johnwilker.com

You are here: Home / Blog

Blog

Cons in the time of COVID

by

I’ve now finished all of my 360|Conferences events for the year, and have participated/watched two writer events.

This past weekend I attended my second MileHiCon, overall it was better than my first.

MileHiCon 52 was this past weekend, and October 2-3 was… I’m honestly blanking and all I have are Zoom links in my calendar, shrug.

Anyhow, many events just threw in the towel (Starfest, Rocky mtn Con, 20booksto50k, etc) so it’s nice that a few gave it their best shot to provide the community something to do. Here are some takeaways I gleaned.

Booths

Don’t bother with author alley/vendor areas. Thankfully MileHiCon wasn’t overly expensive, but it was all a waste. Zero sales that I can link to the event. No “came to my table” that I know of.

I saw this with 360|Conferences events as well. Our sponsors (gods bless ’em) didn’t get much traffic. It just doesn’t work the same as in-person.

Assuming 2021 is likely to still be virtual, I won’t be offering booths at 360 Events. I’ll find someting else to offer sponsors that gets them engagement.

panels/sessions

There are a lot of things to not like about online events. Being able to do the laundry, mow the lawn, etc. WHILE watching (or at least listening to) a session is not one of them IMO. I love the freedom that comes with virtual events.

It’s great to not be stuck in a ballroom, etc while still enjoying the amazing content.

As a panelist, it’s certainly nice to be in the comfort of my home office. To have notes, etc available if needed. MileHiCon specifically, it was nice to have a moderator, LOL. I need to work on my getting on panels game as there were several i felt I could have contributed to.

Overall

As an organizer, while I missed going out for drinks with folks, etc. I didn’t miss having to get up early and be at the venue from 7a to 8p. I was able to still work out, do stuff around the house, actually eat lunch, etc.

Also, from an organizer standpoint, the overhead is next to zero. No overpriced internet, food, etc. No swag. That was nice from a budget perspective.

As an attendee those are all negatives to a degree. While I haven’t made a ton of inroads in the writing community yet, being in the room is a must so from the networking perspective, MileHiCon and the other (Still can’t remember the name!) were for not.

So, you know one more feather in 2020’s fuck you cap for sure are events. There are plusses and minuses of on-line vs. in-person, to be sure but in any model things were just… ‘off’

I’m not overly hopeful that 2021 will see many in-person events, but here’s hopin’.

Finish a Book, Get Free Beer

by

Space Rogues 8 WIP – Done

So, this is a new one, and I have ZERO objections :)

Given that we’re moving into winter, and that Denver (and CO, and most of America) are racing towards new COVID-19 surges, Nicole and I went to one of our favorite breweries to do some “work from a patio, with beer,” work.

I was almost done with the first draft of “Here There Be Monsters” the 8th book in the Space Rogues series. An hour or so after we sat down, I typed “The End” and so took the above picture to celebrate, posting it to my instagram feed. Of course, being the good social media citizen I was I tagged my location, Empourium Brewing.

A few minutes later one of the staff comes out to offer virtual high fives and elbow bumps. It took me a second to realize she’d already seen my post!

We hung out for a bit more (hours and beers) then headed to our next stop (another brewery that was doing a sushi pairing!).

When the crew brought our bill out, they also gifted us a 4-pack of the beer Nicole and I were drinking!

A first for sure, and a trend I have no complaints with continuing forever. Might have to have the crew visit if they make it back to Earth again.

So anyway, that made my weekend!

Can We Just Start Over on Star Trek?

by

We watched Discovery Season 3 Episode 1 the other night. I’m cautiously optimistic.

To date we’ve watched 3 episodes of Season 1 before NOPING out.

We watched all of season 2 while fighting the urge to NOPE out. It wasn’t horrible but was bad. If there’s a bright point to season 2 it’s that it setup the Pike/Enterprise show.

Mild plot point spoilers ahead, if you haven’t seen season 3 episode 1.

