I will NOT have any books with me for sale, as it’s my understanding that the local Barnes & Noble will have a presence at the convention and will have stock on hand. However, if you would like to bring your copies of Breathers or Fated with you, I’ll be more than happy to sign them. Just don’t ask me to sing them.

As for any other scheduled book signings or panels where you might find me over the weekend, at this point I’m not aware of anything. If that changes, I’ll be sure to post about it on Facebook and Twitter.

Hope to see you in Seattle!

Of course, it’s perpetually autumn in San Francisco, with cool weather and a brisk breeze. Minus the leaves changing color because everything here either stays green or just turns brown and dies. And as for football season, there are some who would say that what the 49ers play isn’t technically football.

Where were we? Ah yes. Autumn.

With the bloom of summer fading, I have a handful of appearances I’ll be making at upcoming signings and conventions from Seattle to San Diego to Sarasota. And Roseville, but it didn’t fit with the whole sibilant thing going on there.

Below are the relevant dates and times and locations. If you happen to live in the neighborhood or plan to attend one of the conventions, find me and say “hey.” I always enjoy a good “hey.”

September 24
Signing – Roseville, CA
12:00pm – 2:00pm
Barnes & Noble
Creekside Town Center, 1256 Galleria Boulevard
Roseville, CA

October 21-23
ZomBcon
SeaTac Hilton
17620 International Blvd
Seattle, WA

October 26
WFC Author Meet & Greet – San Diego, CA
6:30pm – 8:30pm
Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore
7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite 302
San Diego, CA

October 27-30
World Fantasy Convention
Town and Country Resort & Convention Center
500 Hotel Circle North
San Diego, CA

November 30
Signing – Sarasota, FL
6:00pm – 7:00pm
Bookstore1Sarasota
1359 Main Street
Sarasota, FL

I say that like I’ve been going all my life, or at least since 1970, when the first incarnation of the event took place at the U.S. Grant Hotel. Back then, the one-day convention drew 145 attendees. This year, the number of attendees was closer to 145,000.

I’ve only been twice, in 2009 and this year, but I think one of the most enjoyable aspects of Comic-Con is that you have nearly 150,000 people in one place bumping into one another, waiting in line, crowding into limited spaces, and no one has an attitude. Everyone’s happy to be there. It’s like one big family.

But to be truthful, if you’ve never been to Comic-Con, it’s kind of hard to explain what to expect. It’s like the Matrix. No one can tell you about it. You have to see it for yourself.

However, for the uninitiated, here’s a sampling of what you would have found during the four-day event at the San Diego Convention Center:

• A harem of slave Princess Leias
• A battalion of Klingon warriors
• Multiple Spidermans and Batmans
• Lines of fans waiting for an autograph from George R. R. Martin
• Panels on LOST, True Blood, and Family Guy
• A William Shatner Star Trek documentary hosted by Kevin Smith
• Full-contact medieval armor battles
• A mechanical shark ride
• And Conan O’Brien marching through the Gaslamp Quarter

Personally, I had the chance to meet a lot of great people, spend time with friends, do a couple of signings, and sit on a panel with six other authors discussing the challenges of having a relationship with someone who’s not human. Most of the standing-room-only crowd was there to see the next panel for the Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time, but it was still a fun and lively panel.

A special thanks goes out to Penguin, Mysterious Galaxy Books, and Geekscape for their support and general awesomeness. See you next year!

THURSDAY, July 21
Signing: Geekscape Booth (#4016)
1:00pm – 2:00pm

I’ll have bookmarks, postcards, and a limited supply of 11″ x 17″ posters of Breathers and Fated that I’ll be giving away. While I won’t have any novels with me, feel free to bring along your copy and I’ll be happy to sign it. You can also purchase Breathers and Fated at the Mysterious Galaxy Booth (#1119)

SATURDAY, July 23
Panel: Room 6A
1:45pm – 2:45pm

Vampires and Others – How to make a relationship work when you or your significant other lack a pulse, or face other mortal-challenged issues.

