Reading at Fantasy Matters

[pameladean]

So I went over on the bus to the University of Minnesota campus, where the Fantasy Matters convention is being held this weekend. I knew when I looked at the map that I was reversing east and west, and told myself sternly not to do that on the ground, but I still did. Luckily, the river was right there and I knew that I didn't want to cross it; also, the buildings are all interconnected, and the signage is surprisingly good. I was sad, however, that the tunnels were so bare and boring. Nobody had written quotations in purple pen on the walls, a longstanding tradition at Carleton when I was there.

Even though I was only going to be there for an hour, they gave me a T-shirt and everything. All the volunteers that I talked to were very nice and enthusiastic and sensible, a good combination. I was early, so I went and browsed the DreamHaven table and talked to Greg for a little while. The conference is being held in the Law School, and the room they gave me for the reading was a little daunting at first -- a lectern in a pit, with long tables rising in tiers into the distance, provided with chairs and electrical outlets for laptops. Jen Miller introduced me very kindly, and I read the first half of Chapter 5 from Going North. elisem and pegkerr both came to my reading, which was awfully good of them. My voice started to go during the last five or six pages, but I think the acoustics were fairly good. People didn't laugh as much as I'd hoped, except for Elise, who delighted me by snorting in several places. A savvy person sitting next to her asked me, during the question period, if, out of character, and world, and all the other aspects of fiction, dialogue came first for me. It does. This was an exceptionally talky chapter. There actually is description and action in other parts of the book, but they contain too many spoilers for me to be reading them to the innocent. I was also asked what made me want to write a sequel to the Secret Country Trilogy; and Elise brought up Zenna Henderson's books about The People, and the theme of exile, which was clever of her, because Henderson is a huge influence on The Dubious Hills, and both character threads in the new book deal with the topic.

I signed some people's books, including new copies of the Secret Country trilogy for a woman who had worn hers out and wanted to give some to her kids to read, which gratified me deeply.

I ought to have gone home then, but instead I went to hear Neil Gaiman's keynote speech. What he actually did, owing to an ambiguity in the program, was to read the first half of the first chapter of a wonderful-sounding book about a graveyard. He said that the very first scene was probably the most disturbing thing he had ever written. It was disturbing, but within a page of it, he had the audience laughing uproariously. Mike Ford was able to do that too, to walk that thin, thin line. I can't hear Neil without missing Mike. Mike introduced us. When the reading was done, Neil said that he could either take questions or give part of the talk he'd prepared before he thought he needed to do a reading instead. He was asked what the talk was about, so he got to answer questions AND do part of the talk. The part I liked was his saying that traditionally, world literature, the vast majority of it, is fantastical literature, and that a situation in which there is a special fantasy and science-fiction section in the bookstore is of very recent vintage.

I thought of staying around to say Hello, but common sense took over, and I came home to work on Chapter 23.