Mile High Con, Updates, and Teasers

Made some site updates: cleanup mostly, plus I added a link to another nice review on the review page.

July 26, 27, and 28 were Mile High Con, in Denver, CO. I gave a reading from Looking Glass, as well as a sneak preview reading from my next book, tentatively titled Irreconcilable Differences. The Looking Glass readings are getting smoother. I found a site online that offered a number of good suggestions for them. Particularly useful were the suggestions to print a large-print version of the reading section, and to understand that readings are differently paced from reading the novel yourself, and it's a good idea to edit the reading to take out particularly description that, while important to the story in the long run, will tend to drag the reading down. Sound advice, all from Charles Stross's excellent site, which in turn was recommended on Wil Wheaton's blog. Thanks to Wil and Charles both.

So about this Irreconcilable Differences book.
The truth is, I'm not going to tell you much about it, because, despite having been originally set down last summer (2006), it's still in pretty primitive state, and a great deal is in flux in it. I can tell you that it is set in the same world as Looking Glass. I can tell you that the main characters are Micki Blake, a teenaged hacker girl, and the personality model of an Interpol agent named Rachel Santana. Rachel exists in hardware installed in Micki's body. She's also the narrator.

It's a bit of a different animal from Looking Glass. It's a deeper exploration into cyberpunk in the great plains, where I've lived almost my whole life, and how the waves of technology that pass through cultures effects these more rural places. Not everyone lives in Gibson's Sprawl, so the impact is very, very different. Differences is also a deeper exploration into how the world of Looking Glass works. It digs into the political angle more, and offers more hints on how the collapse of the United States happened.

Anyway. Happy All Hallows Eve, all. Enjoy the candy. :)

-JRS

Some days, guessing right is scary.

Ever wonder what an early induction rig might be like? See this article. When I wrote Looking Glass, I worried that my dates might be so close to the real calendar that it would be laughable when technologies didn't appear on schedule. Now I have to wonder if I didn't put the technology close enough.

Re: Marta Strickland being the poster of the article; as Babs and Buster Bunny so often said, "No relation."

-JRS