five-ish things, about one weekend
Jun. 20th, 2023 10:11 pmFourth Street Fantasy may well be the con of my heart. It is small (somewhere over a hundred attendees this year), it's a single panel-track so you can talk about the panels with everyone and they probably saw them too, it's surrounded by walkable lunch and dinner options. Most importantly it is friendly. A few folks take on the role of Meal Ambassadors and during scheduled lunch and dinner breaks wrangle a small group off to a local restaurant. I continue to dislike Large Group Restaurant Meals but six or so people makes for good company, and there's plenty to talk about. I expect I'll be back next year, and for longer. (Perhaps the writing seminar on Friday, certainly the post-con party Sunday evening.)
My sociability is evidently still fairly rusty, so I found it easier to mostly talk to people I didn't know at all. But I did at least manage to say hello to everyone who I knew would be there. Part of going for longer next year is so that I can be both rested and sociable, and not staggering around feeling like I just got off a plane.
As always, hanging out with writer-types awakens the part of me that wants to write. So I've opened Scrivener for the first time in *mumble* years and ... I'm still fond of that one story that I haven't yet managed to put a satisfactory climax to. But it might be doable, now, at least doable enough that I wouldn't be too embarrassed to send it to someone and say "hey, can you tell me if this works?" I have time and space to do that in, too, I think.
I also got to spend some time with Steph, and that was quite good as well. She's still in the same house she was in when I visited in 2006. As I'm now on my ninth residence since then I'm extremely impressed by the consistency. I loaned her Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans's 'goth Jumanji' comic DIE; she in turn loaned me Salman Rushdie's Haroun And The Sea Of Stories, which I am enjoying immensely.
I committed a minor tactical error in my trip back. My flight back left Minneapolis at ten and landed in Winnipeg shortly before midnight, and then left Winnipeg at six AM to get into YVR at seven. "That's okay," I told myself, "I can just sleep in the airport, there's plenty of benches there." I had reckoned without going through customs in Winnipeg and thus getting stuck on the wrong side of security. Airports have at least some measure of, I don't know, privacy or protection or something. Airport lobbies are deeply uncomfortable places to pass any amount of time. If airports are liminal spaces existing only to pass from one real place to another, the airport lobby is the liminal space's liminal space. In the end I slept for about an hour and a half, once the cleaning crew had left.
Mr Tuppert is pleased that I've come home. He's been politely demanding scritches and occasional bouts with the string or the red dot.
My sociability is evidently still fairly rusty, so I found it easier to mostly talk to people I didn't know at all. But I did at least manage to say hello to everyone who I knew would be there. Part of going for longer next year is so that I can be both rested and sociable, and not staggering around feeling like I just got off a plane.
As always, hanging out with writer-types awakens the part of me that wants to write. So I've opened Scrivener for the first time in *mumble* years and ... I'm still fond of that one story that I haven't yet managed to put a satisfactory climax to. But it might be doable, now, at least doable enough that I wouldn't be too embarrassed to send it to someone and say "hey, can you tell me if this works?" I have time and space to do that in, too, I think.
I also got to spend some time with Steph, and that was quite good as well. She's still in the same house she was in when I visited in 2006. As I'm now on my ninth residence since then I'm extremely impressed by the consistency. I loaned her Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans's 'goth Jumanji' comic DIE; she in turn loaned me Salman Rushdie's Haroun And The Sea Of Stories, which I am enjoying immensely.
I committed a minor tactical error in my trip back. My flight back left Minneapolis at ten and landed in Winnipeg shortly before midnight, and then left Winnipeg at six AM to get into YVR at seven. "That's okay," I told myself, "I can just sleep in the airport, there's plenty of benches there." I had reckoned without going through customs in Winnipeg and thus getting stuck on the wrong side of security. Airports have at least some measure of, I don't know, privacy or protection or something. Airport lobbies are deeply uncomfortable places to pass any amount of time. If airports are liminal spaces existing only to pass from one real place to another, the airport lobby is the liminal space's liminal space. In the end I slept for about an hour and a half, once the cleaning crew had left.
Mr Tuppert is pleased that I've come home. He's been politely demanding scritches and occasional bouts with the string or the red dot.