It’s that time of year again, when I pack up my bag and head downtown Ottawa for Can-Con! What’s Can-Con? It’s the Conference on Canadian Content in Speculative Arts and Literature (yeah, it’s a mouthful), and it’s pretty much magic. This year, I’m not only taking part in Can-Con, I’ve hooked arms with two other awesome Bold Strokes Books authors and we’re going to be manning a table in the dealer room with queer Canadian SF titles from Bold Strokes.
The full schedule for Can-Con is here, but if you’re looking for me specifically (and aw, aren’t you the best?) here’s where I’ll be taking part in a panel today:
Romantic Story Structures
Friday October 12th, 2018; Salon-E; 4:00 pm. Traditional romances can have some difficult plot problems. The writer must, over the course of a novel, prevent the romantic fulfillment of two characters who are obviously attracted to one another. This panel of romance writers discusses the broad structures and beats they use to evoke reader emotion. ‘Nathan Burgoine, Jenn Burke, Jessica Ripley, Leslie Brown (Moderator)
I’ll also be on a panel tomorrow morning about the economics of the publishing world, and moderating two panels on Sunday: one about how so many of our genre favourites really haven’t aged that well, and another about where Urban Fantasy is today—and where it could maybe be heading. I’ll be back to post more about those tomorrow and Sunday.
But Wait, There’s More…
Now, I mentioned before there was a Bold Strokes Books table, and here’s the kicker about the Dealer room at Can-Con: it’s open to the public. The hours the Dealer room operates are:
Friday: 2 PM — 7 PM
Saturday: 10 AM — 5 PM
Sunday: 10 AM — 2 PM
Drop by, say hello, and find yourself some awesome queer Canuck science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, or horror! I’m bringing all my spec-fic offerings, which means Light, Triad Blood, Triad Soul, Of Echoes Born and—for the first time, ahead of its release anywhere else—I even have copies of Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks. So if you want to be one of the first to read my queer gay YA kid with a teleportation problem, now’s your chance.
At all times, either myself, Stephen Graham King, or Christian Baines will be there.
If you don’t know Stephen Graham King yet, allow me to squee about how much you need to read the Maverick Heart Cycle books, Soul’s Blood and Gatecrasher, and how they’re basically Killjoys-meets-Firefly-only-Queer. You want to get squishy, trust me. King’s world-building is beyond awesome, and reading his books means finally finding space opera inclusive of people like me.
And Christian Baines brings the dark in such a brilliant way—and we all know how I feel about dark usually, so from me this is all the more praise, lemme tellya—and his Arcadia Trust novels (The Beast Without and The Orchard of Flesh) are two of the most vividly crafted urban fantasies I’ve ever read (and also one of the most viscerally crafted ones, too). His vampires—sorry, Blood shades—are not gonna sparkle, trust me.
Even better? We managed to make sure our other Canadian authors at Bold Strokes Books who dabbled in the science fiction sides of things would be there in spirit, so we have copies of both Lambda Literary winning Jessica L. Webb‘s first two novels in her Dr. Kate Morrison thrillers, Trigger and Pathogen, as well as C.J. Birch‘s first two books in her New Horizon series, Unknown Horizons and Savage Horizons.
'Nathan Burgoine 