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I apologize for being a few days late with this post. The reasons were manifold. Part of it, as noted earlier, are all the viruses, both computer and human, running rampant in my home. Just as I was getting over the swine flu, I was forced to completely wipe my computer and one of my external drives of all data and install a new operating system in order to destroy an insidious computer virus called mebroot. The virus is still hiding on my other external drive; I am still trying to figure out how to kill it without losing all my data. My writing is secure, but there is a lot of music, pictures, and video on that other drive that I don’t care to lose. In addition to all that, my 16 month old daughter Cassie has just come down with an awful bug of her own, and my wife and I have been up for the last 60 or so hours taking care of her. Cassie has never been sick before, and I have to say, I don’t care for it. She is too young to understand why she feels so awful or to listen to instructions on how to get better, and we’ve been utterly frantic trying to keep her hydrated and her temperature down.

On the other hand, there is also a “good news” reason for the delay. I was waiting on word from Subterranean Press on whether they could spare more advance copies of The Great Bazaar for me to use as prizes. It turns out they could, so I now have FIVE copies instead of just one to give away, which means I will be choosing five winners. I will also be having Lauren Cannon, the artist who designed the wards and painted the book cover, sign the copies, to make them extra-collectible.

Before I announce the winners, I want to thank everyone who participated so very much. I was terrified that no one would enter at all (the dreaded party where no one shows up), and instead there were a flood of amazing entries from fans all over the world. I wish I had enough prizes to send one to everyone, convention be damned. You are all champions.

On to the winners:

1. Jess, from France: Jess entered a whopping EIGHT times, and all of them were fantastic. She did a lot of characters outside the “big 3”, like Elona, Cob, Arrick, and Ragen, and you can tell she put a lot of love into each. I love the little wooden talisman in her portrait of young Rojer:
   
2. Elena from Russia: Elena entered 5 times, and each of them was an amazing piece of art. She also chose to some atypical subjects like Mery, Ragen and Elissa, which was really great. My fave:
   
3. Mark from the US: Mark actually permanently tattooed wards up both of his forearms, six tattoos in total. How could he not get a prize for that? It is the most awesome thing ever:
   
4. Dwayne from the UK: With three image entries and two video ones, I would have been remiss to leave Dwayne off the list. His composite movie trailers for The Painted Man and The Desert Spear are awesome:
5. Iris from Germany: Last but never least, we have Iris, AKA Rainbow Sword, who not only inspired this contest in the first place, but entered five times, including one comic that made me laugh out loud (click to enlarge):

I will be contacting the winners sometime in the next few days, and will try to get all the entries up on my Fan Art Page soon, but I’m juggling a lot of projects right now, and it might be a couple of weeks before I can do all the coding.

Speaking of fan art, check this out: The Twirling Dragon

Posted on November 30, 2009 at 10:36 pm by PeatB
Filed under Contests, Fan Art, Fans, France, Germany, Great Bazaar, Life, Russia, Writing
10 Comments »

I’ll get to the Fan Art Contest in a minute. Honest. In the meantime, I wanted to post this fun thing google alerts showed me, a French fantasy review blog called Fantasy au Petit-Dejuner, AKA Fantasy for Breakfast. The reviewer films short videos of his review, showing the books next to his brekkie. He is speaking way too fast for my high school French to keep up, so I can’t tell you what his review is like, but the food on the table is making me hungry:

“Fantasy au Petit-Déjeuner” épisode 53 from Salvek on Vimeo.

Posted on November 30, 2009 at 9:39 pm by PeatB
Filed under France, Reviews, Writing
2 Comments »

As I mentioned in the first WFC post, one of the best things about the convention is meeting virtual friends and coworkers in person, often for the first time. Sometimes when you don’t even expect it.

Back in 2004, I started a small blog on a site called Journalscape. It started mostly a platform for me to rant about the 2004 US presidential election, but eventually it moved on to other things, and it became a place for me to chronicle the joys and struggles of my life, talking about things I loved, my efforts to deal with my chronic nerve pain, and of course my aspirations to one day become a published author.

