Salt Lake Comic Con 2016 Schedule

Salt Lake Comic Con is September 1-3, 2016. Several authors who have published through Xchyler Publishing are ganging together at a booth. If you have early Christmas shopping planned, or if you like steampunk, fantasy, urban fantasy, dystopian, or genre fiction in general, stop by! We also have a drawing for an Amazon gift card. We'll be in booth 2226 at the west end of the green section in the northwest main hall.

Follow the red arrow to our booth.

I stole that map from Sarah Seeley who has four panels and is one of the authors at the booth. Thanks, Sarah!

Also, I'm a panelist this year, which should be loads of fun. We'll talk about how language helps us find our tribes and helps us to communicate with those we relate to.

Friday, Sept 2nd at 5 PM, room 253A

Edit: I've been added to a second panel. This one will be a lot of fun, and I'll be sure to come in steampunk attire. It's even in the same room, 253A. [Edit: They added the picture for this second panel finally, so here it is:]

Saturday, Sept 3rd at 8PM, room 253A

A Celebration of Steampunk: Wildly imaginative and stylized, steampunk is a culture and a genre all its own. But how did it start, and how can you get involved? Is it just all about the fashion, or does the genre have something important to say about the relationship between technology and society? This panel will discuss the best steampunk books to read, whether you are a newcomer to the fandom or a longtime lover of the literature, as well as recommending cosplay resources for beginners and pros.

So there you have it. I'll be at the booth some of the time and at panels the rest of the time. We should have a posted schedule of author's planned time at the booth in case you want a book signed. I'll have these books there:

Salt Lake's FanX 2016 and Symbiosis

I'll be at FanX this year, just a bit north of Artist Alley. Several authors published through Xchyler Publishing have banded together to rent a booth, and we'll be selling and signing books. Stop by to say hi and enter a drawing!

Those attending are, in alphabetical order (just because I'm left brained like that):

• Jay Barnson
• Ben Ireland
• John M Olsen
• Sarah Seeley
• Scott Tarbot
• Scott Taylor
• Candice Thomas

We'll have anthologies and novels ranging through steampunk, dystopian, horror, Shakespeare rewrites, and fantasy.

I will have two books with me. "Steel & Bone" (a steampunk anthology) and "It Came From the Great Salt Lake" (a Utah horror collection).

One of the reasons we can afford to have this booth is that my lovely wife Kelly is sponsoring the space as a local Realtor and will have some goodies to give away. When I explain this relationship to people, the typical response is for them to think for a few seconds, then it all clicks. Their next statement is often about how it's cool to have a relationship that benefits both the authors and the sponsor.

The authors get a cheaper place to show their wares and interact with fans. The sponsor gets publicity and interacts with potential clients. That's what you call win-win.

Beyond Words

I am participating in the Writing Contest: Writers Crushing Doubt, hosted by Positive Writer. Please follow the link to learn more.

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Hi. My name is John, and I am an introvert. (Everyone chime in with "Hi, John.")

It's like being eccentric in a way, since one of the cool things about being an introvert (or eccentric) is that you never consider it to be anything but normal. In the 7th grade I was voted the quietest kid in the school. I didn't know anybody, but apparently everyone knew me. I've known and enjoyed the life of a quiet introvert now for over half a century, yet introverts tend to form a small number of deep friendships rather than socializing widely. This was a handicap I didn't know I had.

I'd dabbled with writing fiction on and off for years. The sale of a story in 1995 was more fluke than skill. over the next eighteen years I collected quite a few false starts, and the occasional finished short story. My handful of submissions all garnered standardized form rejections. I was being crushed by doubt and had no idea how to improve.

It's not that I couldn't write. I'd written several chapters in popular books on software design. I just didn't know how to write fiction despite having read hundreds of books in the fantasy and science fiction genres over the years.

Then two things happened, with one triggering the other. First, one of my friends encouraged me to enter an anthology contest. That by itself would have resulted in several so-so attempts, and I would have figured I just wasn't fit to write fiction. It was the second thing which made all the difference.

As a result of my friend's invitation, I did some research and discovered the local writing community with all its quirky wonder. While my first attempts at writing were rejected as before, I was better at completing what I started. I also discovered a treasure trove of web resources on writing. Better even than those resources, I discovered within the local writing community a host of people ready to give me a hand, share encouragement, and let me join in as part of the community even though I was a neophyte.

Within months, I had turned the tables on my old failures and crushed my doubt. I won a position in an anthology, and got a view into the workings of a great editor who showed me what she was looking for in a story. Just this past week, two more anthologies were released with a story of mine in each, and I pitched a book I wrote for NaNoWriMo 2015 at a writer's symposium. The novel needs work still, but I know what it needs, and why it needs it.

Without that sense of community and belonging offered to me by local writers, none of that would have happened. I'm grateful for all my new friends, beyond words.

2015 Writing Year in Review

It was an interesting year for me, filled with quite a few firsts. I published my first fiction way back in 1995, but only got serious about writing in the past two years. Without further ado, here's the successes.

• A steampunk short story "Revolutionary" was published in the anthology Steel & Bone by Xchyler Publishing.
• A short urban fantasy story "The Blight" was announced as a finalist in the Dragon Comet writing contest, with winners to be announced this coming February at LTUE.
• A horror story "Exposure Therapy" was accepted for an anthology to be released, also at LTUE.
• I won NaNoWriMo. For those who aren't familiar, that means I wrote a minimum of 50K words toward completing a novel. I posted about it earlier. That novel is at 73K now, and is going through edits.
• I have four short stories currently out waiting for a response, three of which I can query next week to see what the status is.

My log also shows six rejections for the year, so it looks like my accept/reject ratio isn't that bad. I'm not a full time writer, so there are limits to how much I can have going at once. Given that this is all from the evenings and weekends not taken up by family, church, or career, I'd have to say it's not bad as entries into the writer community go.

I've been blessed to meet and become at least casual friends with a large number of fellow-writers both local and remote. The local writer community that I bump into at conventions and events is supportive beyond what I could have imagined or expected.

Picked up more books, and reviewed more books than any other year that I can recall (but I'm not counting when I raided my dad's library all through my teen years).

For the next year, my goals are to:

• Attend four conferences (probably LTUE, FanX, Salt Lake Comic Con and Salt City Steamfest) to hobnob.
• Recruit four new beta readers to add to the pool. This assumes I will also be a beta reader for others.
• Publish Crystal King.
• Submit four short stories to open calls or contests like web publishers, or 
• Get invited to an anthology.

Some of those should be pretty easy, and some will require me to really stick my neck out and plow through undiscovered country, since like many authors, I'm naturally reclusive. If you see me, feel free to drag me out of my shell and encourage me to jump into the thick of things. I will try not to be grumpy about it.

Steel and Bone

Here's a sneak peek written by Scott E. Tarbot for the anthology my story "Revolutionary" will be appearing in soon.

Steel and Bone Teaser

Publicity for it is in prep mode now, so you may start to see things firing up soon. We still have a few weeks to release, and I'm looking forward to having a print copy in my hands.