Pure Speculation

Pure Speculation 2010 wrapped up yesterday. A great event, the panels I attended were all interesting, well worth the time.

Friday night watched a reading (written by Virginia O’Dine) based on Robert J. Sawyer’s novel Rollback and that was quite entertaining.

On Saturday Robert J. Sawyer and Tanya Huff discussed their different experiences having their novels turned into television series. I also attended Robert’s reading (the second of his I’ve been to, the last was at the Pure Speculation Festival a couple years ago) and had him sign my copy of his novel Wake*. I also got to watch an entertaining interview with Tanya Huff, where she discussed her novel The Enchantment Emporium.

My panel, a discussion of the Writers of the Future Contest and a reading of an excerpt from my story “Digital Rights” went well, I think. Thanks again to those who attended it!

On Sunday Mark Barazzuol, a former BioWare co-worker gave a good presentation on how to get into the videogame industry and I attended a panel where the On Spec editors discussed the process they used to select stories for their magazine. Ran into several former coworkers including David Chan (who is now with 3DI High-Fidelity Simulations) and Rob Bartel who is designing and marketing boardgames, his latest Two by Two should be on store shelves soon.

Spent some time at the On Spec booth, got to talk to editors Diane Walton, Susan MacGregor, Barb Galler-Smith and Ann Marston (who I met for the first time this weekend). I think the only editor I missed was Robin Carson, who did the editing for my story “Ragman’s Vow” a couple years ago.

Chatted with several folks at the various booths, including the fine folks at Northern Frights Publishing and Edge Publishing — I also attended Edge’s release party. Met several fellow writers and aspiring game designers over the weekend and hope to hear from them again.

Kudos to the event organizers, the programming was excellent, a great event all around. I’ll be there next year.

To those coming to my site for the first time, please check out the previous post for a bit of a site-map.

[* – I’m not much of an author stalker so I don’t have too many signed books, I think the first I ever had was Barbara Galler-Smith’s signature for her and Josh Langston’s book Druids… though this weekend I did catch up a bit as I had Tanya Huff sign The Enchantment Emporium, Randy McCharles signed his story “Ringing the Changes in Okotoks, Alberta” from Tesseracts 12, and E.M MacCallum signed her story from the Shadows of the Emerald City anthology.]