ConFusion was a blast. It was located at the Detroit Marriott Troy, off exit 69 on Big Beaver Road, Just past the Hooters.

No, seriously.

I got to finally meet my cyber-buddy Pat Rothfuss, as well as hang out with the likes of Paolo Bacigalupi, Cherie Priest, Tobias Buckell, John Scalzi, Doselle Young, and others, including the good folks of Subterranean Press, like my convention handler Yanni and her adorable baby Calista, who helped soothe my own baby missing. Here’s a shot from the first panel with Cherie, Doselle, John, Paolo and me at right.

I am struggling to find an assistant here in Brooklyn to help me out so I can focus more on writing and find time to blog more. In the meantime, here are some neat things that have been accumulating:

First off, Arthur, a two-time contest winner (Warding and Homemade Heroes), sent me his plushie One Arm, and as promised, I put it in Cassie’s crib. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised at the results:

I also finally sent out the last of the HH contest prizes, namely the grand prize set to Mia. This took me almost 2 months mainly because Mia asked me to do a sketch of Bruna in her copy of The Great Bazaar. Seeing as how there are only like 1500 copies of that book in existence and they are now eBaying for like $500, you can understand how reluctant I was to start scribbling in one. Finally I managed it, and I think the result was pretty cool:

Last but not least, I got a letter  the other day from Bill X, who won the Daylight War tagline contest on the forums:

Hey Peat,

I woke up today and my wife said she had taken the best photo for me. My lilone xander was doing his usual playing Clone wars on wii dressed as vader (Don’t ask lol). He went to sit down and my wife had to remind him not to sit in my chair without making sure it was empty. He spotted my new signed copy of TWM and sat to look at the bookplate. Wife just couldn’t resist taking a pic since id be so proud of his advancement into UBER-Nerd land with me! Thought you would get a kick out of it.

BillX

That’s all for now. I will pick winners for the Limerick and Suggest a Contest contests soon, I promise!

Treading water…

What we’re releasing today is an imperfect work, with the idea being for it to be improved upon over the coming days and weeks, in response to your feedback regarding its design and ease of use. You’ll notice, for example, that the private messaging functionality is yet to go live, and that the registration process could be somewhat less clunky. Once you’ve registered, you’ll need to check the email account which you provided during registration for a message which contains your auto-generated password.

So, without further ado, I would like to invite you to check out the forum. Please feel free to post whatever you wish. It would be especially helpful if you could leave us your feedback here, under Forum Feedback.

(Please note that during the development phase, we secretly opened up the site to registered users for the first time. This is why about a half a dozen of you who are WordPress-savvy were able to register. Now that the forum page is no longer password protected, those users should be able to view the forum and sign in with your original login details.)

Thanks for reading. Looking forward to your comments and suggestions.

David

Yes, believe it or not, there is so much to talk about that one post didn’t cut it.

Last week, on the day The Desert Spear released in the US, I did an interview for The New York Daily News, which was in the paper on Thursday, April 15. You can see the Daily News article online here.

Apparently the interview was available on the AP, because my agent found the article quite by accident in the Saturday, April 17 edition of the Daily Telegraph, and google pointed it out again in Canada’s Edmonton Journal. The story has since been picked up by various blogs in at least a dozen languages. Wild.

On my return, the lovely Brittany Oat came out to interview me for local Brooklyn station News 12, for a piece that ran on Friday, April 25. If you are a Time Warner or Cablevision customer, you should be able to view the piece online here. It’s pretty awesome.

Google alerts sent me a delightful link today, from the Twilight Portugal site. The new Portuguese-language urban fantasy (read: vamp/werewolf soap opera) TV show Lua Vermelha (Red Moon) premiered last night, and featured the Portuguese translation of The Painted Man, O Homem Pintado!

It seems mine is the book of choice for sexy Portuguese vampiresses. You can see a clip here: