The Festival of Fear

I'm not sure if anyone is reading this. In fact, I'm reasonably certain at this point that no one is reading this blog.

But it's only been up for three days, and you have to start somewhere.

I'm scheduled to appear at something called "The Festival of Fear" in Toronto next month. Medallion Press has arranged for me and a few other of their horror authors to sign books during the convention. I don't really like book signings, for reasons I'll get into in a future post. But I did a few at BookExpo America in DC last year, which was (I think) a similar setting to this thing in Toronto. The Medallion reps did a fantastic job of driving foot traffic to the booth in DC. So good in fact, that it actually began to appear as though I had fans -- for a few minutes. Then I looked over and saw that I was signing books during the same time slot as Newt Gingrich and the Born-Again Christian Baldwin brother, both of whom had much longer lines than I did.

I don't think either of them will be at The Festival of Fear though.

In any case, as I understand it, this festival is put on by Rue Morgue, a Canadian horror magazine. I read a few issues when Medallion put some ads in there for Lucifer last year. The content was good. Lots of gore and some really sick stuff that beats the hell out of anything I've written. So I'm hopeful that they'll be putting on a good convention.

This will be a first for me. I've never been to any kind of fan convention. I'm not quite a Trekkie (I won't even use the "correct" term Trekker) although I do love the show. Any inkling I might ever have had to attend a Trek convention though was stamped out about two decades ago by the infamous William Shatner SNL episode. I have never even considered going to anything similar since.

Will it still be lots of guys who live in their parents' basements, only walking around wearing Jason goalie masks instead of Spock ears?

I'm curious to see. If they want to read one of my books, I don't really care what they're wearing anyway.