Week of October 29-November 4 (belated) and con stuff

[mrissa]

One acceptance, four rejections. And it all feels like very long ago right now.

Last night on the plane I dozed off for a bit and woke up with most of a story in my head. Right now I'm calling it "Pirates by Adeline Thromb Age 9," and I have no idea whether it works, but it's coming out now, and it'll be done soon, and then it'll be someone else's problem. Hurrah, someone else's problem! This is probably due to meeting johnjosephadams when he had a pirate temporary tattoo on the back of his head, so I will dump it on him first when I am done with it. That seems fair to me. Serve him right etc. If he didn't want people dumping pirate stories on him, there are all sorts of steps he could have taken.

I have said, "This isn't my usual sort of story," often enough and in plaintive enough tones that I think I should shut up and let other people say what my kind of story is. And then bite my lip and try not to argue. All right, that's my plan then. Unless people go saying things aren't fantasy that are, in which case I will jump right in, because, really.

I went to two panels, a poetry reading (so stillnotbored and cristalia know I love them), and a GoH interview Friday (Delia Sherman does good interviews, and Robin Hobb/Megan Lindholm had good talky answers). cristalia talked me out of going to a Saturday panel on the grounds that it would likely piss me off, and she was concise and coherent, and mizkit was buying drinks, so...there you have that. Friday morning I went to the panels mostly because if I was sitting in a panel audience, no one would expect me to be sociable, and I would have a bit of time to get more sociable again. And it worked, and anyway the panels sounded like the more interesting ones for the weekend.

So I went to Regional Differences in Fantasy, and it wasn't quite...um. Fiona McIntosh made me sad. She was talking about how The Reader wants medieval Europe over and over, so she has to scrub Australianisms out of her work. And I wonder if that's generally true or if the stuff she started writing appeals to readers who want medieval Europe over and over. I believe her that she knows her readers. I just wonder if they're the only readers possible. (I strongly suspect not, in case you couldn't tell, and I didn't go buy her book...but if it had been set in an historical Australia, I totally would have. In fact, does anybody know of any colonial-era Australian historical fantasy? I would pay overseas shipping for that and snarf it greedily.)

And I went to Taking One for the Team: Memorable Supporting Characters, and it was not nearly enough about supporting characters for my taste. The questions kept being about things like the villain, which to me is a different category of character, or about supporting characters who take over. 1crowdedhour has James and Thomas and Georgy and the aunties and the entire rest of society and now the children in with Kate and Cecy in her books with Pat Wrede, and that's just the book nearest to hand from the panelist nearest to me. Also, with the exception of 1crowdedhour, this was a rather bloodthirsty lot. (Not that Caroline isn't, I hasten to add. But she is from here, and we are more reserved about our blood lust. Err. Until we aren't.) Melanie Rawn had pretty clearly heard about her habit of killing off her characters once too many and had decided to embrace it as her own, dammit. John Moore said something very sensible: he said, "Your secondary characters are your reality check." Oh. Well, yah, like that. I mean, obviously not in its entirety, but yah, some. Anybody know anything about his books? People who go around being self-deprecating and sensible on panels make me want to look their books up.

And other than that, I talked to people, and I listened to people, and I wandered around, and I ate things and drank things and generally had a good time. The hot tub was out of commission, and the indoor pool was rather shallow, so the bikini stayed dry, and I seem to be incapable of remembering to use the camera these days, but given how long it took me to deal with the pictures of my niecelet from her baptism, it's probably just as well to let other people handle that.

Byerly's mini-scones are really, really good. Some kind soul brought elisem the caramel toffee ones, or I wouldn't have thought to try the blueberry. But for someone who needs breakfast reliably first thing in the morning, they are lovely and travel well.

I was really glad I didn't stay in the overflow hotel. I would have worked something out, but it was really nice to be able to stay up until I was ready to fall over, given that I'm not a night person. Having my room immediately above the bar was perhaps suboptimal, but it doesn't seem to have kept me from sleep significantly. It was actually rather nice to fall asleep hearing that sosostris2012 was amused again, that someone had done something awful to matociquala...it was rather like hearing gaaldine come home down the hall in college, homey rather than disturbing.

