aamcnamara (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
aamcnamara) wrote2011-06-01 11:00 am
aamcnamara) wrote2011-06-01 11:00 am
Entry tags:
Several days, many things
I want to bring library books with me to return when I go to meet a friend this afternoon. This means I should probably type up Books Read. Which, in my brain, means I ought to write up everything else that happened this weekend because that's more important. Instead I will type up books read, wander off to do things, and come back to complete the post later.
Wiscon! I didn't think I could go this year and then suddenly I could. So I grabbed a space in a hotel room with some Mount Holyoke alums and registered before the deadline hit and bounced all the way to Madison.
As is my wont, I went to lots of panels and waved hi at people. Some of the panels were fantastic, others less so. I wrote down notes, I just haven't typed them up.
I spent a couple of hours in the vid party Friday night. A few of the ones I hadn't seen before: Cold War (Monae) vid for Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Fear (Lily Allen) vid for Summer Glau, um... there were lots of neat ones but those stuck out. Also, apparently if I want to fully participate in Media Fandom I ought to see Sarah Connor Chronicles, BSG, preferably Stargate (though I have seen a bit of Stargate, enough to understand some of it)... possibly Supernatural although I've seen enough vids of it to get at least some of the critique, like this one which I also saw for the first time at the vid party. Saturday there was the Tiptree auction and then the Haiku Earring party and those were both nice. Sunday, GOH speech (they kept the ceremonies going very quickly this year! I was impressed!) and then the genderfloomp dance party. My outfit has been recorded by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
haddayr here.
Also, I bought an umbrella on State Street. It has stripes and a hooked handle and makes me feel awesome about carrying an umbrella, which is really what I was looking for in an umbrella. (Strangely, I bought no books at Wiscon.)
One thing I need to do better about is hanging out with people at meals when I'm at conventions. I don't hugely mind it--I usually spend them wandering Madison, which is wholly pleasant, and it's nice to get out of the hotel and have some introvert time, and I spent dinner on Friday drinking tea at Dobra and taking notes on revisions for A Returning Power which was actually useful--but, well. Meals seem like a good time to connect with people I know and get to spend more time than a quick conversation in passing, and I'm not taking advantage of that. Partially my fault: I feel awkward suggesting to someone "let's go eat things" when I brought all my own packed food for the weekend and will probably just order juice or something, so I don't initiate the conversations in the first place. Oh well.
Dinner Sunday, though, I met up with some Internet friends I hadn't met in real life before, who were in Madison for completely different reasons (even though neither of them lives there at present). So we chatted and wandered the city and it was lovely! I skipped Monday morning panels to hang out with them, too.
(The Strange Horizons tea party was lovely as well--not only did I drink tea and see a couple of people I already knew, I got introduced to some more people and we all had an actual conversation! So that was really nice.)
Aaaand I got Cat Valente to sign my copy of Bordertown, although I couldn't find Amal el-Mohtar at that point and I wanted to get her to sign Bordertown as well, but maybe Amal will be at Readercon. And I think those are the highlights of my Wiscon this year. Except for the random Madison guy who informed me that I was "bringing pimpin' back in style" when walking down State Street in my three-piece light suit. Oh, Madison.
(Yesterday I was walking to my mother's house from the bus and a random woman rolled down her car window at a stop sign to compliment me on my hat. Oh, Minneapolis.)
And then the day after I got back from Wiscon, China Mieville was doing a reading in the Twin Cities. So obviously I had to go. He read part of the beginning of Embassytown, and then he answered questions--he's just about as erudite as you might expect, but funnier, and he's clearly worked out some good answers to the questions people always ask writers ("Where do your ideas come from?" got a response along the lines of "Everyone has as many ideas as I do, but society makes you think you ought to filter them/think they're silly; writers are people who don't listen to that"). I asked if there were any genres he was planning to write in or that he didn't think he would ever write in: Regency romance and pornography, respectively. Someday I hope that he does write a Regency romance, because I would be fascinated to see what a Mieville take on that would look like.
They had people with books from home wait to get them signed until everyone who wanted a new book signed had that, so I ended up waiting through the line twice (once with a new copy of Embassytown, once with my aging copy of Perdido Street Station). Not too bad of a line, though when I picked up a number for my spot in the first line I had 57. Good crowd, but not ridiculously huge. Getting both books signed was a way to occupy myself while waiting for one of my parents to come pick me up, anyhow.
When I came through the line the second time with Perdido Street Station, the guy ahead of me asked Mieville what books he proselytized about; Mieville said two things, one of which was Helen Oyeyemi. I hadn't realized that Oyeymi had written any books after Icarus Girl until this weekend (when her new one showed up on the Tiptree honor list), and said so--Mieville highly recommended it. I am going to have to acquire that somehow.
