Good Book Hunting, Saturday, August 17, 2019: LibraryCon 2019

Subtitle: Daddy’s been a bad, bad boy.

This is my third year going to LibraryCon, a little one day convention that the Springfield Greene-County Library puts together (see also 2017 and 2018). Last year, I bought more books than the previous year. This year? Boy, howdy.

I got a bunch.

We got there while many of the comic book artists were in a conference room, which limited my comic book and graphic novel intake, but it had a larger supply of authors than in years past.

So I got:

• A Blade So Black by L.L. McKinney. The author, from Kansas City, tells me it’s like Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s adventures through the looking glass in Wonderland.
   
• A Trial By Error by Susan Eschbach which looks to be a science fiction romance novel. I say this because some of the other books on the writing group’s table were genre/romance books.
   
• Several books by Levi Samuel. When I got to his table, I thought he looked familiar, but I didn’t recognize the name or his series. When he waved to milk crates to his right with discounted books, I recognized Dammit Bre. This is the same guy using a pseudonym. Sorry, a nom de plume. So I bought a fantasy trilogy, the Heroes of Order (Izaryle’s Will, Izaryle’s Prison, and Izaryle’s Key) and an urban fantasy book, The Pandora Gambit, to join The Order of the Trident on my to-read shelves. At least these will be at the top.
   
• The only two books so far in the Earthborn Legacy series by Matthew S. Devore, Earthborn Awakening and Earthborn Alliance where elves ruled the Earth before being wiped out by an enemy that has now come for man, who allies with a couple of elves who escaped destruction. Sounds interesting with some similar elements to a fantasy novel I started, and the author was a great fellow. I’m looking forward to reading these sometime in the next decade.
   
• Two mystery/romances by Barbara Warren, Murder at the Painted Lady and Hidden Danger, from the same table as A Trial By Error Genre/romances and Christian from what one of the placards said.
   
• Four books by Elton Gahr: Random Fantasies, a collection of fantasy stories; Random Realities, a collection of science fiction stories; Spaceship Vision: The Impossible Dream, a science fiction novel; and Middlemen: The Brother’s War, part of a fantasy series that is interconnected but not dependent on each.
   
• Sharing a table with Gahr was a graphic novel guy, Seth Wolfshorndl. I bought a couple of graphic novels from him, including Rook City (with Gahr as the writer), and Duel! as well as a comic (Evil Ain’t Easy).
   
• Comic work by Isaac Crawford, including the graphic novel Seven Dwarfs and Some Odd Tales as well as comics The Musical Mishaps of Cat & Fiddle (1-6) and The Boy and the Dragon.
   
• A graphic novel A Passage to Black presented by Cullen Bunn.
   
• Age of Bronze: A Thousand Ships, book one of Eric Shanower’s Trojan War tales.
   
• Tales of the ShadowWood, a comic collecting stories about anthropomorphic fox warriors by Margaret Carspecken who also does vivid fine art pictures.
   
• Three issues of Zombie Dave that have come out since I last saw Mark Decker.

I would tell you how much I spent, but I don’t want my beautiful wife to find out.

This year was a blast because I talked pretty easily with the authors–so many of them I recognized and whose works I’d enjoyed previously. No Shayne Silvers this year, which is just as well–I haven’t read the second Nate Temple book yet (the first is Obsidian Son).

I stopped by Joshua Clark’s table to say hello and to tell him I’m still looking for the books in his S.T.A.R. Chronicles that I bought two years ago and haven’t yet read. I also told William Schlicter that I had one of his Silver Dragon Chronicles books that I hadn’t read yet, so I was going to bypass his table this year.

And, you know, meeting these people who crank out a couple of books a year made me think about when I thought I was going to be a writer. And maybe they’ve inspired me.

They’ve certainly made me want to end this post so I can go read, so I shall.