FogCon: Day 2

Lots of good stuff today!

- Breakfast with friends
- Panel on the ethics of magic, which covered all kinds of great territory. Dragon Age was mentioned a few times, and afterwards I actually went up to Marie Brennan (author of the Lady Isabela Trent series, among others, whom I admire both as an author and as a speaker) to talk to her a little bit about it.
- Lunch with forestofglory and her family, including a really tasty dish of ice cream
- I missed the start of the first afternoon panel, so instead of wandering in late, I checked out the dealers room (which I escaped relatively unscathed, only bought one pair of earrings) and dropped by the con suite, where folks were discussing one-note actors and WorldCon.
- A character building exercise with Guest of Honor Jo Walton, which turned into a world building and storytelling exercise, a process both fascinating and entertaining (and thought-provoking to me as character-driven writer who has always felt inadequate to developing plots and original worlds).
- The official lecture by non-genre Guest of Honor Donna Haraway, who had a lot to say about the history of science and mythology and how human culture has developed.
- Ventured out for dinner at a nearby Mexican restaurant, where I read through and enjoyed a couple Nebula nominated stories (as Hugo homework).
- My last panel attended tonight was about the domestic in fantasy, which was so interesting that I took actual notes, and I plan to write a bit more about it tomorrow.
- Hit the bar and then the con suite; in both places, I got into entertaining conversations with people I know, people I've seen around the con, and people who were new to me. And when I left, it was because I was getting tired (and wanted enough time before bed to tap out a few notes about the day), not because I wasn't enjoying the conversation and/or was feeling socialed out, which is seriously progress for me as far as cons go.

It's taken six years of attending, but I finally feel like I"m not starting from scratch every year, like there are people who remember me from previous years and are happy to talk to me again. Like it's a community, not a new collection of strangers every time. Maybe that's because this con is still fairly young, or maybe it's just that I'm getting better at it, but it's a good feeling, and it makes me happy.

One more day!

FogCon: Day 3

Today I went to two events (a reading and a panel), and also had a lovely, wide-ranging lunchtime chat with someone I met randomly in the bar. Maybe it just takes me this many years of being in the same place with largely the same people to get comfortable putting myself forward like this. I thought about staying for the post-con feedback session, but decided it was time to leave Con World for everyday life.

First up was the honored guest reading (which is always on Sunday morning and always a must-see for me). Ted Chiang (whose panels I somehow managed to completely miss) gave an excellent and thought-provoking talk about life-logging and its potential effects on memory, both good and bad, a sort of non-fictional response to his story The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling. Donna Haraway read from her work in progress (and covered very much the same ground as the presentation she gave yesterday; it was well down, but I found myself wishing that she had done something different). And Jo Walton read a sonnet and the opening section of her book The Just City, which may have moved somewhat further up my to-read list. Walton is a particularly gifted reader -- she infuses her words with life and humor.

After lunch came the Draconic Appreciation Society panel, for which I had high hopes, and those hopes were realized. Marie Brennan was on it -- always a plus in a panel, for me, but especially since I really love the dragon series she's currently writing (the Isabela Trent books). Jo Walton was on the panel as well, and it was just generally a good mix of entertaining panel and enthusiastic audience. Discussion started with the history of dragon myths in Europe, and Jo Walton's theory that Northern dragons are based on stories about snake creatures -- when there were no snakes in Scandinavia. From there, they talked about dragons in different cultures (and the curious fact that many different types of creatures are all recognizable as dragons), books that disappoint their readers by having dragons in the title but not in the story, whether dragons always mean fantasy (like space ships always mean science fiction) and what that means for books like Pern, and whether the discovery that dinosaurs had feathers is going to start influencing dragon design in the future. I was actually the first person to bring up the Temeraire series, in the context of dragons as partners to humans rather than either pets (ala Pern) or threats (like Smaug or Dragon Age), but then someone in the audience linked that to the different dragon myths in cultures around the world.

Afterwards, I had my second opportunity of the weekend to geek out over Dragon Age with Marie Brennan, which is one of the things that has most boggled my mind about going to cons: the idea of chatting with authors who I admire about totally unrelated works that we're both fans of. I'm glad to be getting less shy about that sort of thing, and I hope I'm able to not become completely star-struck when the time comes at WisCon.