For our April program, we welcome J Alan Erwine—writer, editor, game designer and imminent groom.

J has sold more than thirty short stories to various small press publishers. Eventually J became an editor with ProMart, then with their successor company, Sam’s Dot Publishing, where he continues to work today. J also spends most of his time working as a freelance writer and editor.

For our March program, we welcome New York Times best-selling author Carrie Vaughn. The seventh book in her popular Kitty Norville series, Kitty’s House of Horrors, was released in January. Her first young adult novel, Voices of Dragons, will be released this month. In addition to her always-worth-reading prose, if you’ve seen Carrie and the Midnight Hour program at MileHiCon (and you really should have!), you know what an entertaining speaker she is. This is definitely a program not to miss!

Check out the details at http://www.thelocal.de/society/20100121-24721.html:

"The Complete Metropolis" will be held at the Deutsche Kinemathek museum for film and television at Potsdamer Platz, where many of the Berlinale red carpet events take place.

"It will be sort of a Making Of," said curator Kristina Jaspers.

From the MileHiCon mailing list, we get this news:

Author Rachel Caine has just accepted our invitation to be one of our Guests Of Honor at MileHiCon42 in 2010!

She is the author of more than twenty-five novels, including the popular Weather Warden series, the NY-Times bestselling Morganville Vampires series, the Red Letter Days series, and the Outcast Season series.

Check out her website at http://www.rachelcaine.com for more info on her books!

Picked up a post from Charles Stross at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/2009-hugo-nomination..., which discusses the fact that Hugo Nominations are now open for the 2009 Hugo awards.

Dan O'Bannon, author of the scripts for Alien, Total Recall, and director of Return of the Living Dead and The Resurrected, has died at 63.

Ah, and check out this lovely rememberance of Dan O'Bannon's work and life.

A bit of news reported on Tor.com:

On December 11, 1929, the world’s first club devoted to science fiction met for the first time. They called themselves the Scienceers. Years later, in 1961, one of their original number recalled those days in a fanzine article which, through the magic of the World Wide Web, can be read here.

Happy Birthday Everyone!

The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center will present NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration, Dec. 19 – March 7, 2010, organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in cooperation with the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

Also off of the twitter feed, Flying Pen Press is having a sale:

I will be putting all Flying Pen Press fiction, including #scifi, on sale this weekend for $6 each. #poker book for $9. Will tweet codes.

Coming off of the Twitter feed is this tidbit by local David Rozansky, who runs Flying Pen Press

I need a senior #scifi #editor to run the Flying Pen Press Science Fiction imprint. Pays inprofit shares.

Requests for more information can probably be sent to Publisher@flyingpenpress.com.