Bonjour, Montreal! If you’re in and around this beautiful city @1pm Sunday, come hear me read at the Hotel Espresso at 1005 Guy Street, where the Montreal Science Fiction & Fantasy Association is hosting a Masked Mosaic event. Free and open to the public — everybody welcome. From the MONSFFA site:

May 26, 2013 – Masked Mosaic: Canadian Super Stories Reading & Discussion …Claude Lalumière and fellow authors Camille Alexa, Lisa Poh, Marie Bilodeau, and Patrick T. Goddard will be on hand to read excerpts and discuss their stories in the new Tyche Books collection: MASKED MOSAIC: CANADIAN SUPER STORIES. In addition, they will be selling and signing copies of MASKED MOSAIC and their own books.

They even made an amazingly nifty poster. Please do come say hello.

Tuesday, April 23rd at 7 pm at the Storm Crow Tavern, Vancouver’s self-described HOTTEST NERD BAR

masked mosaic book party!

  My knees are beginning to ache from the cold soaking up out of the lichen-covered rocks.  The rest of the archaeological team is gathering near the tallest remaining ruins, perching their asses on walls a meter thick and a thousand years old to eat peanut butter sandwiches and slurp instant coffee from styrofoam cups.  Between there and here, abandoned digging and sifting tools lie scattered on the moss-green ground, glinting in the hard near-arctic sunlight that passes for summer in Greenland.

  I turn my attention back to the private little square where I kneel, its parameters neatly marked with twine and pegs, tiny flags planted to show the exact location of artifacts already excavated.  I know those pieces so well I can close my eyes and see them, practically smell the millennium-old damp earth hint of rot clinging to their surfaces:  three bits of a badly deteriorated iron staff, a silver amulet the shape of a chair carved from a tree-stump, a typical Freya’s necklace pendant. . . .

  This is a woman’s grave.

Read the rest of “A Good Thing and a Right Thing” in the June 2013 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, on newsstands now!

Got something for me to sign? Find me at the mass autograph session  Saturday, 2pm-3pm. Or help us Save The World One Thrift Store At A Time on Saturday, noon-1pm. If you (like me) are a Logan’s Run fanatic, you can come make moon-eyes at my co-panelist Mr. William F. Nolan at the Guilty Pleasures panel on Sunday, 11am-noon. Other than Saturday morning’s Broad Universe Rapid-Fire Reading, you know where to find me. . . (#barcon)

From the publisher:

“Our next event is an online chat with readers, and it will be held tomorrow at Bitten by Books. RSVP: http://bittenbybooks.com/?p=62201

Readers post questions in the comments over a 24 hour period and we answer those questions, creating an online conversation between editors/authors and readers.

There will also be a contest for two $20 gift cards from Amazon.com. For every post, readers acquire points and the two readers with the most points win. People can earn extra points by RSVPing to the event. So, please help us to spread the word so that people can RSVP in advance and earn a few extra points to help them win.”

Here’s what you need to know:

Go. Read. You will not be sorry.

[More details about Masked Mosaic and links to our miniviews in the sidebar thisaway ----> ]

Today, Derek Newman-Stille grills me on a series of topics about speculative literature and the Canadian scene, in response to which I discuss fashion statements, broken grammar, yams, and the end of the world.  He kindly says, “ Her love of writing and joy at playing with literary work comes through in the interview below as well as in her fiction writing.”

Check out the interview in its entirety at the site.

This one contains my story “Children of the Device.”