Posts published in: 2013/05

June Newsletter: Mur Lafferty, Walter Mosley, Merrie Haskell, Leigh Bardugo, Khaled Hosseini, Free RPG Day, George Takei, ConTemporal, and more

Posted on 2013-05-31 at 20:56 by montsamu

Vol 3. No 6. May 31, 2013:

Whew. May was quite a busy month, with: visits from (among others) Mary Robinette Kowal (recap here and Warren Schultz's video here) and John Scalzi (Calvin Powers posted a video of Scalzi's reading for those who missed it); Daniel Wallace launched his new book The Kings and Queens of Roam with multiple local events and an interview on WUNC's The State of Things; comics events with Kelly Sue DeConnick and Lucy Knisley; and the invasion of several hundred cosplayers into downtown

Read more...
Posted in newsletter

The Hardest Part: Matthew Ross on The Secret of Ji

Posted on 2013-05-29 at 14:20 by montsamu

UNC/Duke professor Tyler Curtain has an avid interest in literary sf and fantasy translations, and introduced me to Duke ecology PhD student Matthew Ross, whose translation from the French of Pierre Grimbert's bestselling and award-winning The Secret of Ji: Six Heirs was about to be published by AmazonCrossing (Publishers Weekly review) and Brilliance Audio (SFFAudio review). Ross talked a bit about this process at the recent NC Speculative Fiction Night in April, where he also gave a reading from the book,

Read more...
Posted in The Hardest Part | Tagged matthew ross

The Shambling Guide to New York City Listen-a-Long: Chapters 3 and 4 (and release day coverage!)

Posted on 2013-05-29 at 13:48 by montsamu
Posted in Uncategorized

Animazement 2013: Day 1

Posted on 2013-05-25 at 3:11 by montsamu

I stopped by Day 1 of Animazement at the Raleigh Convention Center on Friday early afternoon, and already the 3-day anime-centered convention was well underway.

Even before I made it inside the Convention Center doors, Fayetteville Street was awash in Avengers (for a scheduled mass photoshoot on an external stairway) and all manner of other cosplayers:

photo 1 photo 4

Inside, most pre-registered attendees had already long since made their way through registration, but there were still some crowds milling about

Read more...
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged animazement

Friday Quick Updates: Richard Dansky's Vaporware; Animazement; and (this Wednesday) John Scalzi

Posted on 2013-05-24 at 15:6 by montsamu

Friday Quick Updates for Friday, May 24, 2013:

Durham author Richard Dansky's new novel Vaporware is now out from JournalStone! Congrats, Rich. I've been re-posting a few of the blurbs and guest posts and interviews about the book over on the Bull Spec Facebook and Twitter pages, so go check out this book about a video game project that refuses to be cancelled.

Locals Mark Van Name, Mur Lafferty, and Meagen Voss (among others) are heading up to Baltimore for Balticon this Memorial Day weekend, but here in

Read more...
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged animazement, john scalzi, vaporware

Announcement: author Robert V.S. Redick joins the lineup for the Summer Speculative Fiction event

Posted on 2013-05-23 at 19:16 by montsamu

I've very excited to announce that we've added another author to the already amazing lineup for the 3rd annual Bull Spec Summer Speculative Fiction event. That author is Robert V.S. Redick, author of The Chathrand Voyage Quartet, recently completed with book 4, The Night of the Swarm, in February. Redick studied literature and Russian at the University of Virginia, tropical conservation and development at the University of Florida, and fiction writing in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in

Read more...
Posted in announcements

The Hardest Part: Tonia Brown on Gnomageddon

Posted on 2013-05-22 at 13:15 by montsamu

I met North Carolina author Tonia Brown at ConTemporal last summer, mostly by accident as she was on a panel with Cherie Priest and Phil and Kaja Foglio. But she was funny, she had a clear idea of how to tell her stories, her way, and when she handed me a copy of Railroad!, the print version of her (ongoing!) web serial, it was an easy thing to have on hand to remember to look up her other work later. That led me to find out about this strange book she published earlier this year, Gnomageddon. As the

Read more...
Posted in The Hardest Part | Tagged tonia brown

The Exploding Spaceship Reviews Kevin by Paul Kupperberg (A Teen Family Reading Review)

Posted on 2013-05-19 at 21:11 by angelablackwell

ColumnLogoColorSmall

Review of Kevin (from Archie Comics) by Paul Kupperberg (Grosset& Dunlap paper-over-board novel, April 18, 2013)

Kevin Keller is the first openly gay kid at Riverdale High. He had a comic miniseries which was very successful, so he went to an ongoing series which is now on its eighth issue. The second issue of that series dealt with Kevin’s first high school prom. Kevin had been elected class president in issue four of the miniseries, so it fell to him to select a theme for the prom and get all the

Read more...
Posted in The Exploding Spaceship

The Exploding Spaceship Visits the Doctor Who Experience Cardiff, Wales.

Posted on 2013-05-18 at 18:24 by angelablackwell

ColumnLogoColorSmall

In honor of the finale of this season of Doctor Who, Your Humble Columnists present a review of our trip to the Doctor Who Experience in Cardiff Bay. First of all, pay attention when you buy tickets because they offer a package deal with a brochure, a t-shirt, some postcards and a cool certificate that says you flew the TARDIS, which looks expensive at first until you realize that most of the stuff you can’t buy even at the Experience. They even have a way to buy a family-of-four package. When buying

Read more...
Posted in The Exploding Spaceship

Friday quick updates: Lucy Knisley, James Maxey, and IndieGogos, Kickstarters, and Shindigs, oh my!

Posted on 2013-05-17 at 15:34 by montsamu

Friday Quick Updates for May 17, 2013:

Two events tomorrow (Saturday), the first for writers, at 10 am, as Hillsborough author James Maxey will be teaching a class at the Orange County Library in Hillsboroug from 10 til noon called “Behind Every Great Book is a Great Rewrite.” From Maxey: “It’s going to start from the assumption that you’ve managed to write the first draft of a story or novel, and focus on the things that you should look to fix in later drafts”.

Also tomorrow (Saturday) Chapel Hill Comics

Read more...
Posted in Uncategorized

← Older posts