Randy Packer (left) and Devon Boorman of Academie Duello, the highly respected swordfighting school here in Vancouver, give a demonstration of fighting with rapiers (and a shield, and a dagger, in this particular photo) this morning at VCon 31. It was a fascinating presentation and left me with one indelible impression: any duel between men …
Emily swam through the tunnel as fast as she could, hoping she hadn’t misjudged how close the drone was and the range of its weapon…and also hoping its artificial intelligence wasn’t smart enough to realize just how rotten the rock was in Sawyer’s Point, because all it would take was one discharge to bring the …
More photos here. Here’s the view from the 13th floor suite SF Canada had its party in tonight at VCon. Another good day. As you’ll see below, I managed almost 2,500 words of fiction today, not bad considering I also participated in a (very intimate) panel discussion of playwriting (panelists agree: it’s not the same …
As I’ve mentioned before, my old home town of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, home to the Saskatchewan Mental Hospital, was also a place where, in the 1950s and early 1960s, groundbreaking work on the use of LSD for medical purposes took place. (Weyburn is also the town where the word “psychedelic” was coined.) One of the reseasrch …
Finding the boat had been a stroke of luck, Emily thought. Current word count: 43,754New words this session: 2,452Percentage of novel completed: 43.7 Today’s total wasn’t entirely written at Second Cup, for a change. I wrote half at Second Cup, then half in the Foggy Dew, the Irish pub I mentioned before that’s attached to …
So, day one of VCon has come and gone. As noted earlier, I started the day by finding a Second Cup so I could work on the new novel. I need to pick up the pace, I think; I’ve probably averaged a little better than 1,000 words a day on it, and at that rate, …
More photos here. UPDATE: Welcome visitors from SF Signal. Why not buy my SF novel Lost in Translation while you’re here?
He hadn’t paid much attention to the navigation screens for a while, but now it was time set a course back to Hansen’s Harbor–which I never should have left in the first place, he thought. Current word count: 41,302New words this session: 1,226Percentage of novel completed: 41.3 I was able to find a Second Cup …
Emily wasn’t kept guessing long: an hour after the pounding in the habitat ceased, she knew the killer drone had somehow managed to break through the doors and was on her trail. Current word count: 40,076New words this session: 506Percentage of novel completed: 40.0 A smallish number of words yesterday, what with getting ready to …
So here I am in scenic Vancouver (well, Richmond, technically) to attend VCon 31, a very fine science fiction convention being held here at the Executive Airport Plaza hotel. Just how scenic is it? Check out this photo of the local wildlife–some kind of giant crane–taken through my hotel window. These cranes must be nesting …
“A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.” – Lazarus Long (Time Enough for Love, Robert A. Heinlein). Alas, there are a lot of people with this particular nasty habit.
Remember the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Grand Challenge, in which robot cars raced across a 212-km desert course? Now the robots are moving into the city and taking on traffic.
