Out in Arizona we have this thing called “October Break” during the school year—I’m sure many other districts have something similar—so I packed up my wee family and we headed for the trees.

A popular misconception about Arizona is that it’s all cactus and snakes, but that’s only the southern bit. About an hour and a half north of Phoenix you get into some serious trees. And if you go to Sedona, as we did, you get some supremely pretty red rocks to go along with your trees. I mean, lookit:

Sedona is also home to these things called Vortexes. They’re supposed to be, um…well, I’m not sure. It has something to do with electromagnetic energy and maybe magic and definitely lots of New Age stuff. You can buy crystals and prayer wheels and drums and all kinds of goodies for your personal head trip in town, and then go out to nature and commune with your god(s) and natural avatar(s) of your choice. Personally I like to commune with nature unassisted and unfiltered, but selling people stuff to assist their spiritual journey is a big business in Sedona. They have many stores devoted to it. Or, as the Chief in Police Academy said, “Many, many, many, many!” This is just one of them, which we visited for the fun of it:

It had aura photography! Vedic and Buddhist literature and figures! Lots of pretty rocks and crystals that were supposed to unblock your chakras! Astrology goodies! Wiccan goodies! 31 flavors of Tarot or something like that! And my nerdy Iron Druid moment was this: the super-nice lady who helped us in this store was Polish, and I found myself hoping she was a witch. She seemed to be into the chakra/Vedic thing, though, so I didn’t ask, because I didn’t want to ruin it—I really wanted her to be a Polish witch I met in Arizona so that my fiction would be that much closer to truth. That’s turbo silly, I know. I’m incorrigible that way. Anyhow, I scored a neato bust of Ganesha while I was in there BECAUSE IT’S COOL THAT’S WHY, and he’s watching me type this now with a tiny smile around his broken tusk. Soon we will have a beer together.

But back to the break! Off we went to enjoy nature. Oak Creek is daaaaaang beautiful. I haz proof! Lookit:

But wait! There’s more! This is one of those shots where I’m pretentiously trying to show off my composition skillz:

Of course, since there were all these beautiful trees around, I had to hug a few of ’em and let ’em know they’re loved:

My kid loves the water so she enjoyed our time down by the creek. Here she is in all her blue-haired glory checking out the waterfall upstream from a deep, slow pool:

‘Twas a lovely escape. But now we’re home again and I’m in between contracts, so I get to be super duper creative. My second contract ends with HUNTED, and though that’s not finished quite yet because we still have editing to do, I don’t imagine I’ll get that back from my editor for a while so I’m outlining stuff for the future. I have the Star Wars novel to outline first—that’s actually under contract—and then I need to get going on other goodies. More Iron Druid, for one thing, and an epic fantasy project that I’ve had on the back burner for a long time is just about ready to move to the front. When I have more information about how those are going I’ll let you know, but thank you again for reading my books and spreading the word—that’s the only reason I get to write more. :)

Peace and hugs for you and your trees,
Kevin

It’s time for us to have some fun together to celebrate the upcoming release of book five of the Iron Druid Chronicles! Are ya ready kids?

WHAT YOU CAN WIN: Five people (5) will win all five books in the series, signed, and postal gods willing, you would actually get TRAPPED before its release date. PLUS a very limited-edition pint glass emblazoned with the logo of Atticus & Oberon’s Beer Bonanza. Three winners will be chosen randomly, and I’ll pick two because of their excessive cuteness or badassery. I do have to keep this contest U.S. only—my apologies to the many spiffy readers I have in Canada and overseas.

HOW TO ENTER: Send me a picture by Samhain/Halloween of your pet “reading” any one of the first four books. Dog, cat, fish, lizard, horse, cow, whatever. HAVE FUN WITH THIS.  Detailed rules:
1) You can be in the picture too. In fact, if you’d like to be reading the book to your pet, and they simply look attentive while you’re doing it, that’s acceptable too.
2) It doesn’t matter which book in the series you’re reading, just so long as the cover is visible in the picture.
3) Having your pet look at an e-reader won’t have the same visual impact, so we do need to use a paperback here. If you’d rather not buy one you can probably score one at your local library.
4) Send your picture as an attachment to kevin (at) kevinhearne dot com by Oct. 31. I’ll periodically post them to a gallery of entries on my Facebook author page so we can all enjoy the overdose of cute. (If you haven’t “liked” my author page yet, you can find it at http://www.facebook.com/authorkevin)
5) Please give me your name and the name of your pet(s) and where you’re from. When I post the pic on Facebook it’ll be your first name only, so it’ll read something like “Bartholomew from Alabama reads HOUNDED to his poodle, Fluffy.” If it’s just your pet in the picture that’s cool, I’ll just write “Fluffy from Alabama loves HOUNDED” but I still need your name in case you win. :)
6) If you don’t have a pet, I’m sure someone you know does. :)

Here’s a sample entry with three adorable wolfhounds! Note that this is not actually an entry—it’s just an example of what you can do. You don’t have to compete against this one.

HAVE FUN EVERYONE! CAN’T WAIT TO SEE ‘EM!

Biiig day. Had my panel with a distinguished group of authors. Met Faith Hunter, F. Paul Wilson, and Allison Pang for the first time, and they are all lovely people. I’m reading Faith’s first Jane Yellowrock book right now, actually, and enjoying the different voices.

First thing I saw today at the Del Rey booth was Catwoman handing out promo copies of HOUNDED while holding a lipstick-kissed cup of Starbucks. I had to sit down because it was moderately disorienting. “My life,” I said to myself, “is just a bit different now. A bit.”

