Back from ConFusion

Howard Andrew Jones and Saladin Ahmed at ConFusion 2014. Photo by Al Bogdan.

Howard Andrew Jones and Saladin Ahmed at ConFusion 2014. Photo by Al Bogdan.

I’m back from ConFusion and working up a pretty detailed post about it for the Black Gate web site. Right now, though, I need to get to work, so I’ll just mention a few things in brief.

I finished Chandler’s The High Window on the way there and read most of Quarry’s Deal on the flight back. I was picked up by the mighty John Chris Hocking at the Detroit airport Friday and we had a memorable morning and afternoon wandering around Ann Arbor. Hocking is simply a princely fellow — he and his family are delightful people. Hocking gifted me with a stack of noir from his own collection (along with a Nate Heller book and Leigh Brackett’s No Good from a Corpse), and then picked up some more noir for me when we went to an award winning mystery bookstore, Aunt Agatha’s . I have additional details about all of that in the Black Gate article, which I’ll probably take live in the next day or so.

I may take a brief vacation from my noir exploration, though, as I returned from the con with a number of fantasy books. Brian McClellan and I traded volumes, and I picked up Matthew Thyer’s The Big Red Buckle and Jane Irwin’s graphic novel Clockwork Game. And I mean to read something by new friend Ian Tregillis as soon as possible, although that might take me right back into noir, albeit with a fantasy slant.

Tomorrow I’ll try to type up something about the panels I participated in and provide a link for the Black Gate essay, but for now I’ll just say that I had a fantastic time and get back to work. I am under deadline, after all.