An Evening with Daniel Abraham

So last night Daniel Abraham was in Phoenix for his first ever book tour (a momentous one-stop tour) at The Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, Arizona (lots of signed books available from there). I managed to tweak my schedule to attend – and I’m glad I did. I got my books signed and chatted with him in a pretty interment round-table setting for nearly 2 hours. Daniel is fun, interesting, funny and very smart guy who was a joy to talk with for a couple of hours. Most of the event is actually available on a web-cast if you’re interested. It covers a lot of ground from his background, the Clarion workshop, to writing, to e-books, to various author stories (including what authors bitch about at the bar), the books, and more. Daniel and I (and another attendee Raul) sort of started the conversation 30-minutes early and that was great (and not covered by the webcast). We talked about the books and quite a bit about the transfer from Tor books to Orbit books. It was a frank and informative conversation and one I’ll not share all of the details for – but Daniel views the move as a great opportunity for his career and I couldn’t agree more. The rest of the interview was at times frustrating since the bookstore employee felt the need to lead the discussion and cover the talking points on his note cards – since he hadn’t actually read any of Daniel’s writing much of that was the generic stuff that always gets asked, that so many find interesting, yet bores me.

Anyway, go watch the webcast – it’s nearly an hour and half long, so there is a lot to see. Oh, and go buy Daniel’s books – I really enjoyed The Dragon’s Path (The Book Depository, Powell's Books, Indiebound) and will make sure that I read more of his books.