social media sites. Things are quieting down now, though, so I’m back! Here’s what’s going on in my writing world.

Not the real cover!

-The Faceless Enemy is done! The sequel to Dreamwielder is even more high-action and fast-paced than the first book, and it’s a good deal darker, too—sort of my Empire Strikes Back part of the saga for Makarria, Caile, Natarios Rhodas, and a batch of new characters. Beta readers are going through the manuscript now, and it looks like I’m on track for a Spring 2015 release from Diversion Books. In the meantime, you can take a sneak peek of the pre-published version of Chapter 1, “Enter Darkness,” on Wattpad.

-I’m preparing a self-released ebook title called Page Fault. It’s a novella length story that’s part cyber-punk, part fantasy, and part post-apocalyptic fiction. The novella came about as part of a shared world project in the George R.R. Martin author study course I taught a few years ago at the Orange County School of Arts. Once I have the cover art procured, I’ll announce the official release date.

-My literary story “Choose Your Own Romance” is included in the newest issue (#116) of Confrontation, a prestigious journal that’s published the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, John Steinbeck, T.C. Boyle, and Arthur Miller over the years.

-My good friend and frequent collaborator Ahimsa Kerp recently released his debut novel, Empire of the Undead (Permuted Press). It’s a great novel, mashing up zombies and the Roman Empire—think The Walking Dead meets 300. I interviewed Ahimsa over at the Prose & Cons earlier this week, and he had some great things to say about geek culture, tattoos, and more.

That’s all for now. Happy holidays to everyone!

-Garrett Calcaterra