TL:DR: We went to Ireland. I attended nearly 30 events at Worldcon in Dublin while my partner took in the museums and various sights, and then we visited the south of Ireland (glamping in a vardo and hiking through heather) and the West Coast (slept in an actual friggin' castle and did a lot of walking), ending up with visits to Bridget's Well and the Cliffs of INSANITY..er... the Cliffs of Mohr. It was amazing and cool and I'm still exhausted.
You can stop reading now.
The rest, really LONG part of this is so I don't forget what happened or who I saw.
So I actually made a list of con goals this trip, because it was Worldcon and because I was basically attending alone. I made a pretty ambitious list of goals:
- Talk with one agent or editor; just chat, maybe even over a drink (BWAHAHAHAHAHA nope)
- Pick up a signed something-or-other (uh, oops)
- Attend one social thing, (YES!)
- one GOH thing, (does going to two panels a GOH was on count?)
- one new and different thing (non-writing) (YES!)
- Relax and have fun (YES!)
- Meet someone new (YES!)
- Meet up with someone (uh, never happened)
- Go through the art show (YES!)
- Make introvert time -- center and ground (YES!)
- Find some gifts (uh... notsomuch)
So I didn't go to any of the specific Guest of Honor things (OMG the LINES. The LINES!) and made nothing that involved actually planning with another human being -- no agent or editor talk, no meeting up with anyone. But I did like 29 individual talks/panels/meetups/things over the course of the con, AND I took Sunday entirely off because I was burning out and not feeling well.
Not going to type up my notes. But to remind myself later I went to:
THURSDAY
Names: Form and Function in Worldbuilding and Conlags by Sara Uckelman of Durham U. She was awesome, I saw her at two other things, loved her talk.
Civilization & SF: Foundation, Dune and Hyperion. I could have argued over his choice of texts for this talk, long and strenuously, but meh.
Trust and the Future of Social Media. I was either too cynical or too unclear on the concept for this. Or they haven't actually built anything so he was talking about the problem they're trying to solve instead of any portion of any solution.
Those three talks were part of something new to me, which was ACADEMIC PAPERS as part of a con experience. Maybe that's a usual Worldcon thing? They certainly were well attended.
Illustrating in the Ordinary World, (Rob Carlos, Stephen Cass, and Oism (ushin) McCann. which was my art thing for the day.
This is where I say that the main venues involved in this con were... five? six? blocks apart. So I'd decided that on day one I'd mostly stay spend in the building where most of the academic/art talks were. And I got to see my first person from the PNW, Rob.
Horticulture in Extreme Environments. Helen Pennington, Paolo Bacigalupi, Ian McDonald (oh hey! a GOH!) and Teresa Storey. This was really depressing, actually, because they kept being derailed by climate change, but it did introduce me to a phrase that is apparently being used to address people's objection to introducing new plants, "botanical racism." I have mixed feels about this, as someone who loves native plants, but at the same time, native plants gotta move as climates change or native plants ain't gonna survive.
Science, Religion and the Art of Storytelling by Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. Brother Guy was recovering from pneumonia, was VERY happy to be at Worldcon, and told a lot of jokes. Sadly, jet lag was hitting hard at this point and my notes are mostly illegible.
I think I tried to go to the art show but it wasn't fully set up yet.
I gave up any evening programming to have dinner with my partner each night. Food was good. We ate at Banks (The Banks?) which was ornate, noisy, crowded, and served us utterly delicious food. A gentleman was playing the piano -- Beatles tunes, of all things -- and I had the best Irish coffee (yeah, yeah) for dessert. Teelings whiskey FTW. We'd started the morning, before the con, with a quick tour of Trinity College, but didn't have time to do the Book of Kells and the Old Library. We went back and did those later.
FRIDAY
Space Opera: Boldly Going where no genre has gone before! Rivers Solomon, Martha Wells, Bo Balder (NOT Bo Bolander) and Adam Whitehead. Interesting discussions; happily did not focus on Star anything. Possible reading for me: Lensmark and Skylark Series, the Expanse, Chareles Scheffield's Heritable, Phyllis Gottlieb, Ian Banks, Bujold. Also my favorite con ribbon.
Conlag meetup. I came away with some contact info that might be helpful.
Reading by Charlie Jane Anders. No notes, but that was cool.
