More detail about Minicon -- Friday

David and Lydy and I piled ourselves and our luggage into the car and arrived at the hotel around two. Steve Brust was in the bar and came and gave me a hug. This is where I made my first mistake. Not in the hug, but rather in entering so entirely the past-Minicon miasma, in which the convention goes on forever, and in any case everybody lives in Minneapolis. I should have said to him, on the spot, let's get together, what meal times have you got free? But I didn't, I said breathlessly, "I have a panel and a reading" and rushed off.

We all muddled around unpacking or not, and I checked that I had my manuscript and headed down to the Green Room. They were still setting up, but received me kindly and offered me a sandwich of cold cuts and cheese. I settled for a broccoli sandwich, which was fairly filling. Sharyn was taking us all out for an early dinner after the programming, so I figured I'd be okay.

The panel was that perennial favorite, "The Language of Fantasy."
The panelists were yours truly, truepenny, papersky, and Jan Bogstad, a critic whom I associate with Madison and Wiscon. The topic has been done to death, of course, so I appreciated Jo's slightly different take on the issue, which had to do with the specific historical baggage of individual terms. I didn't feel that the panel really ever got moving, though, and it seemed at times to be moving at cross-purposes to itself. I talked to a lot of audience members who liked it much better than I did, though.

I rushed off afterwards to do my reading. There was sparse attendance at the very beginning, but I see from David's photographs that the room filled better later on. I read a series of brief snippets, because I didn't think my voice would hold out very well, and it didn't. People laughed in the right spots, which was cheering. The bit from the Liavek novel needs more speech tags, though.

David and Lydy and I met sdn in the lobby, and after some complicated maneuvering that included cakmpls's giving Sharyn a charm bracelet commemorating her guest of honorship and her first visit to Minnesota, and being introduced to Andy, the alleged imaginary boyfriend, we walked up to Sawat Dee, where we had a very pleasant dinner. Just as we had all got used to one another, though, we had to repair to Opening Ceremonies.

We didn't need to hurry that much, as it turns out -- they were still dinking around with announcements, which always seems to take too long. My own wait was enlivened by the sudden appearance next to me of John Robey and Mark Mendel, both members of, if not the original Drageara gaming group, at least of the one that I first encountered when I joined Minn-Stf. I hadn't seen either of them in years and years and years, but they were quite recognizable. Once again, I should have snaffled them on the spot, but I didn't, and that was all I saw of them for the rest of the weekend.

Eventually I got tired of sitting on the chairs provided and went and stood in the back of the room, against the wall, with David and his camera. Shortly thereafter Walter Jon Williams gave his speech. I did enjoy it enormously, but mrissa reminded me of the part that made me roll my eyes. He said that television and the internet flatten the affect of what is conveyed, so that everything has the same emotional level. If that's true of television and the internet, it must be true of books as well, since books are a unified medium in exactly the same way; and it manifestly isn't true of books. I can see that some non-readers or poor readers might think that of books, actually -- the difficulty of the print drowns out its finer techniques. I bet people accustomed to oral poetry said that about the new-fangled written stuff. I think possibly that some of those who come late to a new technology feel that way about it, because the strangeness of it and its cues muffle the differences in pitch. But of course it's nonsense to say that any medium is inherently incapable of a broad range of intensity. I feel that way about comic books, but I know that's me, not the comic books.

In any case, I adored the rest of the speech -- he was describing my experience in fandom, and I too much prefer SF Village to the great outside.

Sharyn, who had told us that she had no speech but she might say a few words of appreciation, turned out to have been scribbling furiously while Walter Jon spoke, and did a very nice segue out of his speech by saying that she inhabited the walkway between Children's Book World and the SF Village. Walter Jon had mentioned that when he went to his first convention around 1972, there was a list of about a hundred and fifty books that you could be confident everybody you met at a convention had read. All the old familiar names rolled off his lips, and he got a laugh with, "Heinlein, Heinlein, Heinlein, Heinlein," and just as I was thinking, "Oh, but wait," he said it -- of course, he said, that list was provincial, and he listed all the ways.

Sharyn said that it might indeed be true that we no longer had adult books in common, but she would bet that wasn't true of children's books. She asked how many of us had read Lloyd Alexander, and a forest of hands went up. She told us that Lloyd Alexander is eighty and still writing; he has a story (a strange Kafkaesque story, but goofy in the old Alexander way, I think) in Firebirds, her short-story collection.

She talked about her experience as the only YA editor to come to sf conventions, but at some point she mentioned my name in an adulatory fashion and everybody applauded, which mars my memory of how things came out.

After that was Ask Dr. Mike, a particularly fine one, and I really enjoyed watching Andy almost fall off his chair. (I couldn't see Sharyn as well; somebody was wearing a hat between us.)

I talked to people and listened to music, but I can't recall what happened on which night any more.

Pamela