It’s been a long two days. I lost about 8 hours of prime work time when we lost power on Wednesday after the storm. So, it’s been a wild two days getting the zines up and live for your reading pleasure.
Please check out:
SFrevu
Gumshoe Review
and our weekly zine:
TechRevu
and as always feedback on the issues is welcome. I’m so looking forward to a good nights’ sleep.
If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know that I’m a wicked (in the New England use of the term) fan of Jane Austen’s works and avidly read and review many of the the books written by others to continue the story of the characters that Austen breathed life into.
On August 1st, Sourcebooks is releasing The Plight of the Darcy Brothers: A tale of the Darcys & the Bingleys by Marsha Altman. I reviewed her first book, The Darcys & the Bingleys: A Tale of Two Gentlemen’s Marriages to Two Most Devoted Sisters earlier this year. I’ll be posting a review of this new book this weekend, but first I’ve got some exciting news — can you tell I’m trying to build up the excitement?
Marsha Altman is going to be doing a blog tour to talk about her book. This is the list of sites where she’ll be talking about The Plight of the Darcy Brothers: A tale of the Darcys & the Bingleys:
July 23: Jane Austen Today
July 24: Fresh Fiction
July 28 J. Kaye’s Book Blog
July 29: This Book For Free
July 30: Debbie’s World
July 31: Grace’s Book Blog
August 3: Jenny Loves to Read
August 4: Stephanie’s Written World
August 5: A Bibliophile’s Bookshelf
August 10: Everything Victorian
August 12: A Curious Statistical Anomaly
So, if you enjoy Jane Austen, her books, her characters, and the world she allows us to peer into, you might consider checking out Marsha Altman’s blog tour. Check out my review of her first book, then check back for my review of this new book. I’ve enjoyed her take on these wonderful characters and her ability to maintain their integrity and personality while allowing them to grow and change as they live their lives within her world.
[Hyperion:] Gayle’s being a bit understated again. Look at the August 12th blog listing, then look up a the title of the one you’re currently reading. Take a second … okay … now do you see why she’s excited?
Up early again. Hyperion had to be in the Dealer’s Room by 9:30 and I wanted to get to the Green Room for coffee before my 10 o’clock panel. We made it.
10:00 Upbeat Downbeat in YA Fiction. Panelists: Ellen Klages, Gayle Surrette (Moderator), Leah Bobet, Tui Sutherland, Paolo Bacigalupi. Dark and downbeat endings have become fashionable in YA fiction, even to the point where they have been questioned as a fad gone too far. The trend raises a host of questions about the psychology of young readers that need to be asked and answered. Is the tone and resolution of a work of YA fiction actually more important than in adult fiction, e.g., because the readers are still at the age where their worldview is being shaped? Do young readers have a different tolerance for or reaction to downbeat endings than adults? Do they need to be forcibly exposed to the cruel realities of the world, shielded form them, or gently inoculated?
Since I was the moderator for this panel, it’s hard to evaluate how I think it went. I believe it went well and we gave some interesting ideas and feedback to the audience, but then I’m biased. So, if you were there let me know your opinion and what you got out of this panel.
I read several quotes and asked the panelists to give their thoughts in reaction to the quotes.
From Brooklyn Arden (a blog by Cheryl Klein) I got a quote by Richard Peck:
YA novels “end not with happily ever after, but with a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived”; and the events in the book have left the character better prepared for that.
From the ASJA Monthly, a quote from YA author Nora Baskin:
…YA books today are addressing some of the most controversial and authentic topics in our culture, from eating disorders to drug use, death, suicide, transgender issues, incest: the books reflect the issues that young adults are dealing with in their lives, in more honest and contemporary ways than ever before.
From Cheek by Jowl, a book of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin, in “The Critics, The Monsters, and the Fantasists”
The literature of imagination, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives and therefore hope.
We also discussed Meg Cabot’s June 10th post on her blog where she said:
Why read these books? (trauma porn) If worse than your life they make you feel better. … But if your life is worse what then? What do you read.