Earlier, in the questions part, someone had asked about character and setting, and how some authors' characters seem like you could pick them up and move them into a different setting but Mieville's seem in ways like functions of their setting. And he answered it by talking about how when he'd read Delany's essay on character and visualization of what's going on, that had explained a lot of things to him, but what also occurred to me was Brecht's political reasons for having characters spring from their settings. However... it didn't really seem like raising my hand at a reading in a Barnes & Noble and bringing out the Bertolt Brecht dramaturgical theory (bam!) was really the best option for me. But when he was signing my copy of Perdido, I did mention it, and he said oh, yeah, that it wasn't a conscious thing but he'd grown up with Brecht and probably it was in there, just not thought about. So that was neat. He's the sort of writer I'd like to sit down and talk to at a convention someday--too bad he's from London.
And now I have signed copies of Embassytown and Perdido Street Station. (I decided not to lug Un Lun Dun and Kraken all the way up there, but Perdido was the first thing I read of his, and I still have a fondness for the seven-foot-tall hypnotic soul-sucking moths.)
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen: I had not read this before, shame on me. (Kate gets me to read classics, I make her read fantasy novels.) I had seen a movie version (yes, that one). The book has a lot more layers than the movie did (of course)--I mean, even if I hadn't seen a movie version, the Story Of Pride And Prejudice is fairly well-known, but the actuality is more complex than that. So it was interesting to read it and see some of why it became a classic in the first place.
Geektastic, ed. Black and Castellucci: I picked this up in a bookstore when it actually came out, read the Kelly Link story in it, and put it down again. Um. Got it out from the library and read through it--I think my favorites were the Link one and Sara Zarr's audition-monologue one. I had a lot of resonance with Zarr's main character, I kept going "Yes. Yes." all through it about high school and theater and teenagers and how you do art.
Faerie Winter, Simner: I had forgotten a lot of what happened in Bones of Faerie, and it was neat to go back to that world and learn more--the book took turns I hadn't been expecting, which I liked. I'll read the third one when it comes out, although the concerns of the books/world aren't quite something that hits me hard right now.
The Seven Towers, Wrede: All the way through I was trying to figure out who Amberglas reminded me of, and then the author's note told me that she was a mashup of the Dowager Duchess of Denver and Chrestomanci, and I went "wait, what? What?" and laughed for a while. Which tells you nothing about this book. Heh. Not sure the plot completely made sense to me, but it was a neat solution, anyhow. And I liked the characters and how information was concealed/revealed. I'm glad it got reprinted and I got to read it.
Welcome to Bordertown, ed. Black and Kushner: Okay, so when I was at WisCon this weekend I kept having to choose between three or four panels in a timeslot that all looked interesting. When the dilemma was between the panel on anthologies and some other ones, I ended up picking one of the other ones. Part of the reason was indisputably that if they had gotten to the "is it possible to construct a perfect anthology?" question, I would have had to seriously restrain myself from jumping up and saying "BORDERTOWN!". Some of the stories were more like those in the previous anthologies, some of them were like those in the previous anthologies only with a serious twist added from modern Internet stuff, and some of them were perfectly Bordertown and very much different from either of these options (see Nalo Hopkinson's: yes, please). There was more than one story with queer characters--there was more than one story featuring queer characters--there was, I think, more than one story featuring lesbian characters. (This is part of my benchmark because The Essential Bordertown made me have a revelation about my sexual orientation.) There was a Bordertown Jackaroo story. It just... yeah. Probably in a while I will be able to come up with logical critiques of it as a collection or of any of the stories--nothing is perfect, and I did have moments of "huh?" or "um" while reading it--but right now mostly I am in a state of squee.
I also have been reading a collection of Sayers short stories, which I'm not sure I will finish before I leave town, and Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse (ditto). And when in bookstores I tend to read bits of Holly Black's Red Glove, because I reserved it from the library but I feel like it won't get to me before ditto two previous. Also Delany's Nova, which I don't like quite enough to pay fifteen dollars for at the bookstore but which intrigues me whenever I do end up reading it in the store.
Wiscon! I didn't think I could go this year and then suddenly I could. So I grabbed a space in a hotel room with some Mount Holyoke alums and registered before the deadline hit and bounced all the way to Madison.
As is my wont, I went to lots of panels and waved hi at people. Some of the panels were fantastic, others less so. I wrote down notes, I just haven't typed them up.
I spent a couple of hours in the vid party Friday night. A few of the ones I hadn't seen before: Cold War (Monae) vid for Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Fear (Lily Allen) vid for Summer Glau, um... there were lots of neat ones but those stuck out. Also, apparently if I want to fully participate in Media Fandom I ought to see Sarah Connor Chronicles, BSG, preferably Stargate (though I have seen a bit of Stargate, enough to understand some of it)... possibly Supernatural although I've seen enough vids of it to get at least some of the critique, like this one which I also saw for the first time at the vid party. Saturday there was the Tiptree auction and then the Haiku Earring party and those were both nice. Sunday, GOH speech (they kept the ceremonies going very quickly this year! I was impressed!) and then the genderfloomp dance party. My outfit has been recorded by
haddayr here.Also, I bought an umbrella on State Street. It has stripes and a hooked handle and makes me feel awesome about carrying an umbrella, which is really what I was looking for in an umbrella. (Strangely, I bought no books at Wiscon.)
