Current mood:

creative

World Fantasy Con -- Rumbles and Rambling
My particular slice of the World Fantasy Con in Austin ended (finally!) at about 10 o'clock Sunday night. I'd been invited to dinner at Iron Cactus with Charles deLint, Nina Kiriki Hoffman and others. But only, no room in Charles' rented van! So I drove my new Prius and had the Wordos contingent in it. Then after, we needed postcards! So introduced the Portland folks to the Texas grocery store H.E.B. (great mirth that it meant "Howard E. Butt"). Then, because Ellen Datlow had just gotten a tattoo* on her low back (I heard this type of tattoo is called the "tramp stamp"), she needed Aquaphor to treat that. She & I drove around several places before we found some. Kind of odd, but hey, she's bought two stories from me over the years.

*Ellen's tattoo said "DEVICE" while that of her new anthology partner Kelly Link said "SKIN". Get it? Yeeeaaahh, me neither.


Turns out I'm not such a fan of WFCs. I really like panels and readings and presentations for the learning and entertainment, and that's thin on the ground at these. I find that allowing socially challenged writers to go for days drinking booze and doing self-promotion and acting out their deepest fantasies leads to some wacky and unpleasant behavior. Not everybody was a problem child. And I got to see some examples of true grace in the field, especially the very warm and humble Charles de Lint.

Some of the best parts of the week, in fact, were the casual chats with Charles & MaryAnn here at my house. They always stop by a grocery store and load up on the water, coffee, beer and snacks they might want before they show up and claim my guestroom. And then leave a lot of drinks and food with me when they go! They're really considerate, great about scooping the cat box and washing dishes. Charles sets up in my home office, hooks up to the Internet via my router and cable modem, and diligently works away on the second/work table behind me. The man works on his fiction every day. He calls himself my "junior partner." We're both good about sharing the space without too much distraction too.


Charles deLint at work as my Junior Partner.

Other great parts of the week were catching up with old friends I hadn't seen in forever, and meeting several new folks. Patrice's British friend Martin Owlton was here; a chemical engineer by day, he writes SF/F by night and hangs out with a very active writers group in London. He came over ready to pitch and promote and network. We enjoyed his accent during his reading, and he'd honed the pitch on his swashbuckling fantasy to something very engaging.

jaylake introduced us to Elizabeth Bear, who herself swashbuckled around the hotel with a big buccaneer hat that she placed on the heads of many people. One of those was a cute yet large young Brit guy, Chris. Chris wound up coming to dinner with us several times and entertaining us with stories of his s f/x work on Harry Potter movies and on LAYER CAKE, where he guzzled ale alongside the new James Bond.

J4 announced her intention to pitch her SF book (as yet unwritten) to at least three people. And she did! Well, she did start pitching her completed book too. But the result was: two of the three want to read something. Yay! She'd gone to the Pitching Palooza at the Book Festival, and got really focused. Hope something good comes her way soon!

I talked with FredA, congratulated Mark Finn on his definitive biography of Robert E. Howard, got to know Dave Hardy, new Slugtriber and another Howard scholar, better. Aaron de Orive was madly promoting himself as a screenwriter adapter of fiction, and especially seemed focused on Holly Black, the Spiderwick Chronicles author. Holly's agent, Barry Goldblatt, had a strong Texas connection (including a YA author Texan wife who was up for a Golden Spur award) despite living in NYC. Even Brian Anderson showed up to discuss Zack Proton with Goldblatt one evening.

Elizabeth Moon admired my golden blazer ($30 at Steinmart), and I admired her "Congratulations on 20 years" cake from her agent, Joshua Bilmes. Alan Weiss continued his courting of Bilmes by picking up Joshua and his assistant at the airport and taking them to eat Tex-Mex at Chuy's. Alan seemed to be having a great time, what with all the attention to his hero, R.E. Howard.

Saw another long-ago SlugTriber, Derek Johnson, who's now the divorced father of two and working for the Texas jail system (!!). Not a horror story, just sounds like one. And lrcutter, as I said, was at the con, being pretty active despite her recent health problems. As far as oldtimers in the SlugTribe, she only had me, J4 and FredA to talk to. But I introduced her to some of the new folks. Looked like she and Stina really hit it off.

Saw martang only a few minutes the first night. I quizzed him on several things, but he looked and acted tired (he'd just flown in from New York City) and didn't have much to say. He did, however, hook up with an Australian guy who'd emailed me about introducing him to gay SF/F fans for a documentary he was filming during his stay in Austin. So my nexus powers extend even across U.S. borders.

Speaking of Australians, Lawrence Person introduced me to Stephan Dedman, an interesting guy and SF writer who was staying at Lawrence's house. Turns out Stephan, like me, teaches writing, and had hosted Charles & MaryAnn at an Australian con a few years back. Speaking of Lawrence, while talking to Nina about Wordos and workshops, I described his critique style in Turkey City (the Wordos would have killed him to death for such behavior) and Stina had to loudly claim how wrong I was. I could have argued with her -- like how I've been workshopping with him for 10 years while you've just recently bounced in -- but why bother? She's going to forever be the contrary squeaky goth girl. Yet I still continue to hook her up with editors and name writers when given the chance. Pissy behavior or no.

Saw Delia Sherman (I so love her PORCELAIN DOVE) and Ellen Kushner, somewhat of an odd couple in that Delia is so genteel and even has a 1920's period look with her bobbed hair and buckle shoes, while Ellen has wild black hair and funky, pirate-like fashion sense. I see them also at Mythic Journeys, and make a point to remind them that I do (they're dear friends of Charles and MaryAnn's). Delia had a fun but sincere rant Saturday night about how the WFC awards are decided (by a panel, through myriad dirty politicks, with often not a female winner the whole night -- like this year). Plus I learned that, though she did have the northeastern upbringing and ivy league education with a PhD in literature, her parents were southern. Ellen was erratic and distracted, but when, as my last action at the con, I went up to her and talked about the fun acting workshop we'd done with William Todd-Jones ("Todd") at Mythic Journeys, she finally did remember me and how we'd created a group scene as the parts of a caterpillar/butterfly. She even remarked how much the shirt I had on resembled the one that had inspired us, so I know the connection was made this time.

Charles Vess and his wife Karen showed me online photos of Terri Windling's 16th century home for sale in Devon, England. It has art and quotes painted on the walls by CharlesV, Brian Froud, Alan Lee and Terri herself. Man, it looked charming. And a mere $500K for two bedrooms. I gave CharlesV a KGSR compilation CD (local cool music and a collector's item) because he very sweetly autographed and drew me a special first page on a special limited-edition book CharlesD gifted me with, MOONHEART. It's a very lovely presentation of a book with color plates inserted; I recommend it!


My special art from Charles Vess makes this edition of Moonheart, a gift from Charles de Lint, even more special!