I’ll be doing several events in New York next week for The Inquisitor’s Apprentice. I’m loading up the car with dry socks and cookies to take down to Zuccotti Park. (I only mention this in case you’re looking for somewhere to donate your excess dry sock supply.) Also, I’ll be doing signings and panels with with Very Cool People, including some I’ve never met before and am fannishly excited about meeting….
Complete listing of upcoming events at www.inquisitorsapprentice.com, but here’s a quick rundown of the New York events:
Thursday, October 13, 7pm: “Before and After Harry Potter: YA, SciFi, and Fantasy.” Center for Fiction Conference on Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea Trilogy (Mercantile Library, 17 E 47th St between 5th Ave & Madison Ave, NY NY). This conference (and the panel) are incredibly cool. Among other reasons because the other panelists are Holly Black, Cassandra Clare, Delia Sherman, and Justine Larbalestier. Kewl!!
Saturday October 15, 5:30 pm: I will be autographing books at New York ComiCon with illustrator Mark Edward Geyer. We will be handing out free books! And Mark has promised to bring cool art stuff too. At NY ComiCon, the Javits Center, NY NY.
Sunday October 16, 1-3 pm: “Thrills, Chills, and Magic” (Books of Wonder, 18 West 18th Street, NY NY.) Mark will also be at this panel. And other panelists include Chris Grabenstein, Terry Castle, and Sam Ita.
I’d love to see you while you’re in town! Drop me a note if you have time for lunch or something.
P.S. I’m used to being able to hit tab and get to the “post comment” button, so tab-enter is a quick keystroke combo for me. On your website, tab from the comment box takes me to the top banner, so tab-enter takes me to the main page of your site and erases my comment. I have no idea whether this is a thing you can fix in your current blog style, though.
Hmm. I see what you mean. Don’t know how to fix it though. I’ll ask around. On the other hand, lunch I CAN do! And I was just about to email when you beat me to it …
Whether you can alter the hotkey functions depends on which CMS you’re using. If you google your blogging software’s name, you can probably hunt down sites that will tell you what you can customize in it.
Have fun meeting hordes of excellent authors. I’m not bitter with envy at all…nope, not one bit…grrrr….
Incidentally, I think some of your readers might get the impression that you must be a whiz-bang hacker since you write about things such as AI and evolutionary algorithms so aptly. FWIW, that’s a heck of a reflection on your authorly skills. Most cyber-punk-influenced authors I read, I can tell pretty quickly whether or not they’ve ever written code. I call it the Condorman Effect.
“Kids all over the world read my stuff. They trust me. They know if I fake it.” ~ Woodrow “Woody” Wilkins
But I was genuinely surprised you’re not a programmer. I’ll bet you’re not even a real sorcerer either
Nope, not a programmer, though I am a long-time amateur UNIX tinkerer and I learned enough LISP and FORTRAN way back in the paleolithic to have a gut sense of how programming languages work.
Also, my family is riddled with AI designers and quantum cryptographers and other socially awkward and exotic creatures. So basically when I write computers I start from theoretical CS and information theory research that *I* think is really intriguing, imagine how it might generate some far future technology … and then work my way toward a realistic sounding programming terminology.
Which I guess basically means that I write the programming scenes bass-akwards.
Or should I say BASH-akwards? (BadaBing!)
Ouch!
You do invent plausible terminology, but the real difference is with your ability to grasp the often counter-intuitive (to soft little human brains spoiled by natural language) ways in which computers ‘think’. Almost every fictional self-aware AI I’ve ever read had far more in common with their imaginers’ human minds than with what could plausibly be extrapolated from today’s fledgling attempts at machine intelligence. But I could really believe Cohen and its associates were descended from that lineage.
That right there puts you on surer footing than many an aspiring CS student today.
Student: “Whay do I have to earn BASIC and FORTRAN?!! Nobody uses FORTRAN anymore. Everything’s in C++…can’t I just start with that?”
Teacher: “No! You have to learn FORTRAN because I had to learn FORTRAN, and you will validate my suffering.”
Gotta go, kids on the lawn…