Meg read books to escape and now she chooses to write books similar to the ones that offered her escape when she was younger.
"Invention of Fantasy" Panel
1:00 The Invention of Fantasy in the Antiquarian Revival. Panelists: Debra Doyle, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, Kathryn Morrow (Moderator), Erin Kissane, Faye Ringel. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an extraordinary flowering of scholarship on myth, ritual, and cultural traditions form ancient Greece to contemporary Sussex, a mix which had a profound effect on fields as disparate as classical music, analytical psychology, and literature of the Fantastic. Whether the names Jane Ellen Harrison, James George Frazer, or Cecil Sharp mean anything or nothing to teh average reader of fantasy, their legacy includes the mythic vocabulary that underpins much of our field–an older world beneath this one which still seeps through, to be identified in fragments and perilously traced to its source. Join us in exploring the present-day inheritors of these motifs and their framwork, starting with our own Guest of Honor (Greer Gilman’s Cloud derives its physics form The Golden Bough and The White Goddess, its history from Child ballads; Elizabeth Hand’s Mortal Love not only draws on the Victorian folk revival for inspiration, but sets its plot going among the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Folk-Lore Society; Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist is perhaps the archetypal novel of slippage between worlds. Green Men in varying guises haunt the ficiton of all three). Is this a peculiarly English take on fantasy? If so, what are two Americans doing writing it? Or have we all internalized katabasis, solstices, Indo-European trinities? Bring folksongs to answer the questions if you must, but Morris dancing will be politely discouraged.
Greer has about 8,000 variants of Child ballads.Child was interested in the survival of the text but not in the music or the performance. Sharp (sp?) saved the music too and what he could of the performance of the songs.
There was a lot of talk of the strong impulse that seems to insist that a rite or ballad or ritual must be historic and unchanged and the belief that those doing it are following in the footsteps of their ancestors. When, in truth many of these rites/rituals/songs have been transformed or invented or melded with other traditions and none of them can be traced unbroken to the neolithic past.
One point I enjoyed was that nostalgia was really fast. TV today has nostalgia for the 1990s. History begins when you are born and everyone wishes for that “better” past.
There was much discussion of the research of Jane Ellen Harrison and how she was dismissed by her male counterparts but that they then used her research as the basis for their own.
"I Spy" Panel
2:00 I Spy, I Fear, I wonder: Espionage Fiction and the Fantastic. Panelists: Chris Nakashima-Brown, C.C. Finlay (Moderator), Ernest Lilley, James D. Macdonald, Don D’Ammassa. In his afterword to The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross makes a bold pair of assertions: Len Deighton was a horror writer (because “all cold-war era spy thrillers rely on the existential horror of nuclear annihilation”) while Lovecraft wrote spy thrillers (with their “obsessive collection of secret information”). In fact, Stross argues that the primary difference between the two genres is that the threat of the “uncontrollable universe” in horror fiction “verges on the overwhelming,” while spy fiction “allows us to believe for a while that the little people can, by obtaining secret knowledge, acquire some leverage over” it. This is only one example of the confluences of the espionage novel with the genres of the fantastic: the two are blended in various ways in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, Tim Powers’ Declare, William Gibson’s Spook County, and, in the media, the Bond movies and The Prisoner. We’ll survey the best of espionage fiction as it reads to lovers of the fantastic. Are there branches of the fantastic other than horror to which the spy novel has a special affinity or relationships.
Spy novels have a specific atmosphere to them. Usually a person working for a heartless agency and the mission are imposed onto the agent or innocents are pulled in assist.
SF has movement into different space –middle class world to the underworld — while spies seem to go between governments.
Agents are always alien because a spy always is alienated from those around them. Their mission and purpose is imposed and they aren’t themselves. They don’t have true feelings. In SF the character’s feelings are their own.
Spies seldom have personal connections because they aren’t themselves — they play a part and if they have feelings they are based on false premises.
