This weekend is Word on the Street! It’s Toronto’s biggest book festival, my publisher Stelliform Press is there every year and loves it, so I’m excited too. Handselling books is incredibly rewarding when you love and care about the books and the people who made them—there’s this spark of positive feedback that happens, infectious enthusiasm on both sides, when you meet someone you know is going to appreciate a book you loved. I’ve done it for Reckoning, I’ve done it for Small Beer, now I get to do it for Stelliform. I’ll be there all day Saturday, then on Sunday Geoffrey W. Cole steps in—his short fiction collection Zebra Meridian is just out this month, and it is a head trip and a half. We’ve also published Geoff’s work at Reckoning, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to stick around long enough to get a chance to meet him in person.

I’ll also be signing copies of The Jaguar Mask, and I’ll have jaguar lollies for those as wants them as well as some Reckoning stickers and swag and who knows what other small exciting things.

Next, two weeks after that is the virtual International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (VICFA), the theme of which this year is “Pantheology in World-Building and Magic Systems”, and at which I get to run a panel discussion on the legacy of the Mesoamerican pantheon in modern storytelling. Which, yeah, is an awesome topic, it’s going to touch on colonialism and post-colonial SF as well as some really thorny questions about language, translation, exoticism, and appropriation, and and I’m super happy to get to do it with some writers whose work I really admire, including Guillermo Guardarrama Mendoza, Gabriela Damián Miravete, E.G. Condé and Rob Cameron. I think the exact schedule for that is not yet finalized, so I’ll post more about it in a week or so.

And there’s more after that! But for now, see graphic above. Phew.