The day before, 4pm Friday September 9th, I’ll be doing a reading of What Lies Beneath The Clock Tower at Camas Books as part of the weeklong festival of anarchy:

4pm, Camas Books, 2590 Quadra

Rapid Consensus Decision-Making Workshop and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Reading by Margaret Killjoy

Practice your consensus decision-making skills by way of this interactive reading of a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. Anarchist fiction writer Margaret Killjoy will be reading from What Lies Beneath The Clock Tower, a story of vice and revolution that thrusts its hapless protagonist into a full-scale anti-imperialist revolution being waged by colonized goblins against the gnomish masters.

Event link requires facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=184160934981972

Friday, July 22nd:
1pm: Steampunk & the Apocalypse
5pm: What Lies Beneath The Clock Tower

Saturday, July 23rd:
10am: Publishing panel
12pm: Authors panel

Sunday, July 24th:
3pm: How to Publish

It’s also likely I’ll stick my head in on some of the more political panels, and of course I’m also doing a free reading of Clock Tower at the anarchist bookfair on Saturday at 5pm.

Combustion Books and Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness will be tabling together, and I’m also happy to see that Graceless co-conspirators Ambient Transient will be there as well.

The bookfair is free. So you should come.

My speaking schedule is:

Saturday, 7:45-9:00 PM, Room 238
Choose Your Own Steampunk Adventure: An Interactive novel
Margaret will lead the audience on a live interactive jaunt through his new novel What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower, with a chalkboard to note particular forks and paths.

Sunday, 10:15-11:30 AM, Room 320
Writing for Radicals
Speculative fiction thrives on a dialogue with chewy ideas and can be counter to the suspicion that bringing politics in leads to bad writing. But whether the content is radical politically or the techniques experimental, writing as a radical makes an already difficult task even more challenging. Let’s talk about what radical writing entails and what might help, what works and what doesn’t.

1:15-2:30 PM, Room 320
Anarchism and Fiction
From The Monkey Wrench Gang to For the Win, anarchism is a powerful theme in fiction. This roundtable is a discussion of historical and contemporary anarchist fiction focusing on anarchist representation in fiction and the work of anarchists within the world of fiction-writing.

That something like Think Galacticon exists makes me enormously happy, and I can’t wait to attend.

Or maybe “stoked’ is a better word to describe how I feel about attending Portland’s steampunk convention, GearCon, July 22-24th. (You know, since “stoked” is sort of a pun about steampunk, cause you stoke a steam engine.) I believe I’ll be doing a reading and generally attempting to worm my way onto panels about steampunk and politics and things like that.

And that same weekend, July 23-24th, is the Portland Anarchist Bookfair, which I hope I’ll have a chance to present Clock Tower at as well, and maybe ramble about some other stuff.

And I wish I was at Die Blaue Stunde again (sorry, site is in German), a DIY goth party of radical neo-romantics and other strange folks.

On Friday, 5pm, in the Coolige room, I’ll be presenting Steampunk & The Apocalypse with my friends from Combustion Books (and hawking A Steampunk’s Guide To The Apocalypse of course).

Saturday, at noon, in the concierge lounge, I’ll be part of the Steampunk Bible booklaunch, a book I’m quite excited about because I trust the editors of it completely. (I can’t wait to see my copy. One downside to being nomadic is that I only pick up my mail a few times per year.)

Then on Sunday, 10am, Coolige room, I just discovered I’ll be a panelist at the Envisioning a Better Steam Society: Social Issues & Steampunk panel, moderated by Ay-leen the Peacemaker of Beyond Victoriana. From the description:

A discussion panel where panel participants discuss their thoughts about finding aesthetic inspiration in a historical era rife with sexism, racism and classist thinking. Can the steampunk subculture come to terms with its problematic past, or are we just repeating history, except with ray guns? Together with the audience, we hope to engage in an open dialogue about whether steampunk confronts or condones the historical ideas behind its inspiration, how nineteenth century thinking is re-interpreted in the present day, and what makes steampunk actually “punk.”

And starting on Saturday, gods willing, I’ll have copies of What Lies Beneath The Clock Tower.

I haven’t been to a steampunk event in years, and I’m excited as hell. It’s no secret I burned out on steampunk for awhile, growing sick of all the glorification of imperialism and obsession with trying to get on MTV. But it seems like a really good strong crop of people came up through it and are dedicated to utilizing steampunk as a lens with which to critique and understand contemporary society. And let’s face it, not everyone wants to be a punk-punk, so I’m glad that *punk has come around and opened the doors to DIY culture and anti-authoritarianism for more people. It’s not every day that a new subculture crops up that, for example, specifically includes a lot of people in their thirties and older who’ve never been subculturally affiliated. So fuck yeah, I like steampunk.

Now to figure out what the hell to wear.