There was a long discussion of sexism because spy novels seem to be an area for men. However, the audience mentioned La Femme Nikita, Alias, and others. But it was considered that the pronoun on most of these female characters could change and no one would notice. There was also the mention of Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Polifax novels where the pronoun couldn’t be shifted and still have the book work.
Other books mentioned:
Time Power’s — Declare, Three Days to Never
Dresden Files
The Wolf’s Hour by Robert R. McCammon
The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service by Erskine Childers
3:00 Is Darwinism Too Good for SF? Panelists: Steven Popkes, Anil Menon, Jeff Hecht (Leader), Robert J. Sawyer, Caitlin R. Kiernan, James Morrow. This year marks the sesquicentennial of the publication of The Origin of Species and the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth. Considering the importance of the scientific idea, there has been surprisingly little great SF inspired by it. We wonder whether, in fact, the theory has been too good, too unassailable and too full of explanatory power, to leave the wiggle room where speculative minds can play in. After all, physics not only has FTL and time travel, but mechanisms like wormholes that might conceivably make them possible. What are their equivalents in evolutionary theory, if any?
The problem is that with science and physics you can look at the rules and the equations and they work just about anywhere and you know what would happen if you changed any one bit. But for biology we don’t have a handle on things. We’ve only got Earth to see how things work. One sample just isn’t enough. We need another planet to have some comparisons. If we found life on another planet and the DNA matched bits of ours that would tell us a lot. But we don’t, and things aren’t solid.
We’re really still resistant to Darwin’s thesis of Natural Selection because it means we’re not special or fallen angels, we’ve simply evolved along with all the other animals on this planet.
Discussion continued on what would have happened if Darwin hadn’t published. Would Wallace have published? Would the theory just come from one of the other researchers who was working along the same lines.
In our instant world, could you develop a theory based on historical perspective when our current history is only about 17 hours old.
We need to get the supernatural out of the way. Would a Buddhist have similar arguments for/against Natural Selection as Europeans and Americans do? If the theory came from another culture would it be more acceptable?
The panelists seemed to agree that SF and Fantasy tended to play it safe with Darwin’s theory — some books mentioned:
Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear
Darwinia: A Novel of a Very Different Twentieth Century by Robert Charles Wilson
Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick
Teranesia by Greg Egan
Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer
Frameshift by Robert J. Sawyer
The Dealer’s Room closed at 6 PM and then a group of us went out for Chinese. But, by the time we got back to our room the lack of sleep was catching up to us so we’re going to make it an early night since we start driving home late tomorrow afternoon with a stop in Providence to visit our son. So, we need a bit more shut eye than the six hours we’ve been getting.
This is the first full day of the convention. Registration opened at 10 in the morning so, we went off in search of caffeine and our registration packets. Caffeine was fairly easy to find as during the morning hours the hotel has a Starbucks coffee bar n the lobby with some breakfast type baked goods.
I picked up my tags and the program materials. My panel isn’t until Saturday at 10 and the dealers couldn’t move into their space until about 3 PM. This left time to go to some panels and stretch our imaginations and our intellect.
"SF as the Literature of Things" Panel
11: 00 SF as the Literature of Things. Panelists: Paul Di Filippo, Lawrence Person, John Clute, Leah Bobet (Leader), Chris Nakashima-Brown. It’s commonly agreed that stories set in the future can “really” be about the future or about the present. But in novels like William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, and Bruce Sterling’s Zeitgeist and Zenith Angle, we are for the first time seeing stories set in the present which seem to be about the future. These fictions seem to argue that the future will be built bottom-up rather than top-down; that progress does not derive from the implementation of ideas but rather from the accumulation of quotidian technological change. Character in these works is not so much a matter of nature or nurture, but a product of our interaction with things, things produced as fast as we can (because we can) and without any deep consideration for their consequences. Is this “SF as a Literature of Things” ultimately just an interesting sub-genre, or might (or should) the field itself be morphing in its direction? There are more and more slipstream stories that start with an architectural setting or an object or some arcane text; do these reflect the same movement?
Some random notes:
Cyberpunk — things are symbolic indicators, they tell you about the world and background without having to do an “as you know Bob” informational dump for the reader.
