We titled the second volume of our offbeat anthology the Zoom Situation for pandemic reasons — but by the time we actually got the reading scheduled most of us were vaccinated and able to do live events again.
The result was a strange, hybrid event where four of us read live and two of us read via Zoom — which was broadcast to both the in-person and virtual audience.
Here’s the replay. The audio’s fine, though the video’s a bit jerky. It might be the bandwidth issues, or it might be the space cocaine. It’s hard to tell.
Some of you came to check it out last night at Belmont Books in Portland — thank you! (And a huge thank you to Joe at Belmont Books for the hospitality.
For those of you who couldn’t make it, briefly, it was a riot of a good time.
We had simple rules.
Whoever was reading had to wear the head bopper (so you knew who was reading).
Each reader had ten minutes, as timed by a chicken kitchen timer.
As soon as the timer rang, you stopped reading — even if it was mid-sentence.
If the audience wanted to know what happened next? Well, they’d just have to buy the book.
Left to right: Grá Linnaea, Andrew McCollough, and Mark Teppo. They were such good sports when I informed them about the head bopper.
Here’s the recording of my reading (thanks to my writer friend Elizabeth Mitchell for recording!)
The Space Cocaine anthology will be available for sale soonsoonsoon — check out spacecocaine.com to find a link when it’s live.
(An aside — can you believe no one owned spacecocaine.com? Well, I do now.)
If you’re in Portland and sad you didn’t get to experience Space Cocaine in person, you should definitely come to my launch party for Double Edged, June 6 at 7pm at the Lucky Lab on Killingsworth.
I guarantee you’ll have an equally good time — plus there will be live music and cupcakes.
What: A reading with Jessie Kwak, Grá Linnea, Andrew McCollough, and Mark Teppo When: May 17th at 7pm Where: Belmont Books (3415 SE Belmont St, Portland, OR) Why: Because it could be done
A couple of months ago, my local sci-fi writer-friend mastermind group (the Tiara Club) decided we should do a reading.
Mark Teppo, an overachiever, decided that we should produce a physical collection of the short stories we’d be reading in order to sell at the event.
He started coming up with poignant literary covers. They were lovely.
But I was starting to get a little nervous they would give readers the wrong idea about, well, how high-brow the stories were.
“I wouldn’t want people to get confused when they read my story about space gangsters and space pirates fighting over space cocaine,” I wrote on Slack.
And Mark came back with this:
Perfect.
Introducing Space Cocaine. From the back cover:
It’s not literary. It’s not a themed anthology. Though, it definitely staggers across all sorts of interstitial slip-streamed speculative fringes.
Look, there are space pirates. There’s cocaine. There might be dragons. And stuff blows up.
You’re welcome.
On May 17th, the four of us (me, Grá Linnea, Andrew McCollough, and Mark Teppo) will be doing a reading from this ridiculous collection at Belmont Books in Portland.
(My story is from the Durga System universe — it’s titled Rogue and is currently only available to newsletter subscribers.)
The anthology will be available to purchase at the event.
Will it lead to other, equally ridiculous anthologies?
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