30 August 2002

M'ris' lesson number one for WorldCon: eat, ya idjit!

It wasn't a problem early in the day. Traffic was bad on the way down to fetch Thomas, but not so bad that we were late -- his bags hadn't arrived, although he had. (And he agreed that I was right, there was nobody he could possibly have mistaken for me in the baggage area, given my web photo.) He was everything a Thomas ought to be, down to the handwriting. No drawl, which had been an open question in my mind. It's such a relief when people are nice in person, and it was a good omen for the rest of the weekend, I hope.

We ran into a bunch of people at registration -- Avi and his friends and Clarionites, Alec and ditto, Zed and ditto, but that was later. Raechel Henderson Moon is much smaller than I pictured her. Much. Her husband is almost exactly as I pictured him, and that was strange, because I didn't even realize I had a mental image of him. Anyway, Raechel sounded right, and her personality came shining right on out. (Chocolate party! Chocolate party! I think a chocolate party is possibly the most brilliant idea to hit WorldCon in a loooong time. Also it will help with M'ris' First Lesson of WorldCon.)

So we grabbed lunch with Thomas, figuring that way we could actually talk, rather than trying to get as big a group together as possible and make it difficult to seat us and talk to each other and so on. Pizza Chicago. Mmm. I prefer Zachary's, of course, but Pizza Chicago will do. By the time we were done, it was 1:00, and we were clear off away from the convention center -- no 1:00 panels for us. And I'd been hauling The World Builders around, having realized that it weighed more than a pound and was thus illegal to stick in one of the drop boxes. It was very clearly a bunch of paper in an envelope, and I doubt that they would have done anything nasty to it, but I didn't want to take the chance, having spend the last three weeks on it and all. So Mark and I found a post office, a good ways away from the convention center, walked back and looked in the dealer's room, and then split up: I went to a Kaffee Klatsch with Ellen Datlow, and Mark went to Joe Haldeman's reading. The best of both worlds.

The Kaffee Klatsch was cool. Nice. About halfway through, Datlow pointed at me and said, "I know you!" I grinned and said, "Yeah, you reject a lot of my stories." She laughed and wanted to know if we'd met before, so I said that we had at the ICFA, and that was pretty cool. I like the Kaffee Klatsch idea, I think. Want to do more.

Mark and I met up again for the Women in Combat panel, which made me want to buy Karin Lowachee's book more than I had before. It also made me want to take Susan Matthews home to be my aunt. Or at least to be friends with my Aunt Kathy and my cousin Cathy. (So, people who know both of them: if you can imagine someone who can be friends with both and writes military SF, I think you've got Susan Matthews right on.) She has this infectious little giggle. I would not have associated Susan Matthews with "little giggle" before this. John Hemry and Diana Paxson were also on that panel, and they seemed cool.

Then I went to a panel about the differences between writing for YAs and writing for adults. It was Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Suzy McKee Charnas, Terry Bisson, Tad Williams, and Terry Pratchett. Much fun, and they said respectful things about writing for kids, which is good. Tad Williams reminded me of Jimmer, were he writing fantasy novels. Terry Pratchett talked like his authorial voice at times, and he ended up removing the microphone from Tad Williams when his sentence got too long and enthusiastic. I enjoyed myself.

See, and that doesn't sound like all that much, but by that time, it was 7:00, and we had to get Thomas and his bag over to his hotel, and then we headed home. And I had fruit leather, but I needed more food than that, and sooner. I'm going to have to bring more snacks today or -- more likely -- make myself skip either the 4:00 or the 5:30 panel in favor of eating. I was shaky and not doing so well when I got home. Timprov was even shakier and doing even worse, genuinely ill, rough night. Disappointing timing on that, but mostly we'll just try to take care of him and hope it gets better.

I returned home to the rest of my author copies waiting for me -- the five from The Jewish Americans, plus the six of that and the six of The Chinese Americans that my Grandma wanted me to sign for various relatives. So that's nice to have.

I didn't sleep long or well, and we're kind of draggin' around here. I'm going to at least take the time to check on Timprov before we go, and I'm hoping we can work on getting him rehydrated. It'll be a long day today, but I hope there'll be good stuff in it.

With a very few exceptions, I think I like more people in this field than I want to. You know? I like people whose work I don't like at all. It would be nice if I just liked everybody whose work I liked. But instead I end up with favorable impressions of most people, even if I don't like their work at all.

There are worse things, I assure you.