Characters are defined by their interaction with the environment and their things/possessions. In Pattern Recognition a character doesn’t even show up until the middle of the book but by then we know all about the character and what to expect because of the description of the character’s apartment and things.
There was a lot of discussion about whether you could tell what a person was like from the things owned because we all have public and private personae. If all you see is the public face then are you that public face or are you still the private person you envision yourself to be?
We often seem, now-a-days, to experience the world through things. We film events and see it through our cameras, iphones, or recorders. We don’t see the actual events because we’re annotating and filming it. How does that effect our view of the world and things?
An audience member asked if we were to believe that things were reliable narrators and the panel generally agreed that while the things are narrators they are not necessarily reliable.
Noon: How to Write for a Living When You Can’t Live Off Your Fiction (Special Kaffeeklatsch). Barbara Krasnoff. You’ve just been laid off from your staff job, you can’t live on the royalties form your fiction writing, and your Significant Other has taken a cut in pay. How do you pay the rent? Well, you can find freelancework writing articles, white papers, reviews, blogs, and other non-sfnal stuff. Despite today’s lean journalistic market, it’s still possible to make a living writing, editing, and/or publishing. Let’s talk about where and how you can sell yourself as a professional writer, whether blogging can be done for a living, and how else you can use your talent to keep the wolf from the door. Bring whatever ideas, sources, and contacts you have.
The room was packed. We networked and pickup up some useful ideas and URLs of resources. Rather than go over all the tips and idea presented, I suggest that you go to Barbara’s website of “Useful sites for Earning a Living” at:
http://bkrasnoff.googlepages.com/resourcesforfreelancewriters
Also check out the websites for:
American society of Journalists and Authors: http://www.asja.org
The Authors Guild: https://www.authorsguild.org
National Writers Union: http://www.nwu.org
Freelancers Union: http://www.freelancersunion.org
mediabistro.com: http://mediabistro.com
Editorial Freelancers Association: http://www.the-efa.org
National Association of Science Writers: http://www.nasw.org
American Medical Writers Association: http://www.amwa.org
National Book Critics Circle: http://www.bookcritics.org
1:00 Narrative Psychology and Science Fiction. Robin Abrahams with discussion by Ellen Asher, Eric M. Van, David Swanger. Talk/Discussion (60 min.). If a character gets shot, it’s a mystery story. If a character gets shot with a phaser, it’s science fiction. But are there elements to science fiction that go deeper than the surface tropes? Psychologist and writer Robin Abrahams discusses what cognitive psychology and her own research about mental models of literary genres–including science fiction, fantasy, and horror–and what personality factors correlate with a liking of different kinds of stories.
What is personality if not your interpreted style? Perhaps people like stories that fit their interpretive style. Abraham’s research asked undergraduates to rate various types of genre on several different opposition scales (predicable/unpredictable; emotional/unemotional, etc.). There were some surprises and some “Duh” results.
most predicable — romance
most unpredictable — mystery
most unemotional — science fiction
most bound to time and place — science fiction
most optimistic — self-help
most morally complex characters — biography
most considered to have clear good and bad guys — science fiction
most read to be entertained — humor
most read to learn — self-help
most often written for money — horror
most realistic — self-help
fantasy found high on escapism
science fiction was neutral on escapism
There was a lot of other results but I couldn’t keep up with the talk and take notes too.
There was an interesting thought thrown out that with education and specialization that people raise sub-ordinate categories up to become base categories. For example most people consider dogs a base category. But, to people who breed dogs or are very interested in them knowing that it is a dog doesn’t tell them anything. The sub-ordinate category of breed raises to the base category level.
I then took over getting our table in the dealers’ room setup while Hyperion attended a panel at 2 PM.
