Today is the first day of MarsCON.

Looks like registration opens at noon, but I haven't had enough coffee yet to figure out when Opening Ceremonies is... I do have a panel at 4 PM, which I planned to arrive in time for. Hopefully, they won't need me too much before that since I have to pick Mason up after school, and he's not usually out until after 3 PM.

It's going to be a bit of a mad dash.

I've got a reading tonight and, of course, it finally hit me that what I should read from is the book that will be available there: SONG OF SECRETS, which I co-wrote with Rachel Calish. Depending on how much of that I want to read, I could also read part of my short story "God Box" which appeared in KING DAVID AND THE SPIDERS OF MARS as I'm thinking about bringing copies of that book along as well.

My schedule tonight is:

How Come Nobody’s Heard Of Me, Dammit!!
Room 419 (Krushenko’s) -- Friday 04:00 pm
Let’s figure out all the things we did wrong!
With: Lyda Morehouse, Naomi Kritzer, mod.; Rachel Gold, Michael Merriam

Fiction Reading: Lyda Morehouse
III Eagle’s Nest (Re(a)d Mars) —Friday 08:00 pm
Come hear our Author Guest of Honor read her work.
With: Lyda Morehouse

FanFiction - Who, What, and Huh?
IV Hawk’s Ridge (Anime/YA) — Friday 09:00 pm
From the basics for the beginners to your favorite websites to share your own stories.
With: Lyda Morehouse, Rakhi Rajpal mod, Bailey Humphries-Graff, Susan Woehrle

In other news, Shawn is doing a lot better. She's still sleeping a lot, but I suspect that's what comes from removing an organ. But, she's otherwise back to doing most of the things she does. She's still restricted on lifting and OMG I can't wait until that's over, because I HATE DOING LAUNDRY SO MUCH.

I do a lot of other things around the house, including nearly all of the cooking and dish washing, but laundry has always been Shawn's thing and I can't wait for her to take it back. Also, I'm ready for her to go back to work, if only because the longer she stays home the more likely she is to notice how little ELSE I do around the house.

*wink*

I just got the notice that THREE-BODY PROBLEM is ready for me to pick up at the Roseville library. I'm headed there in about a half hour to also return ANCILLARY SWORD, which *cough*I didn't finish.*cough* This will now be two out of the six books up for the Nebula that I just couldn't finish for one reason or another. As I was saying to Shawn last night, there's nothing _wrong_ with ANCILLARY SWORD, per se. I gave it a fair chance: nearly 200 pages. I just never got really engaged in the story. I found the world.. too stiff and formal and unemotional (which is weird because I think it's loosely based on Japan or China--there is a lot of bowing and tea and begging of pardons), and so I never connected. For me, it suffered from a whole lot of 'so what?' I finally found a character I sort of enjoyed, the alien translator, and, well, not to spoil anything, but let's just say my attachment to that person was short-lived.

I feel very strange about my inability to connect to either this or ANCILLARY JUSTICE, since so many people recommended the first book to me and it was up for nearly all the awards last year. I feel like I failed this book. Like there's something wrong with me that I didn't 'get' it.

Certainly, there are nifty things going on in Leckie's universe. I love the idea of the ancillary's themselves, even with their gruesome past. I love (though found it somewhat off-putting and jarring at first) the whole use of the feminine pronoun for all the things. Leckie's writing is strong--for the most part.

Leckie is hobbled by the constraints of her main character, Berq, though. Because Berq used to be a ship (for real, she was a space ship), she's not exactly *in* her body. She's not sensual in any way. There's no physical description of other characters beyond basics like skin color and a bit about hair. Gender, of course, is never attached. Which is so much the opposite of the other books I've read by women this year--so much body: so much sex with the body, so much awareness of the body's gender, so much indulging of the body with food (glorious food!) and pissing and shitting and bleeding and f*cking.

And I miss it.

I feel "floaty" and unanchored without it.

Add to that the emotionlessness of Berq and her culture, and I'm lost. Berq often has to *tell* me what she's feeling, rather than showing it physically (also something to do with this emotionless culture Berq is from). "I'm angry all the time" I read, and I thought, "You are? Since when? and Why?" (which seems like a major misstep, if I'm supposed to have known, much less felt it, too.)

Because of all this, I end up just not feeling it. Any of it.

I really wanted to like this book too. And I just didn't.

At any rate, I intend to bring my laptop with me to MarsCON over this weekend, so hopefully, I can regale you all with daily con reports.