Journalscape was a great community of very supportive people. We all read each others’ blogs and commented on them at random, and slowly, some of us became close friends in our own right, though we never actually met. I wrote in February about how excited I was to finally meet Lo at NY ComicCon. I thanked Netta for being a beta reader of The Painted Man on the acknowledgment page. But there are still others out there, like Maggie, the Electric Grandmother, or the young woman known only as Make Some Pasta. Etc.

So I’m at this party at WFC on Friday night, and we’re hanging out at the Eraserhead Press party, where they were serving their own self-brewed specialty beers, in custom bottles with their book covers on them. It was an impressive effort, and I liked the dark beer.

The party was pretty crowded and it was really late, plus I’d had more than a few Guinness over the course of the day. My eyes were a little blurry, but across the room I saw someone that I was sure I recognized… but I had no idea from where. Did I know her? Was she famous? An old co-worker? As I pondered, she wandered through the room and headed towards the bathroom, where all the beers were in an ice-filled tub as an attendant handed them out.

Suddenly it hit me, that’s Maggie. I saw her picture once when she friended me on facebook. I remembered she had recently moved to CA, and how she too had been an aspiring SF writer. I put a hand on her shoulder. When she turned, I said, “I’m sorry, but I think we might know each…”

That was all I got out before her eyes widened. “Peat?!” she gasped, and swept me into a hug.

I guess she remembered me, too. It was really amazing to see her, and to have time to relax with some drinks and just hang out. We’d never laid eyes on each other before, but immediately we were talking like old friends.

Posted on November 26, 2009 at 1:19 am by PeatB
Filed under Appearances, Events, Life, World Traveler, Writing
3 Comments »

I know it’s been a while since I’ve updated, but in my quest to always be trendy and hip to the latest fads, I caught a nice case of H1N1 about 2 weeks ago, and spent about 7 days being totally useless, and another 5 feeling generally cruddy. This was followed by some massive computer problems which I am still in the process of resolving, but I am at least functional again. For those of you who worry about such things, fear not for my unfinished writing. I have several redundant backups on separate drives, so nothing has been lost.

But while nothing has been lost due to viruses (human and computer), I am definitely behind on things. The stepsheet to The Daylight War was due last week, but I still need a couple more days of work to finish that. Also, I am a little behind on judging the Fan Art Contest. Thankfully, I gave myself until Thanksgiving to pick a winner, so I still have a couple of days. I also begged Subterranean Press for a few more advance copies of The Great Bazaar to give as prizes, and just received news that they are sending a few extra, so there will be multiple winners. Huzzah to Bill and Yanni at Subterranean for making that happen! (Did I mention Yanni’s baby is adorable? I met the little darling at WFC a couple of weeks ago.)

In other news, I have learned that AST in Russia will be publishing the Russian translation of The Painted Man in December, and I have just accepted an offer from them for The Desert Spear, so that’s a nice Christmas present for me and my future Russian readers.

Speaking of The Desert Spear, I would like to finally post the last entry in the Fan Art Contest to make it in before the Nov. 15 deadline, an awesome trailer for The Desert Spear movie made by Dwayne in the UK. Since a lot of you chumps have still not updated your browsers, which tend to crash when I embed video, I am including it as a link. Just click on the movie poster Dwayne made below to go to the YouTube page:

Posted on November 23, 2009 at 5:24 pm by PeatB
Filed under Contests, Desert Spear, Fan Art, Fans, Life, Movie, Russia, Tech, Writing
5 Comments »

Only one day left to enter the Fan Art Contest, and some very determined fans are looking to make it as hard as possible for me to pick a winner. Today we have new entries from Jess, Marilia, Iris, and Dwayne.

Jardir, by Jess:

The Painted Man, painting, by Marilia:

Leesha know best, by Iris (click to enlarge):

The funniest thing about Iris’ comic is that I used this same gag in The Desert Spear, only to have my editor suggest it be cut. I have since moved it to The Daylight War. I think it’s awesome that Iris thought of it, too.  I guess her mind is in the same gutter mine is.

And last but not least, Dwayne made an awesome movie trailer and posted the video on YouTube. I would embed the video in the blog, but it seems many of you still have outdated browsers that crash when I do that. Time to update, people! In the meantime, you can see the vid by clicking here.

Posted on November 14, 2009 at 4:39 pm by PeatB
Filed under Uncategorized
5 Comments »