2:00 Where the Turtles Stop: Preons as the Most Funadamental Particle. Eric M. Van. Talk (60 min.). The discovery (invention?) of the quark simplified the “particle zoo” immensely, but the Standard Model of Physics still contains an embarrassing plethora of “fundamental” particles: six quarks and six leptons (both of which fit into neat and cognate 2×3 grids) and a variety of bosons (the photon, gluon, etc.). That all of these particles might be composed of various combinations of two or three truly fundamental “preons” seems obvious. Van will explain why the preon concept was unfairly rejected in the ’70s and ’80s and talk about its recent resurrection by t he Australian physicist Sundance Bilson-Thompson. He will then (of course) present his own preon model, which he argues is simpler and has much more (way cool, in fact) explanatory power. Note: this talk is designed to be intelligible even to those who believe “leptons” manufacture iced tea and Cup of Soup.
While the talk was interesting, it was wholly theoretical. There is no evidence to support the existence of preons, and there may never be any. What makes the preon theory attractive is both its simplicity, and the ability to explain much (if not all) of the Standard Model and Quantum Mechanics as an emergent behavior of these simple entities. Van’s model is based on what’s gone before, but is modified to fit his own understandings. Given that, the preon model is basically that there is only one basic entity in the universe, the preon and it’s anti-particle, which is just the preon with a negative spin. Things get a little strange at this point as preons live their lives in p-space, a structure which contains two spacial dimensions, one time dimension, and a special non-time, non-space dimension called “qwa”. And it’s in this Qwa dimension the the preons do their spinning. According to the theory, preons are only happy in even number pairs, although the pair may contain any combination of preons and anti-preons. Since each preon has a charge of either +1/6 or -1/6, combining six preons (or anti-preons) gives you all the standard particles in the Hadron family. Other combinations of two or four preons gives you other “normal” particles. The rest of the zoo is, presumably, made up of other combinations. What makes the preon theory predictably nice is that there are multiple ways that two groups of three preons and be bound together. And those methods then determine the masses of the resulting particles, such as the Electron, Muon, and Tauon particles. There was a good deal more, but I think that pretty much gives the flavor of the theory. One last bit, Van assumes that gravity is an emergent property of p-space, and therefore predicts that when the LHC is finally brought on line, they will NOT find the Higgs Boson. Well, we shall see.
"How to Review" Panel
3:00 How to Review. Panelists: Rose Fox, Gary K. Wolfe, Charles N. Brown (Leader), Michael Dirda, Lev Grossman. A roundtable on reviewing: what to do and what not to do. How do different audiences need different sorts of reviews?
I was late to the panel because I need to work more in the dealers’ room but managed to get there for the last half hour.
One thing to remember is that writing that isn’t fun to read won’t be read, and that includes reviews.
Review space in most places is shrinking. Reviews should be essays and part of the essay is to give the feelings and thoughts that you had upon reading the work.
Trashing a book doesn’t make a review. You can write a negative review but you must explain why it isn’t good — where does it fail and how.
A review needs to be an accurate account of the book.
The audience for genre review (since this is a genre convention) need not be written for the fan but for the general intelligent reader who likes a wide variety of reading material. Hopefully to entice them to try something different or something similar to another author that they enjoy.
Dirda says he believes that people should read more and beyond the Best Seller List.
5:00 Memorial Guest of Honor Interview. Michael Swanwick. Talk (60 min.) Swanwick will interview the late Hope Mirrlees, author of “Paris, a Poem” and Lud-in-the-Mist, in person.
This was very interesting and especially well done. I’d downloaded Lud-in-the-Mist for my Kindle and had read Swanwick’s short essay about Hope Mirrlees before the convention. For this presentation there was a woman who looked much as you’d expect Hope Mirralees to look like. Swanwick stated that he would be asking questions and then turn it over to the audience but there had been a great deal of negotiation for Mirrlees special appearance and that only questions which had well documented answers available publicly could be asked. The humor and British air were refreshing and endearing.
"How Do We Choose What We Read" panel
8:00 How Do We Choose What We Read? Panelists: Michael Bishop, Chuck Rothman, Victoria Janssen, Rosemary Kirstein (Leader), Rick Wilber, Michael Dirda. Those of us with broad tastes in literature are constantly choosing among many different types of story. What determines these choices? Do our story preferences vary with psychological state? What’s behind the phenomenon of concentrating on one subgenre or even one author, or acquiring a transient aversion to same?
