Fall Plans: Dalton, Cartersville, Marietta, Atlanta (Thrice)

The Next Chapter Con in Dalton, the Carterville Comic-Con, signings in two Atlanta bookstores, and panels at ConJurationCon. Also compilations of B-movie trailers and reformatting SERPENT SWORD

Although I significantly dialed back my appearances in late summer and early fall due to professional responsibilities, I’ll be back in the saddle again with one event in September and four in October.

Tomorrow (9/17), I will be at Virginia Highlands Books in Atlanta from 1-3 PM. I’ll have a table and will be signing books, which people can then pay for at the register. Virginia Highlands has some really nice restaurants, including Surin and Ocean Wave (they share a kitchen) whose chicken curry I particularly like, so if you’d like lunch first there are plenty of options. Morelli’s, a fancy ice cream place, is also conveniently located. Parking is kind of a pain, but there are paid and valet lots in addition to street parking.

Next will be the Next Chapter Con on October 7 at the Dalton Convention Center in Dalton, Georgia. This will be my first time appearing at this convention with Serpent Sword, the (relatively) new second book in my steampunk military fantasy series, as well as stickers I had printed based on the cover of my debut horror novel The Thing in the Woods. The vendor hall will be open from 10 AM to 4 PM; afterward, there will be panels on topics like Amazon Advertising and Kickstarter for authors from 5 PM until 8:30 PM. Those of you who are authors or aspire to be can sign up at the above link.

After that, I’ll have a table outside Tall Tale Book Shop at the Toco Hills shopping center in Atlanta from 12 PM until 1 or 2 PM on October 9. More on that as we get closer. The reminder will have a video. :)

Next I’ll be vending at the Cartersville Comic Con on October 14 from 10 AM to 6 PM. I haven’t been to Cartersville in years and when I went it was mostly to go to the Tellus Science Museum, so this could be interesting. This will be my first time coming to this event, period, and it’ll be a whole new set of potential customers.

And on the following Saturday (10/21), the Switzer Library in Marietta, GA will be hosting a local author day from 11 AM to 4 PM in which I will definitely be participating. Switzer is the headquarters of the Cobb County public library system, which bought a bunch of copies of my book not long after I donated a starter set. I might also have a table at a Halloween-themed event in Stone Mountain on 10/22, but that hasn’t been officially decided on.

For my final big event of the fall (and probably last big event of the year), I’ll be vending at Atlanta’s ConJurationCon Nov. 17-19. I will be on panels as well — at least three in order to get the free vending table and hopefully more. Some of you might remember me from the 2022 convention, including a panel where I claimed Labyrinth was Hellraiser for kids. Stay tuned for updates about the specific panels I’ll be on.

For all these events, I’ll be bringing Thing, its sequel The Atlanta Incursion, Battle for the Wastelands, its prequel novella “Son of Grendel,” and its sequel Serpent Sword, my horror-crime farce “Little People, Big Guns,” and my short story collection Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire. I’ll have the Thing stickers as well as used comics I’d like to sell onward at the conventions; the bookstores might be able to ring up stickers, but I’m not sure how they’d do used comics.

My Austin DVD Haul and Some Interesting New Potential Substack Content

Labor Day Weekend I traveled to Austin, Texas for a friend’s bachelor party and one place we visited was Waterloo Records. Although the store mostly sells music, I did find the Drive-In Delirium series and after some deliberation bought all of them. These DVDs are compilations of trailers for low-budget movies — you can see the full list of those movies here.

Since each has several hours of trailers it will take me a long time to watch them. But many of these movies look interesting — often in a trainwreck kind of way — and reviews of these movies and “how I would have done them” rewrites will be a good source of both free and paid content for my subscribers.

And I imagine due to the sheer absurdity alone these will be fun to watch. The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made was good for playing in the background at one of my parties at my first apartment and for watching while ironing clothes. And when I was a little kid my grandmother purchased for me on VHS Fantastic Dinosaurs of the Movies, which was also a fun trailer compilation. Thanks to TubiTV I imagine I’ll be able to find many online for free, plus I have VideoDrome nearby if I need a DVD.

Reformatted Serpent Sword Now Available

When Serpent Sword first came out, the formatting had been done by a different freelancer whom I’d had to scramble to hire when the person who’d done my earlier work wasn’t available. Although the product wasn’t bad, they used a different spacing scheme than Battle and between that and the additional 10,000 words, the book was around 90 pages longer than the first. That meant higher per-unit printing cost and (possibly) people less willing to take chances on such a long book when they saw it at my convention tables.

So I ended up hiring this gentleman from the UK via the website Fiverr on the recommendation of my friend Clark, who’d hired him to format his independent horror novel Transmission. He was able to reformat Serpent Sword to exactly match Battle, reducing the length by between 30-40 pages. This allowed me to reduce Amazon paperback prices by a dollar. He also corrected some errors I’d missed the first time and even plugged in some copyright information about cover artist Matt Cowdery. The proof arrived from Amazon Friday afternoon and it looks nice.

I have 22 copies of the original edition of Serpent Sword remaining for sale at conventions or via mail. Once they’re sold, I’ll order the new version to replace them. So if you’ve gotten a print book already, you have a very limited-edition product. :)