{"id":3,"date":"2009-11-23T22:08:08","date_gmt":"2009-11-24T02:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.efwatkins.com\/blog\/?p=3"},"modified":"2009-11-23T22:09:29","modified_gmt":"2009-11-24T02:09:29","slug":"return-from-philcon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.efwatkins.com\/blog\/return-from-philcon\/","title":{"rendered":"Return from Philcon!"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the second year in a row, I spent my birthday weekend at Philcon in Cherry Hill, NJ. Not a bad way to do it, actually. I sold 8 books, so that made it a better birthday than if I had sold two…or one…or none. I shared a table with fellow members of the Garden State Horror Writers and did a “Rapid-Fire Reading” with fellow members of Broad Universe. It was nice to have a chance to socialize with writers from both groups. I also took part in panels on “200 Years of Phobias” and “What Price Immortality?” You don’t get a lot of time to prepare for these topics, so it can be a test of how fast you think on your feet. (Well, we were all sitting down, but you know what I mean.)<\/p>\n

I went to Jonathan Maberry’s reading on Saturday of his forthcoming YA zombie novel, from which he read a very moving passage. Yes, a serious, moving scene from a YA zombie novel! That takes talent.<\/p>\n

And I attended an amusing panel that night called, ‘Vampires: Geesh, We Just Can’t Get Rid of Them.” Contrary to what you might think, most of the participants were vampire fans, but analyzed whether the current fad of romantic\/sexy vampires is robbing them of their scary elements. I somewhat agree, and put in my two cents during the Q&A session.<\/p>\n

Anyway, this is my first entry in this new blog, and I will try to keep up with it regularly, even though I badly need the time for my actual writing. (Another issue I hashed out with the other GSHW folks over the weekend.) I’m nearly through a decent first draft of my next novel, and I don’t want to get so caught up in sharing my grand philsophical insights that I forget to finish it. (I have so few grand philsophical insights to begin with!)<\/p>\n

Also, I have a house guest coming this weekend and vacuuming to do. So for now, ‘night all!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the second year in a row, I spent my birthday weekend at Philcon in Cherry Hill, NJ. Not a bad way to do it, actually. I sold 8 books, so that made it a better birthday than if I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[85,12,11,7,8,10,9],"class_list":["post-3","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-events-and-appearances","tag-books","tag-broad-universe","tag-fiction","tag-gshw","tag-jonathan-maberry","tag-philcon","tag-vampires"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pJYyW-3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.efwatkins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.efwatkins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.efwatkins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.efwatkins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.efwatkins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.efwatkins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.efwatkins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions\/8"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.efwatkins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.efwatkins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.efwatkins.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}