The Countdown Begins

I want to state up front that this post is not an April Fool's joke. Seriously. Someday I'll have the creative energy to come up with an elaborate April Fool's prank, but that would require realizing ahead of time what day it is, and I sometimes have difficulties with that.

However, it is now April, and now I can say that Don't Hex With Texas is coming out later this month. Since there was such a fiasco with book availability and distribution on release day with the last book, now would be the time to visit the store where you plan to buy the book on the 29th and ask them if they're going to be carrying it. You could even special order it so that even if they're slow to shelve it, they might have your special-ordered copy waiting for you. With any luck, if a store wasn't going to be stocking it and got customer requests, then that might influence them to stock it, and if orders go up, then that looks good to the publisher.

Meanwhile, I've finally updated my web site to include info on the new book and a sneak peek at the first few pages. Here's the Don't Hex page.

I'm not doing as many events this year, but here's what I have scheduled so far:
I'll be part of the mass autographing at the Nebula Awards weekend in Austin. That's April 25, 5:30-8 at the Omni Hotel downtown. I don't think they'll have the new book early, so my plan is to hook unsuspecting new victims, but you could drop by and say hi while getting books from the dizzying array of SF/F authors who will be there (seriously, I'll be suffering a fangirl overload the whole weekend). (Plus, I was invited to this event by one of the honchos at Del Rey, so this is a good chance to prove that, yes, my books are seen as fantasy, and I have rabid fans, so having people around me would be nice.)

On launch day, April 29, I'll be doing a talk and signing at the B&N at TCU in Fort Worth at 6. Then on May 7 at 7 I'll be at the Borders in Plano. Beyond that, I'm going to ApolloCon, Conestoga, Worldcon and Fencon. (You can get the full schedule at the news page of my site.)

Car shopping update: At one of those car shopping/reviews web sites, I went ahead and filled out the form to get dealer quotes. I specified that I wanted to be contacted by e-mail only, but you still had to enter a phone number for the form to be accepted. Yep, very soon my phone was ringing off the hook. And, wouldn't you know, none of them, not even the ones who responded by e-mail, actually gave any quotes or offers. The closest I got was one sending me the window sticker info. So, yeah, that was a waste of time. I guess I'll have to visit to get offers, and then play them off each other. I really don't have the personality to do this sort of thing. I have a character lurking in my brain who might be good at it, though, so maybe I'll use this as a writing exercise and go car shopping as this character (but using my own name, of course). It doesn't help that I don't really care much about cars. They're a necessity in this part of the world, but I wouldn't mind at all giving up my car if I lived in a place where they weren't needed so much. What I really want is a TARDIS so I wouldn't have to worry about the physical point A to point B travel and instead could just hop instantly from one place (or time) to another, but they don't have a dealership in this area.