So I’m trying to recover from the shock when oh my god here comes Dazzler! Remember Dazzler? You, uh, probably don’t. Dazzler was a Marvel character who peaked in the 80s, a mutant who could turn sound into light, and her books didn’t sell very well. Stunned to see anybody who knew that character.

You know who’s a total BAMF? The mutant who goes BAMF! of course, Nightcrawler. Rare to find someone willing to go full blue for the costume, but this dude didn’t hold back:

As always, the bestest, most awesome bit of the day was meeting readers. And for a day full of awesome cosplay, spiffy reader Lisa visited and instantly became my favorite: she did Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica! Cigar and hexagonal dog tags and everything!

So yeah. Completely awesome experience and I’m so grateful to everyone who came by to say hello. Thank you, New York! Going to fly home and start on the Star Wars book now. More news on that when I have it. :)

Where to begin? With great freakin’ Legos, man! Check out Darth Maul:

Turns out that a couple of the members of the Fellowship were journeying through NYCC and I had to direct Gandalf’s attention to imminent danger. Anton Strout was coming!

OH, and you’ll never guess who I ran into! It was freakin’ THOR! Comic book Thor, of course, not the real one, because I keeeeeeled him. :)

I got to meet some very spiffy readers yesterday with whom I’ve Tweeted and stuff for a long time. Shecky and Rob and Kiera AND her amazing pumpkin cookies—they were all delightful. Also met awesome people at the signing—shout-out to Samantha from the UK who actually squeed. :) It was very cool to meet Sally from The Qwillery, one of my favorite book blogs. Then I got some time to wander the floor with Garrett, where we coveted all the shiny things. Our covetousness drove us a bit loony, in fact. Want proof?

I didn’t take as many cosplay pics as I would have liked, but I’m so glad I got this one because DAMN it’s a spectacular  job, and  you’re only seeing half of it here:

The turbo geek moment for me was when I discovered Geek Chic. They make custom geek furniture like wooden gaming tables and comic book storage units that “deliver a dragon punch to the balls of the white cardboard box.” If you’ve watched Wil Wheaton’s Table Top series on Geek & Sundry, these are the people who made the table he uses in that show. In fact, here it is, so you can go all spoggly:

I bought a display case for my HORDES miniatures and I’m so excited! It was cool to meet Robert and Brenda and chat with them for a bit. I think I’m going to have to add in one of the 8-Hour Chairs to my order. They’re so comfy.

My turbo fanboy moment came when I finally got to meet Nicole Peeler, whose Jane True series is one of my favorites. Great voice and an unusual heroine and she always cracks me up on Twitter. So I waited in line for her signing and then I got to take a pic with her:

Also had the privilege of meeting Peter V. Brett for the first time. We’d emailed and stuff in the past but it was great to finally meet him. Looking forward to the third book in his Demon Cycle!

So after beers and whiskey late at night, my editor and I got silly and decided we should get serious with SAXON CODPIECE.

For those of you who don’t know, SAXON CODPIECE was an idea spawned at San Diego Comic Con. Me n’ all the spiffy peeps at Del Rey have had such fun goofing around with the idea of this British private eye whose name is all caps all the time that we’d really like to try putting something out there for everyone to enjoy. So, I don’t have any firm details yet and nothing is definite, but because many of you have been liking and commenting on the SAXON CODPIECE posts on Facebook, we might be able to whip something up for cheap and give everything to charity. OMG LOOKIT SOCIAL MEDIA WORKS. :) Seriously, thank you all for saying hi and stuff like that.

Off to the con now: I have a panel and a couple of signings, looking forward to it!

Finishing a novel isn’t something that happens every day; it’s even more rare that you finish it and hand it to your editor in New York less than 24 hours later. But I got to do precisely that today, and it was cool. I finished HUNTED, put it on a Darth Vader USB flash drive, flew to New York, and gave it to Tricia! That felt good. It was especially awesome though when she ripped off Darth Vader’s head to reveal the USB thingie. Somewhere, James Earl Jones cried, “Noooooo!”

I got to see both my editors today, actually. They are the brilliant people I keep thanking profusely at the end of my books. They’re so much fun to work with. Look! Here they are!

A few people have asked, so here’s the scoop: HUNTED is book six of IDC and comes out June 25 next year. That is not to be confused with TRAPPED, book five, which comes out soon—November 27. Turning in a book happens waaaay before it gets put on the shelf. I turned in TRAPPED back in March. :)

I also ran into the legendary Anton Strout, author of Alchemystic, arch nemesis of Patrick Rothfuss, and guardian of the giant new Jim Butcher cover!

Logan and Sarah are a couple o’ young up-and-coming editors at Del Rey and they TOTALLY trust me. Nobody warned them about shenanigans or anything! You can tell:

I also got to meet Tom the Intern, who was kind enough to do my Wikipedia page this summer and who flatly refused to wear the Promotional Underwear they were handing out at the Con. Those things are not related.

Promotional Underwear would be a great band name. Think of the merchandise.

So what else happened at the Con today? Well, Batdog was there, the vigilante hound! And he was giving interviews to MTV! You can’t really see it here but that dude is holding a microphone to his jaws and they were recording.

More goodies later—I’ll take some more cosplay pics over the course of the weekend and post them for you guys. If you happen to be attending the Con, here’s my schedule, hope to see you:

FRIDAY: Signing from 5-6 PM at Del Rey booth #1120
SATURDAY: Myth Mixology Panel! 12:15-1:15, room 1A08.
SATURDAY: Panel signing with all the UF authors, 1:45-2:45, autograph tables 2, 3, 4
SATURDAY: Signing from 6-7 pm at Del Rey booth #1120