Escape Artists live recording: Premee Mohamed (who I adore on twitter), Alasdar Stuart, Aidan Doyle, Marguerite Kenner, Tina Connolly, Benjamin Kinney. This was what it said on the tin; they were recording an episode at the con, and we all were mostly quiet so they could do that! During the Q&A, someone asked what made good short stories for audio, and the answer was: clarity and pacing, clarity both conceptually and in prose, because people can't go back to figure something out. Shorter pieces work better because an even pace works best and it's hard for longer works to maintain an even pace.
The Future of Food: Scott Edelman, Dybuk (Susan Weiner) Klezmer, R.B. Watkinson: very pro-GMO (paraphrased "You've eaten a Ruby Grapefruit? those are grown from a radioactive mutation of a gene.") and with twists I wasn't expecting: "we think local is friendly but it is more energy efficient to grow and import Spanish tomatoes than U.K. tomatoes). 3-D printed food, insects. Also kinda depressing, which I should have expected.
R.F. Kuang's reading, from the Dragon Republic, which isn't out yet.
Fountain Pen meetup, with Fran Wilde and Aliette de Bodard. OMG this was so much fun! And they gave away ink, and I got mine home without spilling it all over my clothes!
Language is a virus from outer space: Hanne-Madeleine (Iro) Gates Paine, P.M. Freestone, Stanley Schmidt, Joseph Malik. Couple of people from the conlag group went to this one. So this was a fascinating discussion about how different writers had used conlags in their work or good and ill. One note SS made: the IPA does not approximate the sounds of any animal on earth (well, other than humans). Watch Malik's book trailer. His operatically trained wife sings elvish.
Broad Universe Rapid Reading. E.C. Ambrose, Randee Dawn, Juliana Mills, Kathryn Sullivan, Rebecca Gomez Farrell, Elizabeth Crowens, Laurel Anne Hill. Kathryn gave out pens that are quite nice, I'm still using them.
We discovered that evening that one wants dinner reservations on a Friday night in Dublin, and we didn't have any. I was exhausted and embarassingly near tears by the time we ended up at tiny Pichet by complete happenstance and desperation and discovered it was a wonderful, four-star Michelin-rated restaurant. I was utterly charmed from the time they seated us. Intro was a fine-crumb bread much like a Sally Lunn but slightly sourdough, and saffron gin cocktail (saffron gin, elderflower, lemon juice and Proseco). And I'd never had île flottante (floating island) and his version was wonderful.
SATURDAY
I walked a lot Saturday because I went back and forth between venues and holy carp could they use some HERALDRY lessons. Got to the first one quite a bit late.
Hyperbolic Crochet: Constance Hoffmann and Nicholas Jackson. Started off with a history of the math, which to be honest I didn't give a shit about, and moved to the actual crochet, which was at least in explanation, ridiculously simple. Just a steady, regular constant increase. Every 3, 5 or 10 stitches. Oh. Now I have to try it. Reading: The Owl Service by Alana Garner and Crocheting Adv with H Planes Diana Taimina. The Raksura Colony Tree, which I saw at the end of the con, was created with hyperbolic crochet forms.
I believe I took time to go through the art show at this point. I was surprised it was so small -- no larger than Orycon's art show, or Norwescon's, and very few folks going through it. Some very nice pieces, interesting holographic art I'd never seen before, and some wooden boxes I would have given anything to buy but didn't figure they'd survive the trip home.
Irish Folklore in YA: Patrick O'Gullin (The Call, don't read it alone), Susan Connolly (TV writer), Ruth F. Long, Sarah Rees Brennon (The Other Lands?). My god, these people had fun, and might have been my favorite panel of the con. I wanted to go to one with local folks on it, and I picked the right one, I think. The grim dark sense of humor and their effusive explanations of where it came from was exceptional.
"Do you believe in faerie?""Do I believe in electricity? In a table?" Story about throwing the family in the car without a word because a storm, crows and injury happened at the same time, and they're atheists. Discussion of how Ireland had moved a motorway at the cost of millions of Euros so as to not disturb a faerie rock. "Would you enter a faerie circle?" "(Hell yes. Have you seen the state of the world today?") NO! say the others, these are IRISH faeries!
Things that annoy them:
- male banshee. There's a SHE in Banshee for a reason.
- Summer and winter courts. That's an aristocratic British thing.
- faerie trades with kings/kingdoms... esp. with uniquely English overtones.