My Sunday was good, though I got really exhausted by the end of it.  Only later did I realize that my problem was that I was over-caffeinated and under-fed.  I’d been trying to go on the cheap, as one does on the last day of the con, and, every time I went to get food, I’d managed to arrive at the con suite only in time to find the one lone carrot and the last scrapings of dip.

So, I was kind of… zombie-like when I finally got home at 5:00 pm.  It was only after dinner perked me up that I realized, “Oh, d’uh.  Food.  That would have helped.”

A rookie mistake from a long-time con goer like me—for shame!

I had two panels on Sunday, “Timing and Pacing” (which could have been boring, but was actually, thanks to the amazing chemistry between the panelists, my best panel all con), and “Dull, Realistic Characters” (which, unfortunately, lived up to its name.)

The concept behind “Dull, Realistic Characters” could have been an interesting one.  The idea proposed boiled down to: in reality, in a crisis, the best people to have on your team are the cool-headed, pragmatic ones.  How do you write someone like that in a way that they don’t come off as dull and uninteresting?

You write them well, is the answer, of course.

I’d wanted to be on the panel to argue the premise.  That those characters are dull.  Or that you can’t show reality in a riveting way, ala, say, a movie like “Apollo 13,” which while it may have had some inaccuracies, basically portrayed real people in a real crisis acting calmly—and yet was an utterly heart-pounding and mesmerizing film.

We ended up instead, rather boringly, meandering around the subject.

Which is a shame, because there’s something kind of intriguing about this that we never got to—like, why is it that some people can write about what they had for breakfast and you think, “Wow, what a fascinating insight into their lives!” and other people do the same thing, only in a different way, somehow, and you think, “OH FOR GOD SAKE GET OFF MY FEED, YOU DULLARD!” and start hunting around for the “hide” button.

Because it’s true.  I was once in a writers’ group with Terry Garey who wrote this whole scene about canning tomatoes.  It should have been dull, dull, DULL, but it wasn’t.  It was amazing.  I don’t know if it was because I learned some esoteric bit of canning lore from it, or if there was a pivotal character moment that was subtly woven into the narrative, or if was just a kind of ‘cult of personality’ that can happen when someone just has a really good writing voice.

On the other side, I’ve read fight scenes where people are spewing buckets of blood and I think… f*ck, when is this OVER? Because it was just THAT dull.

To me, that’s a more interesting question.  How does that work?  What are the mechanics of voice?  Does adding arcane knowledge (expertise about a certain subject) make dull stuff interesting, too?  What are the other ways you can make narrative sparkle?

That could have been a panel worth being on.  Alas, that was not the panel I was on.

Ah well. Speaking of questions unanswered, sometimes panelists click and sometimes they don’t.  This was one of those where I felt like any energy I injected into the conversation got sucked into the great void.  It happens sometimes.  It happens sometimes with really fascinating panelists.

But otherwise, I had a great time catching up with jiawen, haddayr, and naomikritzer.

Oh, the only other thing I wanted to note… when Mason and I came into MarsCON on Saturday, I looked around the little lounge area by the door for one of our tribe (which is to say the nerdest looking person) to ask for directions to registration.  I go up this older gentleman in a top hat and I say, “Excuse me, but do you know where registration is?”  Some other guy behind us answers me, and off we go.  It was only later, when I was leaving the dealers room and I heard someone yell out, “Last call for autographs from Dr. Demento,” and I turned, curious to see what Dr. Demento looked like, did I realize… yep, I’d asked Dr. Demento for directions to registration.

You gotta love cons.

Oh, and here's a picture goinked from Baron Dave Romm's Facebook page  (photo credit to him!) of me on the "Getting into the Mind of a Fanatic" panel on Saturday:


Could be subtitled: "Author at Work."  (I look very engaged, don't I?)  My folks know... I get kind of a buzz from "smart talk" which is why I enjoy cons and panels so much.

Oh, the only other fun take away from MarsCON was a line from one of the Guest of Honor this year, Esther Friesner, on a panel about fostering imagination, in which she said, "I have a special relationship with 'What If?'" which struck me as both insightful and kind of funny--because, of course, my mind started writing the slash with "What If?"

Because I'm a dork.

Oh, and speaking of that, I spread word of the cult of "Moon-Moon" all weekend, as well as tried to convince everyone I met that they really needed to watch "Free!" aka the gay swimming anime.

Oops, one last thing!  My fellow Wyrdsmith, Adam Stemple, is interviewed on our blog today.  Go check it out! http://wyrdsmiths.blogspot.com/2014/03/q-adam-stemple.html