First off, Kirstein asked what each panelist’s first genre books was or how they decided to read genre. Books mentioned were the ones with a rocket ship or atom on the spine. Danny Dunn. Tom Swift. Tom Swift, Jr. The Magician’s Nephew. Lucky Star. Podkayne of Mars. Have Spacesuit will Travel. Mostly they just stumbled across a book or it was recommended to them and they liked it. Bishop said his first genre was baseball stories then SF/F.
As adults:
Dirda said he enjoys history and will pick a book because it’s an interesting historical, an author he likes, or a topic he wants to learn about. He tries to keep an even mix of fiction and nonfiction. Since he reviews, he reads all the time but seldom just for pleasure because he reviews what he reads.
Wilber said that he travels a lot and tends to stick with an author. As a child if he liked a book, he then read all the books by that author or in the series. As an adult he still does that. He’s a completist. If he’s traveling he’ll sometimes pick up a book at the airport because of the size — picking one he thinks will last the trip. He also reads books he thinks he should have read to fill in the gaps in his reading mostly picking up the classics he hasn’t read before.
Rothman also tends read authors he’s liked in the past. If it’s a new book, he’ll pick it up if it is very different from other books of the type that he’s read before. Usually, the choice is because of the blurb and seldom from the cover art.
Janssen said that she chooses books for two reasons 1) for herself and for pleasure reading and 2) for work or the author part of herself. The second is to be read as an author looking at the structure, style, and tropes and conventions of a genre. She’s been writing for Harlequin Spice and is filling in the gap in her romance reading education.
Dirda said when he is starting to read a new author or in a new genre he looks for the best representation of the work by the person or in the field. That gives him some point of comparison and a starting point for finding more books in the area.
Bishop said he’s drawn to books by reviews. Reviews got him reading some mystery writers that he hadn’t come across before and he really enjoyed the work and then read more of them. He’d brought Newsweek with the cover story, “What to read now”. It was a list of fifty books that everyone should read. Number one was by Anthony Trollope and there were only two fantasy/science fiction books: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Philip K. Dick)
and The Dark is Rising (Susan Cooper)
Wilber said he reads about three books a week: 1 for business/work, 1 for fun, and 1 book that he feel he should have read (usually a classic).
All agreed that if a book doesn’t give you pleasure and you don’t have to read it for a class or for work — give it up. Sometimes you can return at a later time and find that it now fits your needs and other times it will just be a bad book that doesn’t work for you or at all.
Grand Ceremony
10:00 Readercon 20 Grand Ceremony. Listed all the past Guests of Honor and of those past guests all those who are attending this year’s convention.
Cordwainer Smith Award Ceremony
10:30 The 2009 Cordwainer Smith Rediscover Award Ceremony. Barry N. Malzberg and Robert J. Sawyer.
This year’s winner was A. Merritt.
Meet the Prose Party, Crowd
10:45 Meet the Pros(e) Party.
There was cake and it was good. At this event the Pros all have a sheet of peel off labels with a phrase or sentence that they sent in to the convention people. Attendees talk to the Pros to try to collect a label from each one. It’s a nice bit to get people to talk and mix a bit. Most authors use something from their books or story stories. Since I’m not a writer but a reviewer, each year I try to come up with a sentence that is very weird while making sense in context of SF/F. This year I wrote:
It’s as if Elizabeth Bennet and The Tick try to explain the meaning of life to a race that has no numbers.
Now it’s late and we’re off to relax and sleep, perhaps to dream. Tomorrow is another full day.
Guess you all know where I’ll be for the next 24 plus hours. Sitting in front of a computer screen pulling out hair I can’t afford to lose, wondering if that word should be hyphenated, why can’t people at least run the spellchecker (I mean if it pops up on my browser in red — that should be a hint right)?
