This weekend will be the fifty-seventh iteration of Bubonicon, New Mexico’s premiere SF convention, held at the Marriott. I shall attend, and here be my schedule:

Friday Aug 21

6:30 PM, Santa Fe Room

Reading

Saturday Aug 22, 12 Noon Salon G

PANEL: THE DAILY POST, WEAPONIZATION OF THE INFORMATION SPHERE.

1 PM

PANEL: THE ETHICS OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, ASIMOV’S THREE LAWS AND BEYOND

4:35PM, Salon F

MASS AUTOGRAPHING SESSION

Sunday Aug 23, 12:30 PM, Salon F

PANEL: LET’S DO THE TWIST: I WASN’T EXPECTING THAT. (How to keep your plot surprising)

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Cat Island, the fifth and final of my Privateers & Gentlemen adventures, has been re-released by Flagship Editions and is available on Amazon.

The book is built around the long campaign to seize New Orleans for the British, and allows me to make use of the astounding number of extraordinary characters who were involved in that conflict: the pirate Jean Laffite, the ferocious Andrew Jackson, the French Revolutionary General Humbert, the Navy’s Commodore Patterson, and the largest British invasion fleet ever assembled (to date, anyway).

Plus Romance. Plus Intrigue. Plus Action. What more do you want?

I’ve been walking for exercise the last week or so. Which is not unusual in someone recovering from knee surgery, but I’ve had a foot so swollen that I couldn’t get a shoe on it, so walking was kinda out of the picture.

Daily application of compression sox finally reduced my foot to something like normal size, but it will still swell if I leave the sox off for too long. This afternoon I took my sock off and looked at my foot, which was skinny enough to look rather skeletal.

And then a little horror movie started.

Things were moving under the skin. Little swellings forming and moving and fading. And then my foot, of its own volition, began creeping along the floor. Millimeters at a time, but still. . .

It was creepy. And fascinating. And food for a horror film that spontaneously leaped into my head.

Now I’m waiting for Part II to start

Another fortnight, another Privateers and Gentlemen release from Flagship Editions. These are coming in quick succession!

This is The Macedonian, which is the name of a frigate captured by the Americans in 1812, and not a description of anyone in the book. This is the middle book in the Favian Markham trilogy, which opens with Favian’s court-martial, and ends with the war’s biggest reveal, by way of counter-espionage operations, the theft of the frigate in question, and a hairsbreadth escape.

Not to mention a narrow escape by my grandfather, Vihtori Kuusikoski, after an accusation of witchcraft. (The witch was actually my grandmother, but never mind).

Find the Macedonian, and others in the series, at Amazon.