Eastercon: the photos

So at Easter, I went to ... Eastercon!

It might look sunny, but snow was piled up on the sidewalks.

It's an annual SF/Fantasy convention with an emphasis on books rather than other media, and it's been going since the 1940s. Wow!

The first thing I thought when I arrived was, "Goddamn, I should be wearing a beard."

There were a lot of panel discussions, and  I sat on two of them.
"Editing and Being Edited", in which I tried my best to plug "Geek Love":

Me sitting next to Bella Pagan of Tor books - probably the nearest I'll ever get to a mainstream publisher!

And "Robert E Howard and H P Lovecraft," which - despite the serious faces - was a lot of fun for me because I ranted about the sexuality in their work and everyone else looked a bit nervous:

NB: Sarah Newton is currently writing the "Achtung Cthulhu!" game ... I want!

I also attended a lot of panels, and watched the new season premier of Doctor Who in a hall with 700 rabid fans ...

... and went out for a curry (well, it was Bradford, it would be crime not to) and did a (mostly clean) reading:

And watched a couple of Lovecraft films and signed some books and ate a ton of junk food and TALKED to loads of people, old friends and new ones and total strangers. And I met Paul Cornell at last.

I had lots of fun, and though I'd describe myself as too introverted to cope with this sort of thing for long, I seem - bizarrely enough - to be signed up for two more cons this year - Nine Worlds Geekfest and World Fantasy Con. I'm exhausted already!

Here I am with Adrian Tchaikovsky, author of the Shadows of the Apt fantasy series:

See? I so need a beard...

Adrian and I co-wrote a novella, Reading Between the Lines (NOT erotica: dark fantasy) a while back, and it's about to be published by Pandemonium Press this May.

Isn't this the most beautiful cover by Vincent Sammy!

Pandemonium specialise in high-quality extremely limited edition collectable print runs, so you'd have to sign up to their newsletter to get even a chance of ordering this book. But I think it's sorta cool.