WFC dreaming, or: the weekend I was nearly famous.

We'll get to our post in a moment. But first, the news:

• The Land, Sea, Sky Trilogy is now live at Amazon. This omnibus edition includes a new author's note and the first chapter of Seized, just in case readers get to the end of the book and want to know why Antonia treats Naomi like a rock star. If you enjoyed the Land, Sea, Sky books -- or if you have been meaning to get around to reading them -- now's your chance. And not that I'm encouraging anyone to wait...but starting this Thursday, the omnibus will be on sale for 99 cents. I hope you'll check it out, and tell all your friends, too.
• The fractal jaguar is having his moment in the sun this weekend. The book trailer for Fissured is featured at Indies Unlimited today. Click through if you haven't seen it -- or, heck, if you'd like to see it again.
• I received an e-mail this week from the organizers of this year's World Fantasy Convention, notifying me that "A Man's Got to Do What a Man's Got to Do" has been selected for inclusion in Unconventional Fantasy: A Celebration of Forty Years of the World Fantasy Convention. The anthology will be recorded on a thumb drive and given to everyone who attends the convention next month. I happen to know that a whole bunch of my fantasy-author heroes also have pieces in this anthology, so I am fairly giddy about being included. 

Which segues nicely into this week's post, in which I reprise (with a tweak or two) a thing I wrote for Indies Unlimited a few weeks ago.

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I don’t mean to brag, but I had 850 people show up at my first book signing.

Okay, they might have been there to see Gene Wolfe, or Stephen R. Donaldson, or Elizabeth Bear, or Peter Straub, or Patricia McKillip, or…well, you get the idea. But I was there, too!

“There” was the 2010 World Fantasy Convention, in Columbus, Ohio. This annual convention travels to various venues around the world – last year’s was in Brighton, England – and is geared toward speculative fiction in general and fantasy in particular. Membership is capped at 850, and many of the attendees are authors, agents, and editors.

Watchers with SRD in 2010.

I went with some friends from Kevinswatch, and we all went because Donaldson was going to be there. But one of the questions on the sign-up form was, “Are you an author?” This was right after Calderwood Books had published The Maidens' War, so I checked “yes” and put in the Calderwood Books website since I hadn't really started blogging yet. Not only did the WFC organizers believe me, but they put me on a panel. And they let me sign books with the big guys on Friday night.

I've mentioned the mass autographing session here at hearth/myth before. It's a World Fantasy Convention tradition, and it’s pretty crazy. They set up long tables in a ballroom-sized conference room, and they give you a table tent with your name on it. Seating is first-come, first-served, and the lines to get a popular author to sign books can be long. When Neil Gaiman was an honoree in San Diego in 2011, the line to see him wrapped around the ballroom. There were, in fact, so many people in line that he couldn't get to everybody; the convention organizers had to set up a second signing later in the weekend just for him.

Then there are the dealers, who set up outside the room with crates of unsigned books and send runners with stacks of books into the autographing session. The runners stand in the lines, get the books signed, and bring them back to the dealers – who, of course, charge more for autographed books.

There was no line in front of my table, alas, and none of the runners had The Maidens' War in their stack. But my friends gathered around my table, had me sign their copies, and chatted as if I was an actual somebody. One of my buddies even took my picture as I signed his book. I caught at least one passer-by eyeing my table tent to try to figure out who the author was who had attracted such a crowd.

It was really hard to go back to the day job the following Monday, let me tell you.

I'm not expecting such a rousing success this year. For one thing, I won't be a starry-eyed newbie. Well, okay -- I'll still be starry-eyed (I mean, jeez, Guy Gavriel Kay is a guest of honor!), but at least I won't be a newbie. Still, I'm looking forward to this year's shindig. For one thing, my travel and hotel costs will be minimal, as it's happening ten minutes from my house. For another, I get to be in an anthology with Donaldson. "Nearly famous," indeed!

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This post originally appeared in a slightly different form at Indies Unlimited.

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These moments of nearly famous blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

My own Fool's Journey (writing edition).

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been talking about various aspects of my new book, Seasons of the Fool. And in an aside a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that at one point, I embarked on my own Fool's Journey via a series of meditations with the Major Arcana of the Tarot, and that's what convinced me to start writing seriously.

I remembered that comment earlier this week, when my IU pal Laurie Boris talked about her own journey as a writer on her blog. Her post was sparked by a couple of questions Kim Emerson posted in the MasterKoda group on Facebook: Where were you as a writer ten years ago? How about five years ago?

Those questions had made me think, as well. (They made me do math, too -- darn it, Kim!) And I realized how far I've come in the past ten years. So let's set the Wayback Machine to 2004, Sherman....

Ten years ago, I was a single mom with two kids in high school. I had the same day job I have right now -- legal secretary at a big law firm in Washington, DC -- and way more education than anyone should ever need: a journalism degree, a creative writing degree, and a paralegal certificate. And I wasn't using any of it. I'd bailed on broadcast journalism five or six years before. The business had changed a lot since I'd started in it, to the point where there was less of an emphasis on news that mattered and more on news that would boost the ratings. And neither the crazy work hours nor the every-two-years-like-clockwork layoffs were conducive to raising kids.

I wasn't writing any fiction in 2004, either. Right after grad school, I'd tried marketing some of my short stories to various magazines and literary journals, but I didn't get any takers. In hindsight, I can see that the business was in transition (and still is, come to that); mass-market magazines had pretty much stopped publishing fiction, many smaller journals were succumbing to financial pressures, and e-zines weren't a thing yet. It had gotten to the point where your best option for getting published was to show up at writing seminars and schmooze with editors and agents, so they'd recognize your name when you sent them your work. And I had neither the budget nor the time for that sort of thing (see "single mom," above).