Relationship advice from: Patricia Briggs (The Mercy Thompson series), Nancy Holder (The Crusade series), Linda Thomas-Sundstrom (The Golden Vampire), S.G. Browne (Fated), Clay & Susan Griffith (The Vampire Empire series), and Christine Cody (Bloodlands).

Autograph session for the panel to follow:

Signing: Autograph Area 8
3:00pm – 4:00pm

At this point I don’t anticipate any additional appearances, so if you’re at the convention on Thursday and/or Saturday, swing by the Geekscape Booth or the panel and say “hi.”

Held in the Grand Ballroom of the Marriott, the Book Signing Meet and Greet will run from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm. There’s no guarantee that everyone at the convention will be signing or have books for sale, but here’s a list of convention attendees. There will be a special area for Guests of Honor, which include Peter Straub, David Morrell, Gillian Flynn, Douglas Clegg, and Dacre Stoker (the great grand-nephew of Bram Stoker).

While I will be in attendance signing books, unfortunately I won’t have any copies of Breathers or Fated for sale and I can’t guarantee that anyone in the dealer’s room will have copies available. However, please feel free to bring along your copy for a signature or just stop by to say “hey.” This will be my only appearance while I’m in New York.

Hope to see you next Thursday!

Long Island Marriott Hotel
101 James Doolittle Boulevard
Uniondale, NY
(516) 794-3800 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (516) 794-3800 end_of_the_skype_highlighting

My schedule for both events is listed below. Unfortunately, since I’ll be leaving Austin on Saturday, I won’t be in attendance for the mass autograph signing on Saturday night. So my apologies if anyone was expecting me to be there.

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World Horror Convention – Doubletree Hotel, Austin, TX
Friday, April 29
Reading (with Gary McMahon)
1:00pm – 2:00pm
Robertson Room

Friday, April 29
Panel: Why Horror Movies Are Terrible
(with Brad Keene, Thomas Sipos, Joe Hill, Gemma Files, and Mark Wheaton)
7:00pm – 8:00pm
Dezavela Room

L.A. Times Festival of Books – USC Campus, Los Angeles, CA
Sunday, May 1
Signing (with Steve Hockensmith, Debra Ginsberg, and Christopher Farnsworth)
11:00am – 11:50am
Booth #372 – Mysterious Galaxy Books
(In the Founders Park area, near the Poetry Stage)

Check out the entire weekend signing schedule for Mysterious Galaxy Books at their booth.

There’s also map of the Festival of Books you can download here. And if you have an iPhone or an Android, you can download the Festival of Books app to your phone.

I hope to see you in either Austin or Los Angeles!

April 1 – Signing
Geekscape, Booth #617
2:00PM – 3:00PM

On Friday, April 1, I’ll be signing 11″ x 17″ posters of the covers for Breathers and Fated, including the UK versions.  Unfortunately, I won’t have any copies of my books for sale, but feel free to bring your copy to the Geekscape Booth (#617) and I’ll be happy to sign it.

April 2 – Interview w/ F. Paul Wilson
Room 220
2:00PM – 3:00PM

On Saturday, April 2, I’ll be interviewing F. Paul Wilson, bestselling author of The Keep, Black Wind, and the Repairman Jack Series, as well as numerous other novels, screenplays, and comic books.  There will be an audience Q&A afterward.

Hope to see you this weekend!

But here we are, a week after my first time attending the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (or ICFA, for the multi-syllabic challenged) and I’m happy to announce that I had a wonderful time.

I have to admit, I was a felt a little out of my element about attending an academic conference of literature students and scholars, since I am neither an academic nor a scholar. Especially when I needed a dictionary and an interpreter just to understand some of the titles for the papers, like:

Languages, Litanies, and the Limit: Mathematics as Discourse in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem

I still have no idea what that means.

In any case, with four days of round table panels, author readings, and academic papers, I had the opportunity to meet a bunch of great people, make a lot of new friends, share my thoughts on humor in horror on my panel, and even attend a couple of papers on zombies that referenced Breathers, including:

The Decomposition of the Contemporary Family: Zombie’s Role in the Transmogrification of the Nuclear Family (by Emily Mashak);

and The Politics of Zombie Love: Subversion, Self-Actualization, and Erotic Zombies in S.G. Browne’s Breathers (by Professor Franc Auld).