- Irish wisdom preserved in the pyramids (what?)
"You have one gimme so be careful what it is."
Things they loved:
- Hand of Morrighan as seaweed strangling everyone
- Iron Druid by Kevin Hearne
- Wormwood Gate Kathreryn Farmer?Bull
- Irelands Immortals Eddy Lenihand You Tube.. Meeting the Other Crowd
- Prefer the local stories to the big epics
References for getting it right:
- www.celt.dias.ie
- celtic studies, a schoolschildren's collection of Irish folktales
- Ashley Burns? Otherwold
- Lady Gregory's collection, Mary's Jone's Celtic Literary collection
Then I went to Fran Wilde's reading of Riverland, and heard that her Gem World triology is Elise Matheson's jewelry turned into a book.
Marie Brennan's reading, nice. (A Natural History of Dragons).
Yoon Ha Lee's extremely crowded reading (I couldn't see at all) from a book that doesn't come out until 2021, sigh.
Editor's Panel: Michale Rowley, Eleanor Teasdale, Ginjer Buchanan, David Thomas Moore, John R. Douglas. Stories of strange, painful and fun bits of the job, from getting the U.K. rights to The Martian to missing out on Game of Thrones to finding an author like Cassandra Khaw and John M. Ford.
Urban Fantasy from the Margins: another favorite. Nichole Givens Kurtz, Eliza Chan, Claire Light. Some about place, the kind of urban fantasy they prefer, and the feelings of belonging nowhere and in two (or more) worlds simultaneously. Reading suggestions were numerous, Rivers of London kept coming up, by Ben Aaronovitch, also Nalo Hopkins, Jewle Gomez, Maurice Broaddeus. Also for disability, Goosebury Falls (face blindness) Tanya Huff, Mishel Baker, Borderline.
Dinner Saturday night was at Sole (reservations this time) Fish pie was grand, and I found French coffee -- cognac is an exellent addition, thank you and good day. Got a night picture of the big harp bridge. Feet hurt but it was worth it.
SUNDAY
I took the day off from the con. Neither of us were feeling good and we were a little exhausted and I was burnt out. We visited the Book of Kells, or the pages that were open that day, and the Old Library with its harp and ancient tomes. Watched the Hugo Awards on my phone in our hotel room, which meant no lines and no people and no fancy clothes and no long walk back to the hotel. Missed the buzz and excitement and all, but ... it was good.
MONDAY
Bigotry is not allegorical: J.S. Fields, moderator (from OSU! I own two of her books!), Jacq Applebee, with whom I'd had a brief conversation two days previous and seemed to upset, and it's bugging me; Cadwell Turnbull, Liz Bourke. Excellent panel.
The Raksura Colony Tree celebration: I ran over to see what they'd created. Was very awesome. Neighboring art show was already half dismantled.
Creative Couples: Ellen Kushner & Delia Sherman, Peter Morwood and Diane Duane (another GOH!), moderator Heide Goody. Funny, light and enjoyable panel.
Stuck my head in on the Spider Robinson concert.
Untranslated SFF: Alexander Hong (moderator, who was held up somehow and so we ended up with a audience member pressed into service temporarily), Lionel Davoust, Haruka Mugihara, Wataru Ishigame. I really wish I could read or understand Japanese and now I want to read Terry Pratchett in French. There's some fiction getting translated among what I'll call the Pacific Rim countries without being translated into English.
Scott Edelman reading, short story.
Nichole Givens Kurtz reading, from two shorts.
And then my con was over. We went out for dinner that night, I'm not sure where, because I was taking notes on the endpapers of my journal at that point. The next week was vacation, which involved more food, and a lovely glamping site in the south (Chez Shea, a vardo and a caravan, in the Beara Penisula, wonderful, caring people, they're on Air BnB) and Castle Ballynahinch, which is what it says on the tin, and wow was that a culture (and price) shift, and yet still birdsong at both places every morning, and we walked and ate and walked and ate and walked.
Google Maps was about a half-mile off on the location of Bridget's Well, it was further up the road by Murphy's Tavern (TINY parking area which is probably the pub's, tiny site with the most vertical cemetery above it I've ever seen. Do not drink that water). The Cliffs of Mohr were pretty amazing.
And then home and jetlag, and trying to get back into writing and queries and submissions again. Onward!
