Tentative #Worldcon DC schedule (Dec. 15-19)!:

Wed 7:00PM Sip With the Stars

Thu 7:00PM The Work of Malka Older

Fri 7:00PM Sip With the Stars

Fri 8:30PM The Work of Nalo Hopkinson

Reading TBA.

http://discon3.org

My schedule for Capclave (Oct. 1-3 in DC) www.capclave.org:

Friday 4PM Walking the Anti-Hero Line

Saturday

3PM Ghost Stories

6PM Reading

7PM How Do I Use History Without A Ph.D. In It?

8PM Mass Signing

10PM Why Do Your Villains Want to Destroy Everything?

Sunday 1PM Character Arcs Other Than the Hero’s Journey

Agent of Exiles: The League of Set is now available!

Check out the description on my page for it.

My Awesome Con schedule in DC next weekend:

Friday 8/20 5:30-6:15 PM

Panel: Small Changes, Big Consequences: Alternate HistoryRoom 143AB

Sat. 8/21 2-4PM.

Graphic Audio at Booth 2051. Come by to chat, hear about my new Agent of Exiles series with them and their adaptations of my American Craftsmen books.

A new great review of Border Crosser, this one from Ernest Lilley!

Sometimes You Really Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover: Border Crosser by Tom Doyle

Part 2 of my interview by Lancer Kind is now up (episode 129). Part 1 is episode 128. This one talks about the process of writing Border Crosser, and a discussion of its psychological content. https://lancerkind.com/series/scifi-thoughts/

This 1^st part of Lancer’s interview of me probably has more of the arc of my writing career than anything else. So if you want to know how I got to this point, here it is. https://lancerkind.com/podcast/4958/

Here are the 2017 framing sections of the far-future Border Crosser story. The first appears at the beginning, the second in the late middle, and the third at the end:

1.

Now I am not early in the twenty-first century.

Now I am not early.

Now I am not.

Now I am.

Now is Monday morning, ship time, so I am against the Empire.

2.

INTERLUDE: EARLY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

I am early in the twenty-first century, and it is not accomplished. The whole world has gone to shit. I’m aware of my diagnoses, but writing about how I project my dark microcosm onto the macrocosm doesn’t make me feel better. I’m profoundly decentered, and I know it. The Hollywood narratives about people like me which imagine some fixed central point of rational self that some nice person can change are fairytales designed for sale to those nice people, because they don’t help me in the least. No, that’s not quite true—those narratives help me manipulate, gaslight, and obsess the helpful others this way and that, and we all fall down.

Why do I always do this to myself?

I’ve tried writing the world better, and it just won’t give. My future powerful Eris-self has taken my revenge on the universe and the assholes who run my world, and I don’t feel any better, because the assholes are still here in the real, and even if they go someday, I can’t wait that long.

Even without talking to the shrinks, I know what they’ll say about where this has to go next. I hate them because they’re right. I’ve gone out to the stars; now, I have to go into my bowels and dig out some old stupid pain to show them. It doesn’t help create anything; it just hurts. But I’m going to do it to keep my hands and mind busy, because the other things I might do still scare me.

I have to go back to the place from which no one rescues me.

3.

In the year 2017, a human being puts down a razor blade or pills or a gun or some other conventional instrument of self-harm and instead picks up a pen. The person hesitates, because this is part of their therapy, and they’d much rather hurt themself than do what the shrinks told them. Most of all, they don’t want to be here and now. So they write, “I am not early in the twenty-first century.”

They write while the world spirals downward, and everyone they know plummets with it. But even a constellation of profoundly decentered selves can, in words, make rooms of their own for the fractured bits, build many mansions in heaven, hell, and earth.

By the end, they decide that this story may hurt just enough to do the trick.

Here’s a link to the interview I did this past Tuesday with Mike Zipser of Fast Forward TV: https://youtu.be/PAtF35KP1o4

My reading from Border Crosser (a PG13 bit) starts at around 11:25 in.

Philcon.org Schedule this weekend, 11/20-22 (an online convention this year)

Reading: Sat. 3:30PM (with Border Crosser giveaway)

Panels: Fri. 8:30PM: From the Iron Bank to CHOAM: Business in Fiction

Sat. 11:30AM: What We Owe Each Other: Philosophy in SF&F Media

8:30 PM: What Else Might Have Changed?

10PM: The Adventures of Baron Munchausen