Season 3 gives me hope (Not a lot though). We’re in the future, you can tell because there’s even more whiz-bang hologram interfaces and beds made out of smart pebble things. I’m sure those sheets are comfy.

My biggest reservation is “Solving the Burn”. In the “What to expect this season” bit at the end of the episode, there was a lot of Burnham “I’m going to figure out why the the burn happened” stuff.

Oh, if you haven’t seen it yet, the burn is the “Big bad” thing that ruins the future.

Now back to Burnham. So the Federation fell as a result of the burn, a lot of folks died. I guess all the smart ones because somehow we’re going to follow her figuring out what future people with better knowledge couldn’t, because… well you know, she’s Spock’s adopted Earth sister…

I’m the first to gripe when the “Good Trek” (That’s everything before Discovery) would show us something cool, then never revisit it. But Discovery (and Picard) suffer the exact opposite problem. They can’t seem to just have a show that doesn’t spend all season tackling 1 ridiculously outsized problem. As if Trek wasn’t built on episodic “fun”. Now if you miss an episode you’re as likely as not to have no damn clue what’s happening.

Discovery Season 2’s entire arc, would have been 2, maybe 3 episodes of any other trek show, and been better told.

I’ve been a trekkie since I was a kid, but jeez the folks they’re letting run the franchise right now are doing their level best to tell some really shit stories.

Scrivener for iOS (NOT iPadOS) needs some love

by

I get it. Software is hard and takes time. I’ve never begrudged developers taking the time to release good software and good updates.

Scrivener might be the exception to my “Don’t complain” policy.

Scrivener is still an iOS app, with an iPad interface. We’ve had iPadOS now for over a year. iPadOS 14 came out last month. In that time, Literature & Latte has released 2 updates to Scrivener iOS, the last being 9 months ago.

I get it, Scrivener isn’t the only application they have, and I don’t know if it’s even their most lucrative. I also don’t know if it’s trivial or not to recompile as an iPadOS app. Maybe if L&L was a bit more transparent I’d know.

What I also know is that now that I’ve moved to a more iPad Pro centered workflow, for my writing, Scrivener is becoming more annoying than not. Especially it’s antiquated way of viewing files in your project.

Have a document in your research folder? You have to back all the way up to the top level of your project, then go down from there to your research file. Find what you need, then reverse those steps to get back to the scene you’re writing.

The pain of looking up your research when writing in Scrivener

I’m normally very very pro Scrivener. If someone asked me today, I wouldn’t recommend the iOS version. The Mac version, yes, it’s great.

I use it daily. There have been times where I’ve needed to move things around and rather than deal with the clunky mobile interface, I come back to my office, wake up my computer, open scrivener after Dropbox has synced, and move things. Then I close it all down and go back to my iPad. It’s tedious, to say the least.

More and more DabbleWriter which I love overall, is looking more attractive as my main writing project app for iPad and desktop. I tend to move back and forth right now between the two tools, but maybe I’ll take a break on Scrivener and go all-in on Dabble for a bit.

Oh, by the way, I write Thrillers too.

by

Island of Secrets Cover

Lesson learned, release two books really close to each other, while also running conferences, means something will not get the love it deserves.

In this case, it’s my action/adventure thriller ‘Island of Secrets‘

I decided to branch out a bit from science fiction to write something a little more down to Earth. A team of treasure hunters going where they’re paid to go to find treasures and secrets long lost.

It came out last week, go grab it if you’re a can of Clive Cussler style adventures

Release Day! A Guy Walks Into A Bar

by


A Guy Walks Into a Bar

It’s here! It’s here! :)

Space Rogues 7: A Guy Walks Into A Bar is officially released! You can read it on your favorite eReader or (once Amazon gets their shit together) Paperback.

I love release day, especially now that I have a bit more idea what I’m doing. :) The book is written, edited, covered. And now people are reading it.

This one was a ton of fun to write and took a little inspiration from a guy’s trip I took to Disney World. I won’t get into the details (Spoilers!) but yeah this might be one of my favorite tales of the crew of the Ghost.

I hope you enjoy it!

Your Cart