It's like a book tour without the book

I just completed and submitted my first short story this year. After doing no writing at all in January and February due to the Mars thing, I began work on this story in March, but worked only sporadically on it during that month. I finally buckled down this week, as I had a market in mind with an April 1 deadline. I wrote 1530 words on March 31 and 2265 words on April 1, getting the completed story in at 7800 words just before deadline. It's an un-critiqued second draft, but I feel pretty good about it.

At the moment I'm at the airport, heading for San Jose for the El Camino Reelers' 25th-anniversary square dance fly-in. After that we'll be hanging out in the Bay Area for a few days. This begins a summer with insane amounts of travel:

We're not yet certain about the 4th Street Fantasy convention in June but everything else on there is committed. As I should probably be, for planning this much travel... but we want to do all these things! And as we don't have day jobs, and we have the money for it, and we're healthy enough to do it, we're doing it.

The stars represent days I'll be presenting my Mars talk. These are:

• April 5: Google, Mountain View CA
• April 8: Powell's Technical Books, Portland OR (open to the public)
• May 15: Nebula Awards Weekend, Cocoa Beach FL
• May 29: WisCon, Madison WI
• June 20 and July 11: Washington Aerospace Scholars, Seattle WA

I'll probably also be giving the talk at the Worldcon and Potlatch, but those are too far in the future for me to contemplate.

Why am I doing this? I'm not being paid for any of these speaking engagements and they probaby aren't going to sell many books (I will be signing copies of Space Magic at some of these but it's not directly connected). But it's great exposure, and I consider it part of my job as MDRS Crew 88 Journalist to do public outreach in support of the Mars Society and humanity's future on Mars. And I'm a huge ham.

So what the heck. Allons-y!