Back Home, Happy Book Day, and a NEW CONTEST!!!

Yay!! The German release of The Skewed Throne, retitled Die Assassine, has officially hit the shelves today! If you're in Germany, read German, check it out! And if you're not in Germany but you read German, check it out online. And if you don't read German, but you know someone who does, please let them know about it. I know some of you have already done this and I thank you profusely. It would be spectacular if the book took off in Germany.





I've been running a contest, giving away copies of the hardcover US edition of the book for the last 10 days, and the winner for the last day is . . . evaleastaristev! Congrats! Send me your address either here on LJ as a message or at jpalmatier@sff.net. Give a name if you'd like it personalized, otherwise I'll just send a signed copy.

And for the rest of you, never fear! There will be future contests. In fact, there's going to be a new contest right now! This contest was inspired by a situation that arose at the last signing, in Paramus, NJ:

The signing went on for four hours, but as invariably happens, when it came to an end and everyone was packing up, we had a rush of people who wanted to know what was going on, etc. We usually sell books at this point, and this time wasn't an exception. Someone wanted me to sign a copy of the book for them, so I asked their name--"Dave"--asked them to spell it (just in case, I never assume it's spelled the usual way), and they said "D . . . A . . . V . . . E" with a smile. I started to sign the book and Dave asked, "Do you prefer Josh or Joshua?" I said that it doesn't matter, Josh is fine with me . . . and promptly signed the book "To Josh."

*headdesk*

I got a new book and signed that one to Dave, of course, and then I bought the book I'd screwed up. So, I have a paperback copy of The Skewed Throne signed "To Josh" . . . and I figured I'd run a contest with that as the prize. Why not?

To enter, simply comment here with a reason why YOU deserve a book signed "To Josh." The entry with the best reason, whether I decide it's the most humorous or simply the most deserving (if your full name is Josh Joshua Joshuapus, for example), is totally up to my discretion. So give me your best response and we'll see who gets this special copy.

And finally for today, I had a few of you ask why the one panel didn't go so well . . . it was a combination of things. Mostly though, I went into the panel with the idea that it would be about HOW to write gender issues (it was called "Writing Gender Issues"), with us giving tips and tricks on how to do that, ways to be careful on how you treat those issues yet still allow yourself to be free to write what you want, etc. Instead, it ended up being a discussion of the issues to some extent. I figured I was on the panel because I'm a man who wrote a first person, intensely personal story of a woman and part of the panel description was about that (men writing women, women writing men). But we didn't spend much time on that before it became more about sexuality representations in novels. Which is fine as a panel topic, but I don't think it was the intent behind the panel. Since I wasn't that prepared for that, I kind of sat back after I'd had my say on the "men writing women" issue at the beginning and let the panel run its course.

But anyways, I'm back. I need to do some work on fallout from the con (contacting people, sending out projects, etc) today, get the prizes ready to mail for the contest winners (since I was away for a good chunk of the contest), and begin to obsessively watch the Amazon.com.de ranking numbers for Die Assassine. *grin*