It was interesting to sit in on the papers and hear someone else’s interpretation of Breathers, which is another blog post entirely, but I very much enjoyed the conference and I’m looking forward to going back to ICFA again next year.

I’ll just make sure to bring along an interpreter.

You fly out on Thursday from SFO and get picked up in Sea-Tac and chauffeured to The Maxwell Hotel, where a ZomBcon concierge checks you in and registers you for the convention and sends you on your way to your hotel room. This is nice. This has never happened to you before. You wonder if they have you confused with someone else. But you don’t say anything. You just smile and enjoy the ride.

The next day you wake up in your hotel room for a leisurely day that includes talking and schmoozing and meeting great people like Roger Ma (The Zombie Combat Manual), Don Roff (Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection), Steve Hockensmith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls), Timothy Long (The Zombie-Wilson Diaries), and Steven Schlozman (The Zombie Autopsies).

You listen to an entertaining and irreverent zombie comics panel with Stephen Lindsay (Jesus Hates Zombies), Steven L. Frank (Zombies vs Cheerleaders), and Mark Rahner (Rotten Comics).  You also listen to a conversation between Chuck Palahniuk and Max Brooks.  You try not to be a fan boy, but you hang around and talk to some other guests until Chuck is done signing so you can talk to him like a normal person.  You find out he’s writing an article for Rolling Stone.  This becomes relevant later.

Saturday you have an intimate coffee chat reading at Barnes & Noble with Jessie Portlock and Roger Ma and a few other lovely people.  Then you meet up with Stacey Graham, a zombie author you met on Twitter and Facebook and who is more delightful in person than is humanly possible.  You also meet Melanie Hooyenga, a zombie newbie, and the same goes for her.  Melanie was also kind enough to interview you before ZomBcon for her blog.

You sit on a panel with Stacey Graham, Jesse Petersen (Married with Zombies), and Scott Kenemore (Zen of Zombie), where you discuss why Zombies Are People, Too – though Jesse is the dissenting opinion since she kills zombies in her books.  We try to convert her without success.  Then we all go out to dinner at Bamboo Garden, a vegetarian Chinese restaurant where all of the meat is TVP (textured vegetable protein) and the dishes have names like Vegetables Treasure in Pearly Pond and Buddha’s Basket with Precious Nuts.

On Sunday (leaving out the two bars you went to on Saturday night), you have one final panel with Stacey Graham and Jesse Petersen, the last panel of the weekend, titled Why We Love Zombies, where you spend an hour bantering with the audience about reanimated corpses.  This panel is also attended by Chuck Palahniuk, who sits in the audience and scribbles down notes for his Rolling Stone article.  You aren’t nervous at all.

Because you have so much fun at the convention, you don’t have time to sit down and blog about it.  Then you drive down to Portland and then back up to Seattle for three signings in four days and have too much fun with friends and signings and fighting off a cold to get this blog post written any sooner than now.

And for the record, fighting off the cold wasn’t really all that much fun.

With a guest list that includes George Romero, Max Brooks, Bruce Campbell, Ted Raimi, Chuck Palahniuk, Malcolm McDowell, and a number of authors of zombie novels (including yours truly), it should be quite a weekend.

The event takes place throughout downtown Seattle, including the Seattle Center, Barnes & Noble, and the AMC Pacific Place and will include author coffee chats, signings, panels, film festivals, and much more.

Check out the full schedule of events.

As for my scheduled appearances, they’re all on Saturday, October 30:

9:00AM Coffee Chat
Barnes & Noble

2:00PM Book Signing
Barnes & Noble Pavilion
Seattle Exhibition Center

4:00PM Panel
Zombies Are People Too
(w/Stacey Graham, Scott Kenemore, and Jesse Petersen)
Seattle Center NW Conference Room

I’m also planning to be at the Opening Ceremonies Friday morning at 10AM and at the VIP Meet and Greet Sunday at 4:30PM.

If you’re already attending, I’ll look forward to seeing you there. If you’re not attending, then you’ll be missing out on a lot of zombie fun.