I’ll be at FOGcon 6 this weekend, so if you’ll be there, please say hi.  It’s my first FogCon.  The theme of the weekend is Transformations. The guests of honor are Jo Walton, Ted Chiang, and Octavia Butler (posthumously).

I’m scheduled for two events:

Friday, March 11 @ 4:30–5:45 pm

A panel called “From Caterpillar to Butterfly” with Jamie L Henderson, Ashley Christina , Theresa Mecklenborg, Colleen T. O’Rourke, Loren Rhoads

We all know that caterpillars turn into butterflies and tadpoles turn into frogs, but what other strange changes are out there in the natural world? How about male seahorses giving birth, or the way that temperature determines the sex of alligator babies? What creatures can change their reproductive roles, and how or when? What can we learn from Earth animals to make our aliens more interesting and more plausible? What, if anything, stays constant through those changes, and how?

My plan is to talk about octopi and how they inspired Vezali in the Templar books.

Saturday, March 12 @ 10:30-11:45 am

I’ll join Micah Joel and Writing Contest Winner Shara Tran for a reading.  I’ll be reading from No More Heroes, the third of the Templars novels. Micah plans to read from his debut novel.

Location: San Francisco Bay Area at the Walnut Creek Marriott.