But by 2009, things were very different. I'd had two short stories published by Calderwood Press and was putting the finishing touches on The Maidens' War, which Calderwood published later that year. What had happened in the interim?

For one thing, my kids were both away at college, which freed up a lot of my time. For another, we published the Kevinswatch anthologies in 2006-07; for the first time in years, I was writing fiction again -- and I was writing fantasy, instead of trying to shoehorn my style into realistic fiction. I met Joy Calderwood at the Watch. E-publishing was becoming a thing. And I did my first NaNoWriMo in 2008.

I was beginning to think maybe I ought to do more writing. But it wasn't until I did the Fool's Journey exercise that I committed to it. You see, I'd always been under the impression that you couldn't make a living as a fiction writer. I kept thinking I needed something else to pay the bills. And too, I wanted to "pay it forward" -- to provide some way to help others write, too. So I thought maybe I'd start a writer's retreat B&B, or some kind of office-space-with-daycare facility, or something.

But when I posed the question to the Universe, the answer that came back was that I was supposed to be writing. The Universe wanted me to be a writer. All this other stuff was just a distraction.

So I began to concentrate on writing. Now I've got ten novels published, and another one in the slot. And as for paying it forward, I'm doing that by writing for Indies Unlimited. Funny how things work out, isn't it?

Where do I see myself five years from now, in 2019? If the Universe is kind to me, I'll be making a living from my books; I'll have another 15 novels published then, at my current pace. And in any event, I'll be eligible for early retirement at the end of that year. So one way or another, I'll be on the verge of writing full-time. No fooling.

Where were you ten years ago? And where do you see yourself in five years?

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This week, I'll be putting the finishing touches on a Land, Sea, Sky omnibus. And come to think of it, it's probably time for another newsletter. Stay tuned....

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These moments of bloggy reflection have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

What I did on my summer vacation (fangirl squee!).

Me, asking Donaldson his opinion of indie publishing.

I may have mentioned once or twice that my all-time favorite fantasy series is The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson. I read the first three books when I was in my 20s, just a few years after they were published. A college friend recommended them to me, but it wasn't until after I had graduated that I ran across them at the library, checked them out, and was hooked. The main character, Thomas Covenant, is an anti-hero: a cynical leper who finds himself plopped down in a wondrous land where he is cured of his disease, amidst people who believe he is some kind of hero. He fights the temptation to believe it's real, all the while pondering whether his own actions matter in a place he may have invented in his own head.

Those first three books redefined the genre of epic fantasy, which up until then had consisted of Tolkien's work and not much else. Donaldson followed up a few years later with the second three books of the Chronicles. He put off writing the final four-volume set until about twelve years ago; the final Covenant book, The Last Dark, came out last fall. In between, Donaldson wrote a high fantasy duology called Mordant's Need; the Gap cycle, a five-book sci-fi series; a couple of short story collections; and, as Reed Stephens, three mystery novels. (The mysteries, including a new fourth book, were republished under his real name a few years ago.)

In 2000 or so, not long after I started at my current day job, I ran a web search for information on the Chronicles. Donaldson didn't have a website (he does now), but I found a couple of fan sites. One of them was Kevinswatch, and among its features was a discussion board on the EZ Board platform. I joined more or less immediately. A couple of years later, when the EZ Board ads became too annoying, a member in New Zealand offered us space on his server, and that's where the Watch has been ever since. Over the past decade and a half, more than 3500 people from all over the world have joined the Watch, including Donaldson's webmaster, his beta readers, and the camera operator for the hilarious public-access TV show "Fantasy Bedtime Hour" (you can watch the episodes here -- Donaldson appears in three). The board has grown as well, expanding from the original Chronicles discussion threads to include separate forums for food, history, literature of all types (Donaldson fans, it turns out, are quite the well-read bunch), fan art, music, sports, writing, politics, philosophy, and games, including our own role-playing games. (And I've probably left something out.) In short, it's a community. Watchers have been known to remark that the Watch is one of the nicest places on the internet. Even our political forum is less rough-and-tumble than others of that ilk (or so I've been told).

It's entirely possible that had I never joined the Watch, I would not be a published author today. In 2006 and 2007, we created three anthologies of our own work. When our editor, Joy Calderwood, set up Calderwood Books, she asked me for the reprint rights to two of my stories from those anthologies. Then she published The Maidens' War in 2010. Thanks again, Joy, for believing in me.

One of our members lives in Albuquerque, where Donaldson also lives. In 2004, Danlo offered to host a sort of mini-convention at his house for whoever could make it, with the big draw being dinner with The Author. I missed the first Elohimfest, but I've made all the others, as well as a couple of regional gatherings. Many Watchers are now among my closest real-life friends.

Last weekend, we gathered in Albuquerque for Elohimfest 4. Nearly 40 Watchers from across the US and around the world (Australia, Ireland, the UK and Finland) attended. And on Saturday night, during the Q&A, I finally got up the nerve to ask Donaldson what he thought of indie publishing.

Maybe it was the venue, or the fact that I've now met him several times. But his response was much less dismissive than comments I've seen from many other traditionally-published authors. I can't give you a direct quote -- the video isn't up at his site yet, and I was too distracted to take notes -- but he recognized the sorry state of corporate-owned trad publishing, and he said indies and on-demand publishing might well save the industry.

Bless you, sir, for your kind comments, and for your books, and for being the catalyst behind the creation of the Watch. 

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Edited to add a link to fellow Watcher Rob Hope's take on E-fest, just so y'all know I'm not the only person who waxes rhapsodic about the Watch.

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These moments of bloggy fangirl squeeing have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.