Why oh why did I wait so long to get my stuff pressed and polished — I should have known that at least 10 more things would pop into my “need to check it now” stack at the last minute and they did…
Deep breath. I need a nap. It’s already been a long day. Tomorrow at midnight the zines go live. Beware the anticipation… Breathe.
I think after that nap, I’m making a pot of coffee with triple scoops of COFFEE…maybe with coffee syrup and coffee flavoring. I might even add chocolate. But first the nap…provided I can get to sleep.
Insomnia. I hate it. I deal with it a few times a month. I haven’t had coffee or caffeine in four days thinking that was it and I still haven’t slept more than 2-4 hours a night lately. I’ve decided to change my attitude. I’ll now be taking a nap tonight. Not sleeping mind you just napping for 2 or 4 hours. See. It’s not insomnia now, it’s planned. I’m not trying to sleep. (I’m using reverse psychology on my sleep engine — do you think it will work? ) Anyway, it’s not like I don’t have plenty to do in the next 24 hours anyway.
Got to the doctor’s office yesterday and saw the PA. Now I have an Rx for Prednisone. Today is day two. I forgot about the headaches I always get while on the stuff. So far no difference and a few new spots. The itching is driving me crazy even with the cream they gave me.
It seems that every year I go through a few bouts of poison ivy. This year I thought I had it covered. I bought some great gardening gloves that come up to the elbow (Foxgloves). Then over those a regular pair of heavy duty gloves for the hands. The poison ivy started just above the elbow — darned if I know how it got that high because there was barely a 1/2 before the sleeve of my shirt. This is so frustrating and there weren’t any 3-leaved anythings where we were weeding but there was some suspicious 5-leaved vines and bushy-stuff. I think it’s out to get me.
We’re also approaching the end of the month and gearing up to get SFRevu and Gumshoe Review online with their July issues on the first of the month. It’s shaping up to be two great issues — lots of reviews and a special teaser for next August.
Hyperion and I will be attending Readercon 20, July 9-12 and held in the Burlington Marriott, Burlington, Massachusetts. SFRevu will have a table in the dealers’ room. Ernest Lilley and I will be on programming while Hyperion manages the table. So, if by any chance you’re going to be there, drop by and say “Hello”. When I have more details about my schedule I’ll let you know.
Meanwhile, I’ve got to go put something on these itchy spots before I dig some divots out of myself. Arrrghhh.
Capclave is the annual convention put on by WSFA (Washington Science Fiction Association) in October. In 2009, the Capclave Chair is Bill Lawhorn. The convention will be held 16-18 October 2009 with Guests of Honor Harry Turtledove and Sheila Williams. The convention will be held in the Hilton Washington DC/Rockville, Executive Meeting Center, 1750 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland 20852. Check the convention webpage for complete information.
Yesterday was a meeting of the Capclave committee. What was discussed was how to spread the word about the convention and brainstorming ideas for publicity, programming, and some of the other tasks that need to be done. As you know the economy hasn’t been too good over the last couple of years and trying to come up with the right mix of guests and programming to encourage people to come and have fun, learn about writing, and meeting a lot of people who enjoy reading science fiction and fantasy is not easy.
Registration numbers are okay and so far on target, but we certainly would be happy to have more people sign up and come to the convention. Check the website — we’ve got some awesome guests.
One of the benefits of coming to Capclave for people who want to learn about writing is that Capclave offers several workshops. The workshops are free to Capclave members but do require that people sign up ahead of time so the workshop leaders know how many to expect and so we don’t overbook the rooms. There’s no extra charge for the workshops and many are an hour or half-day so you don’t miss the rest of the convention either.
So, please, check out our webpage. And let me know what you think? Would you come to such a convention if it was near you and you enjoyed science fiction and fantasy books and short stories? What would make you want to attend a convention of this type?
I feel like Chicken Little with the end of the month approaching. The zines go live on May 1st so I’m up to my eyeballs in proofing and writing. Have to get everything done by Thursday because on Friday, I’ll be a Malice Domestic (if you’re there track me down and say howdy!).
I took some photos of what blooming in the garden but haven’t had the time to post them.