In case you missed it – San Diego Comic Con announce half a dozen novellas will be published to tie in with the HEROES REBORN miniseries coming out this fall. Our MALCon Featured Guest Keith DeCandido is writing one!  His is entitled SAVE THE CHEERLEADER, DESTROY THE WORLD, and focuses on Claire Bennet. There will also be novellas by Tim Zahn, Kevin J. Anderson & Peter J. Wacks, David Bishop, Duane Swierczynski, and Stephen Blackmoore, so you know he’s in great company.

So MALCon 2015 will be playing host to TWO of the HEROES REBORN novella authors, Keith DeCandido and Peter J Wacks!

Myths and Legends is pleased to announce that Stant Litore will be joining us this year as our Author Guest of Honor!

An emerging voice in weird fiction, Stant Litore has published five volumes of The Zombie Bible, which retell history (and the Bible) as a series of encounters with the restless dead; the first, Death Has Come Up into Our Windows, has been translated into several languages, including Spanish and German. His debut novel was also the #2 horror bestseller on the Amazon Kindle in December 2011. His second novel won second place in the 2012 eFestival of Words Best of the Independent eBook Awards, Horror.

Litore has been a Guest at Denver Comic Con and at several Colorado conventions. He has appeared in interviews for podcasts such as ReelNerds and The Geek Port. He has been featured in “The Year’s Best New Sci-Fi” at NPR (March 2014) and as an Author Success Story on the Amazon.com homepage (November 2013).

He has also been featured in the Examiner, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Huffington Post, SF Signal, and in interviews for Weird Fiction Review and Nomos. Litore was interviewed extensively on the topic of “writing characters your readers won’t forget” for Jeff Vandermeer’s Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction.

Besides The Zombie Bible, Litore is the author of Dante’s Heart and an ongoing scifi series, The Ansible Stories, in which future explorers become trapped in alien bodies on alien worlds. Stant Litore lives in Denver with his wife and two daughters, where he is working on his next novel.

Myths and Legends is pleased to announce that Special Guest Keith R.A. DeCandido will be joining us this year! Among many other things, Keith wrote the Serenity novelization, several Supernatural novels, and multiple Doctor Who short stories.

Keith R.A. DeCandido was raised by a roving pack of librarians who trained him in their strange ways. A career in publishing was inevitable to avoid lots of very expensive therapy bills. His career as an author, nonfiction writer, editor, comics scripter, and more spans twenty-five years. Recent and upcoming work includes: Star Trek: The Klingon Art of War; the Sleepy Hollow novel Children of the Revolution; the Stargate SG-1 novel Kali’s Wrath; the “Precinct” series of fantasy police procedurals, starting with Dragon Precinct in 2004 and continuing through half a dozen books and short stories; the graphic novel Icarus; the Farscape graphic novel The War for the Uncharted Territories (written in collaboration with Farscape creator Rockne S. O’Bannon); short stories in Buzzy Mag Online and the anthologies Bad-Ass Faeries: It’s Elemental, Out of Tune, Stargate SG-1/Atlantis: Far Horizons, V-Wars: Night Terrors, and The X-Files: Trust No One; the short fiction collections Ragnarok and Roll: Tales of Cassie Zukav, Weirdness Magnet and Without a License: The Fantastic Worlds of Keith R.A. DeCandido; rewatches of various Star Trek and Stargate series for Tor.com; and tons more that he’ll be happy to tell you all about at the convention.

In 2009, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, which means he never needs to achieve anything ever again. Besides the IAMTW, he’s also a member of the Liars Club, the Science-fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, and the Horror Writers of America. In addition to writing, he is a freelance editor for clients both personal and corporate, a second-degree black belt in karate (which he teaches to both children and adults), a veteran podcaster, an avid baseball fan, and probably some other stuff that he can’t remember due to the lack of sleep. Find out less at his cheerfully retro web site at DeCandido.net.

It’s nearly the middle of February and you know what that means: cheap candy and chocolates on February 15! For me, it also means taking another look at zefrank and his vday video. If you haven’t had a chance, definitely take a look. He relates a cute story of being a kid and giving his crush a valentines card that says, “Do you like me? Check yes or no.” I love the simplicity of that. Keep it simple. I don’t always succeed, but I try to follow the easygoing nature of that. I recommend it for lower stress relationships.

Also a-buzz recently is the movie version of the fan-fiction novel that’s got BDSM into mainstream news. It’s interesting to see people’s reactions. I haven’t read the book myself. I suppose if I had more time to read, I might get to it eventually, but other things get priority, and it’s pretty far down the list (I’m currently reading The Startup of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, and I highly recommend that).  My stance on the movie and book is that if you’re new to BDSM, you might take it/them as a how-to guide, and that’s somewhat dangerous. Things like consent and safewords and respect need to be a part of any healthy relationship, including kink relationships. So for fantasy, sure, indulge, but please, use better judgement in the real world. And if you’re looking for direction or more information, just ask. There are a lot of healthy kinksters in the Denver area.

Another zefrank thought: braincrack. Running a con gets into the braincrack (again, go check out the video). I have a lot of great ideas that don’t come out of my head into fruition in exactly the same way I imagined them. The amazing thing is that the sparks of awesome that got me excited in the first place do exist in the thing that gets created, and people get excited about that, and for me, that makes it worth it.

So I hope you all are having a great February, with all its trimmings, and remember folks, stay safe out there. 🙂

Happy 2015, everyone!

I kind of forgot how to post on the site, so sorry about the lack of updates in the posts! The good news is that things are on track for another great Myths and Legends Convention this year.

Exciting news on my end is that I got to go to Disney World and Universal Studios in Florida at the end of 2014, and wow, do these folks know how to do things right. I absolutely loved the Harry Potter worlds at Universal, and yes I got to ride the Hogwarts Express! I got to a point where it felt natural and normal to be drinking Butterbeer. 😀 I’m not sure how to bring some of that awesome feeling of immersion that you get at the theme parks over to my convention, but it’s fun to see things on such a higher level; it gives me something more to strive for.

For me, the fun of the convention is multifold. I want to create an experience, and I want it to include the feeling of community. We all come to MALCon because we’re fans of something, and I want fans to be able to find others who sing the same songs, as it were. I also want it to be better and better each year; not necessarily bigger, but an experience to remember. I also want to be in the black each year. 😉

For 2015, we will have some new guests (to be announced -you haven’t missed it yet) and some new vendors, as well as a bunch of our returning favorites. We’ll be bringing back some fun activities such as Blanket Forts and Chainmaille, while also bringing in some new fun things. Some continuing continuity and some fresh and new.

Oh, I meant to mention, I have decided not to create a forum for the website. Seems like that’s a dying dinosaur; not even the largest cons in the area get much conversation there anymore, so I think we’ll keep things happening on FB and here (if I can get the spam comments to quit popping up).

I hope you all get to enjoy the wonderful sunshine we’re having, and see you next time, Gadget!

Same address but new look! Welcome to the new Myths and Legends website. My plan is to streamline the look and make it easier to navigate for all of our existing community as well as folks who have just found out about our awesomeness.  🙂

There are two new additions I’m hoping to add to the new site format: a blog section to keep folks up to date on what’s happening (while we post things to the main site), and a forum, so people can keep in touch and chat with each other during the rest of the year. We’ll still keep the Facebook page for fun and updates but hopefully this will satisfy folks’ desire to interact with each other (online) in a better way.

Let me know if you have thoughts and questions, and here we go on our next new adventure!

– Nikki