Conflux | Cannibal Murder Star Trek
I'm going to Conflux this weekend for panels and the Ditmar awards. Plus, I'm preparing to crowdfund a new comic.
Hey, killers. It’s been a busy couple of weeks here with the High Holy days and school holidays and various other events keeping me away from the keyboard. Lots to talk about in the business of writing with the WGA deal and new wrinkles on the AI front, but this week I want to focus on what I am doing in the immediate future.
Let’s go.
Conflux
I will be at the Conflux speculative fiction convention in Canberra this weekend. The theme this year is Passages and Portals, which those anyone who read my novel 2022 novel X-Dimensional Assassin Zai through the Unfolded Earth will know is a subject very close to my heart. In the novel, I use the phrase Doors and Ways, which any good thesaurus will suggest amounts to the same thing. Doors and Ways. Different avenues that give access to extraordinary worlds. Parallel dimensions, adjunct realities, alternate earths, and places beyond. But of course, there’s usually no escaping the unique hell of the airport…
X-Dimensional Assassin Zai is on the shortlist for the Ditmar awards this year, which will be presented on Saturday night at Conflux. It’s dark horse candidate for sure, but it is a real honour to be on the list with such an excellent set of writers.
I will be on a number of panels during the event as well. If you’re coming, you can now see the program in full. Otherwise, here’s my timetable:
Panel Beater | Saturday 10:00am
How to behave on convention panels.
Working with Illustrators | Saturday 12:45pm
Guide for working with visual artists in comics and other media.
Dating While Creative | Sunday 11:15
How to get a life while being a creative person. This is how I met my wife.
Truck-Kun and You: Portal Fantasy, Isekai, and Transmigration | Monday 11:15
Portal fantasy, especially a look at Western vs Japanese treatments of the genre.
Sticking the Landing | Monday 2:230pm
How to end stories well.
Cannibal Murder Star Trek
Did you ever think that Star Trek would be more fun if the officers were, um, space cannibals?
Well, I do, and I made a graphic novel about it. I have been sitting on the mostly complete Gourmand Go through the Covid pandemic, waiting for the right time to launch it. Moving house, a huge slate of deadlines, and no small amount of fear and trepidation delayed me, but I have enlisted some professional help and the time is nigh upon us.
The campaign should launch in October and I think it’s going to be a cracker. The art, by a swathe of excellent Australian artists including co-creator Hazz Purnell, Laura Renfrew, Gavin Thee Thomson, Mat Kyme, Cristian Roux, Aly Faye and Ben Michael Byrne, is absolutely delicious and I can’t wait to serve you up a portion.
In the meantime, the pre-launch link is up. If you click through you can sign up to be notified as soon as the campaign goes live. You can also be sure I will keep you posted here on Substack.
In the meantime, please indulge me a quick poll. Shipping of material from Australia is ridiculously expensive these days. For those of you who are overseas—Substack tells me the majority of my readers are from North America—I am trying to work out now if it’s worth setting up physical reward tiers, or if you’d just prefer to receive digital books.
It is relatively easy for me to set up print-on-demand copies of the book which will be much cheaper to ship to you, but that would prevent me from signing the books. One option is for me to send out signed book plates which you can sticker onto your copy, which should only cost a small amount extra. A final, more costly option, is for me to ship the same edition to you that Australian backers will receive, which of course I’ll be happy to sign.
I would very much appreciate it if you’d drop an answer in the poll below—or you can just reply to this email with your thoughts.
That’s it for this week. Next week’s message will probably be delayed next week by Conflux, but I expect I’ll drop some more discussion about the WGA and AI, as well as some more details about Gourmand Go.
Frankly yours,
— Jason