I am, quite frankly, dazzled Diane Lacey. She and Debra Yeung are handling Programming for SFContario, and more than a week ago they had already sent me my schedule. Yeah, you read that correctly, they sent it out more than a month in advance!!!
They’ve found quite a lot for me to do too, lots of great panels with lots of interesting people, as you’ll see below. I’m going to be very tired after this convention, but it will be that good kind of tired.
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I’ll probably get it uploaded sometime tomorrow, but Swedish journalist and long time Klingon speaker Yens Wahlgren was kind enough to re-send me the translation he did of “Buffalo Dogs,” so soon I’ll have that language up and available as well.
Thanks, Yens!
If you’re reading this, then you’re (probably) seeing the newly designed and relaunched version of my website.
There are still a few pieces that will get added over the next few weeks, but it’s looking pretty slick now, if I do say so myself.
The good news is that Valerie is recovering nicely from her surgery, is more or less free from post-surgical pain, and has gotten over most of the annoying symptoms related to going off more than two weeks of high grade narcotics that kept the pain at bay. Yay, Valerie!
The bad news is that her stamina is still poor, and she’s simply not up to a 2+ hour car ride (each way), hanging around NYC for a couple hours before the reception, and then 3 or 4 hours of the reception itself. So, I’ll be there alone this year, which sucks, but better than not going at all.
And once again, I’m beset with the same issue that always hits me for this event: where in NJ should I park. In past years I’ve parked near various NJT stations and taken the train over. The last couple years I’ve parked at a lot in Hoboken and taken the Path over. I haven’t been particularly happy with the parking near the Path train, so I’m not sure what I’m doing this time out.
Anyone with brilliant ideas, feel free to chime in and let me know.
The current plan is for me to leave Philadelphia about 2pm (which is when I get off work). That should put me in Hoboken between 4:00 and 4:30, and so I could conceivably be in NYC by 5pm. Not a clue what I’ll do for two hours before things kick off at Planet Hollywood, so I’m open to suggestions there too.
In any case, if you’re going to be at the shindig, I hope you’ll stop by and say “howdy.”
I’m in the process of getting a new website (same URL, just different structure and some additions/changes to content). Part of this includes being more responsible to some of the other social network obligations I’ve taken on, in particular Good Reads.
Apparently for months and months Good Reads was sending me their version of “Friend Invitations” and I was oblivious to them. Ooops.
In an attempt to rectify that, I’m posting this message here, complete with a link to my Good Reads page. Voila!
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/162810.Lawrence_M_Schoen
Last year, Valerie and I let our membership at the Plymouth Meeting Community Center lapse, and instead bought memberships at a nearby YMCA.
The Y had several times the fitness equipment that we liked, and quite a bit more space for it. But it was also further away, and I didn’t much care for the locker rooms or the pool, and so I stopped going. Bad, Lawrence.
Valerie’s been out of “gym commission” for the last few months, and other than being beaten up by my Pilates instructor I have not been getting much in the way of exercise (as is made evident by the bathroom scale).
Today I dropped by a newly-opened Planet Fitness. It’s a bit closer than the Y, and it’s on the way to work. The price is very good. There’s no pool, but there are plenty of ellipticals and similar cardio-type machines that I like to use. And the locker room is nicer (by which I mean not as small) as the Y’s. Plus, if I went with their “Black Card” membership, I’d have unlimited use of massage chairs, tanning, and red-light therapy treatments (though I don’t know that I need any of that), and the price would still be less than half of the Y.
I’ve had a bad experience with a different, nation-wide gym chain, but they seemed to have a very different business model.
Any of you have any experience with Planet Fitness (or tanning machines or red-light therapy, for that matter)? This would be a good time to share those insights with me. Thanks.
Bottom line though, I need to get myself back into a gym!
The folks who run Capclave are bucking the trend. Instead of waiting until the last days or week before their convention, participants received their programming schedule a couple days ago . I had to work out a couple potential kinks in mine or I’d have shared it with you sooner, but here it is, in all its glory:
Friday, October 14th:
5:00 – 6:00 “Holy Shuftik!” He Cried
Saturday, October 15th
12:00 – 1:00 Author Table
4:30 – 5:00 Reading
Sunday, August 16th
11:00 – 12:00 So You Want to Put Together an Anthology?
2:00 – 3:00 The Genre Food Panel
Somewhere in there, I’m intending to do something by way of launching the newest anthology from Paper Golem, Cucurbital 2, possibly at my Author Table on Saturday, or maybe as part of a room party Friday or Saturday evening. If all else fails, I’ll have copies available at the mass signing on Saturday night.
Of course Barry will be there with me, and he wants nothing more in this life than to have his picture taken with you (you know who you are).
See you at the convention!
Less than two weeks ago, I received an email that an anthology editor was trying to reach me but without success. He’d been emailing to a little used email address and I’d been preoccupied with things like my wife’s surgery and wasn’t checking my older, more obscure accounts. Ooops all around.
Turned out he’d been pulled in as the new editor on a project that I’d sent a story into some years ago, only to have the funding for that project wither and die. Then there’d been some talk about the story appearing in a magazine that the original editor was involved with, but never quite gelled.
I quickly got in touch with the new editor, sent off the requested bio and such, and asked to take another pass at the original story (now years old), because I felt certain that I’d want to clean up some of the language and style, my writing having improved over the intervening time. I was told a contract would be coming out in a week, but the rough terms were mentioned.
Yesterday, that week having passed and no sign of a contract, I queried, mentioned some concerns I had about the contract as described, and again asked for a copy of the current version of the story they were working from, so I could add some polish.
This morning I received a contract. It lacked some of the basics of contracts that I’m used to (both as a writer and a publisher), and asked for things that I don’t normally sign away. I was informed that all of this was “industry standard” and that if I wasn’t willing to sign then my story would be dropped from the anthology. Also, that I’d have a chance to make “minor changes” of the proof of my story, which I would receive in another week or so.
I replied that I’ve been in the industry a little bit now, and that while such things might be standard on boiler plate contracts, only the unwary or the unwise signed such things, that every contract was negotiable, and that I couldn’t and wouldn’t sign such a thing, and I still wanted to be able to review the story and perhaps make changes, and clearly that wasn’t an option.
So I bowed out.
I don’t like doing that. I don’t like pulling out of an anthology that’s expecting to have my work because it feels like I’m leaving them in the lurch (even if it’s a lurch of their own making).
I don’t like killing a sale and having another piece of my work out there for people to read, but on the other hand, I want it to be work that I’m proud of and that reflects where I am as an author. A story that I’d originally written five years ago doesn’t do that.
Most of all though, and this was the big trump, I don’t like contracts that are presented as written in stone with no room for changes, even if those changes actually protect the publisher (and I’ve added such things to contracts in the past).
I don’t know what, if anything, will become of this story now, but I think I did the right thing. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s the best one I could make given the choices.