Speaking of gaaldine, it was weird to see ksumnersmith have a few of the same tone/expression combinations. If I'd gotten to be friends with ksumnersmith in person, I could blame some initial comfort level on being reminded of gaaldine. Instead it was more of a converging thing, and that was weird.

Also, I feel like saying that ksumnersmith and I always gang up on tmseay and tease him mercilessly -- but I think that's an illusory always, because it's only happened in small long-distance bits before.

But we should always, because it's fun.

Also, I'm not sure if it's an illusory always that cristalia and I manage to have an intensely personal conversation at cons like we don't do online, but I'm pretty sure we did that in Madison, too, so maybe this is one of those "two points determine a line" bits of social geometry.

I got much closer with stillnotbored, raecarson, and jmeadows, and sosostris2012 than I ever imagined I would. Backseats that size are not intended for people that numerous. But I could feel my leg again within a few mintues, and Jodi's head seemed mostly intact, so I think we emerged from it largely unscathed. sosostris2012's shocks may never be the same, though....

I think that's it for now. I have walked the dog and worked and cleaned and done other useful tasks in the middle of writing this post, so I'm just going to fling it at the internet and see what I feel like saying later. I am not going to even try to make a comprehensive list of which lj people I met or saw -- I don't even know the names of some of the people I'm pretty sure have ljs -- but there was much goodness.

Comments

[everyonesakitty.livejournal.com]

It was so wonderful to finally meet you. You made Sat. evening lots of fun!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Great to meet you, too! And I also had a lovely Saturday evening.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The secondary characters panel didn't do it for me at all (which is why I bailed a little way in). I would much rather have heard them talk about how the good ones are the ones who, despite having bit parts, show remarkable depth and humanity. Ended up having a chat with friends about this in the context of Battlestar Galactica -- you get a character like Lt. Gaeta, who in your usual SF would be Just Another Bridge Officer, but who in BSG has things like a smoking habit he doesn't even like, a tattoo he got while drunk, and an occasional moment when he stops being Calm Reliable Gaeta and just snaps. Not a major character by any stretch of the imagination, but he comes across as a three-dimensional person.

(I'm too lazy to check whether I've spelled his name right.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't watch BSG, but that's the sort of thing I would have liked, too. Dave Duncan's comment about making a minor character "visually memorable" and making the reader sorry for him did not really resonate with me at all at all. Maybe visual people would remember, "Oh, yeah, he's the guy with the blue hair spiked up, not the one with the floppy green hair," but that's not going to cut it for me!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I think I left shortly after that, because it made me want to beat my head against the chair in front of me. I may recognize the line "God bless us, every one!," but that doesn't mean I think much of Tiny Tim as a character.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Right -- a lot of Dickens's secondary figures are recognizable as caricatures, not characters. And the idea that everyone who goes onstage in Shakespeare is a great character is just -- that's not even wrong. (Also also, talking about secondary characters upstaging the leads in books because you've seen it in plays is probably not directly useful. Sigh.)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Right -- a lot of Dickens's secondary figures are recognizable as caricatures, not characters.

Well, more recognizable as such; I don't find any characters in such Dickens as I have read - which is admittedly not all of it, but then again, life is short and there's also a lot of Dumas I've not yet read - more than two and a half dimensional.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Not a Dickens fan here, in part for that reason. I will always, always, always reach for Dumas over Dickens.

[eposia.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed meeting you on Saturday! It was great watching you and Steve trade Minnesota jokes.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, nice to meet you, too! And thank you for specifying who you are and how I met you, so I didn't have to wonder if I had the right person.

Embarrassingly, the first time Steve told me a Minnesota joke, I didn't initialy realize it was a joke. He started, "So I was talking to Ole the other day," and I thought, well, yah, okay, there are plenty of people I don't know yet in Minneapolis fandom; what did Ole have to say? My error soon became abundantly clear, but it's probably a tribute to the Ole joke that my confusion lasted even a split second. (I really did go to college with guys named Sven and Ole, and of course Larses are extremely abundant.)

[deannahoak.livejournal.com]

Hey, Mrissa. I'd like to chat with you a bit about something we talked about briefly at the con. I think I might be able to help your relative with some of the red-tape intricacies, to at least a small extent. Drop me a line at my site or ping me on AIM if you get a chance.