Over the past two weekends I was able to attend two really great author/literary events.
I read my story “the Blooming” with the local chapter of the Horror Writers Association at the Hayward “LitHop” event on April 30th. Fun event, with the HWA reading horror stories for the first hour, and then the local chapter of the Mystery Writers of America getting sinister in the second half. Sounds like they’re planning that to be an annual event, so if you happen to be local to the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Area, keep an eye out for it again next spring.
This past weekend was the Bay Area Book Festival’s triumphant return to scenic downtown Berkeley. Always a fun event, though it does always feel weird to me when I arrive, and remember that the are set up for vendors and authors is in the same park where the stoners used to hang out when I was in high school.
The Book Fest was a lot of fun, and I highly recommend others check it out in the future. I’ve gone twice now as a representative of the HWA and had a good time. Some day I’d love to go and sit in on some of the panels, presentations, etc., but I’m usually too busy working at the booth.
As a promo item, I had a QR code at our booth which would take people to a download page to get a free epub of my story “the Blooming” (the same one I read at the LitHop). And my takeaway from the weekend was that nobody pays attention to QR codes. I had the thing posted in a couple different spots at the booth over the entire weekend, and only got 2 scans the whole time.
Anyway, if you’ve read this far, and are interested, here’s a link to download “the Blooming.” It was first published in early 2020 in the charity anthology “Infected: Tales to Read at Home.” It looks like that publisher has closed up shop, and the book’s getting harder to find, unfortunately.