S.G. Browne

I’ll be attending the World Horror Convention in Austin, TX, at the Doubletree Hotel this weekend, though my stay in Austin will be abbreviated, as I’ll be flying out to Los Angeles on Saturday to attend the L.A. Times Festival of Books at the USC campus.

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!

I’ll be appearing at WonderCon this weekend at the Moscone Center South in San Francisco for a couple of events.

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!

Yes, I know it’s a week past due, but better late than never. Besides, I was busy enjoying 80 degree sunny days on the Gulf of Mexico, which even in California are a rarity right now. So I couldn’t very well spend them sitting at a computer.

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 go to ZomBcon…

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.

This Halloween weekend, the zombie apocalypse will be in Seattle as the inaugural ZomBcon comes to the Pacific Northwest October 29-31.

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.