Meet me at Can*Con 2025 in Ottawa next Saturday, October 18!
|
Can*Con is a science fiction and fantasy convention in Ottawa put on by The Rocket Words Society. I’m planning to be up there on Saturday the 18th, hoping to meet many new people and quite a few folks I’ve connected with online but never met in person. The convention is at the Brookfield hotel in Kanata. My original “I’m going to write a novel!” plan had me targeting Can*Con 2023 for the release of my book, but it’s a much longer, more frustrating, and more rewarding journey than I’d expected. Now I think there’s a pretty good chance I’ll have an actual book in hand by 2026. Am I projecting confidence yet? Putting yourself out there and talking to people is something a lot of authors are uncomfortable with, and that includes me. I’m compensating for this with a t-shirt that should hopefully help to start many conversations: If you’re at the convention come over and say hello! Deadlines are very tight but if all goes according to plan, I should arrive with a pile of these bookmarks, so hit me up for one or two: There’s going to be a heavy dose of nostalgia for me at this event, since as a much, much younger man I spent a couple of years working on projects just across the street in the heyday years of Mitel, in what is now the Nokia campus. I promise to try to refrain from relating old war stories. |
Alan Langford
I write fiction, make images, and tinker with other creative things.
On Shifting Gears I was going to just put "Shifting Gears" the subject of this message, but then I realized that in this context it usually implies some sort of change in direction, a pivot, often with a subtext that the last thing wasn't working, and with much enthusiasm for the next thing. So no, I am not giving up on writing to focus my creative energies on being an aging rock star. Or whatever. What I was looking for is more along the lines of "moving into high gear," but I'm well aware...
Forgive me, but I must begin by complaining about our digital masters, of the email sub-type. The latest word from the people trying to turn email into a "closed garden"1, namely Google and Microsoft, is that the best way to ensure "deliverability" is to make sure you post to your subscribers regularly, preferably at least monthly. For those not into the finer points of email, poor deliverability means that Google might route a message into the Spam or Promotions folder, and Microsoft might...
It's probably fairly common knowledge that the vast majority of software development projects take much more time, more effort, and more money than planned. There was a time where the majority of development projects got cancelled before they delivered a working product. Software project managers had a standing joke: The project is 90% complete, now it's time to get started on the remaining 90%! That line captures my feelings for working on this novel. Just as it seems like I'm in the home...