One thing I need to do better about is hanging out with people at meals when I'm at conventions. I don't hugely mind it--I usually spend them wandering Madison, which is wholly pleasant, and it's nice to get out of the hotel and have some introvert time, and I spent dinner on Friday drinking tea at Dobra and taking notes on revisions for A Returning Power which was actually useful--but, well. Meals seem like a good time to connect with people I know and get to spend more time than a quick conversation in passing, and I'm not taking advantage of that. Partially my fault: I feel awkward suggesting to someone "let's go eat things" when I brought all my own packed food for the weekend and will probably just order juice or something, so I don't initiate the conversations in the first place. Oh well.
Dinner Sunday, though, I met up with some Internet friends I hadn't met in real life before, who were in Madison for completely different reasons (even though neither of them lives there at present). So we chatted and wandered the city and it was lovely! I skipped Monday morning panels to hang out with them, too.
(The Strange Horizons tea party was lovely as well--not only did I drink tea and see a couple of people I already knew, I got introduced to some more people and we all had an actual conversation! So that was really nice.)
Aaaand I got Cat Valente to sign my copy of Bordertown, although I couldn't find Amal el-Mohtar at that point and I wanted to get her to sign Bordertown as well, but maybe Amal will be at Readercon. And I think those are the highlights of my Wiscon this year. Except for the random Madison guy who informed me that I was "bringing pimpin' back in style" when walking down State Street in my three-piece light suit. Oh, Madison.
(Yesterday I was walking to my mother's house from the bus and a random woman rolled down her car window at a stop sign to compliment me on my hat. Oh, Minneapolis.)
And then the day after I got back from Wiscon, China Mieville was doing a reading in the Twin Cities. So obviously I had to go. He read part of the beginning of Embassytown, and then he answered questions--he's just about as erudite as you might expect, but funnier, and he's clearly worked out some good answers to the questions people always ask writers ("Where do your ideas come from?" got a response along the lines of "Everyone has as many ideas as I do, but society makes you think you ought to filter them/think they're silly; writers are people who don't listen to that"). I asked if there were any genres he was planning to write in or that he didn't think he would ever write in: Regency romance and pornography, respectively. Someday I hope that he does write a Regency romance, because I would be fascinated to see what a Mieville take on that would look like.
They had people with books from home wait to get them signed until everyone who wanted a new book signed had that, so I ended up waiting through the line twice (once with a new copy of Embassytown, once with my aging copy of Perdido Street Station). Not too bad of a line, though when I picked up a number for my spot in the first line I had 57. Good crowd, but not ridiculously huge. Getting both books signed was a way to occupy myself while waiting for one of my parents to come pick me up, anyhow.
When I came through the line the second time with Perdido Street Station, the guy ahead of me asked Mieville what books he proselytized about; Mieville said two things, one of which was Helen Oyeyemi. I hadn't realized that Oyeymi had written any books after Icarus Girl until this weekend (when her new one showed up on the Tiptree honor list), and said so--Mieville highly recommended it. I am going to have to acquire that somehow.
Earlier, in the questions part, someone had asked about character and setting, and how some authors' characters seem like you could pick them up and move them into a different setting but Mieville's seem in ways like functions of their setting. And he answered it by talking about how when he'd read Delany's essay on character and visualization of what's going on, that had explained a lot of things to him, but what also occurred to me was Brecht's political reasons for having characters spring from their settings. However... it didn't really seem like raising my hand at a reading in a Barnes & Noble and bringing out the Bertolt Brecht dramaturgical theory (bam!) was really the best option for me. But when he was signing my copy of Perdido, I did mention it, and he said oh, yeah, that it wasn't a conscious thing but he'd grown up with Brecht and probably it was in there, just not thought about. So that was neat. He's the sort of writer I'd like to sit down and talk to at a convention someday--too bad he's from London.
And now I have signed copies of Embassytown and Perdido Street Station. (I decided not to lug Un Lun Dun and Kraken all the way up there, but Perdido was the first thing I read of his, and I still have a fondness for the seven-foot-tall hypnotic soul-sucking moths.)
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen: I had not read this before, shame on me. (Kate gets me to read classics, I make her read fantasy novels.) I had seen a movie version (yes, that one). The book has a lot more layers than the movie did (of course)--I mean, even if I hadn't seen a movie version, the Story Of Pride And Prejudice is fairly well-known, but the actuality is more complex than that. So it was interesting to read it and see some of why it became a classic in the first place.
Geektastic, ed. Black and Castellucci: I picked this up in a bookstore when it actually came out, read the Kelly Link story in it, and put it down again. Um. Got it out from the library and read through it--I think my favorites were the Link one and Sara Zarr's audition-monologue one. I had a lot of resonance with Zarr's main character, I kept going "Yes. Yes." all through it about high school and theater and teenagers and how you do art.
Faerie Winter, Simner: I had forgotten a lot of what happened in Bones of Faerie, and it was neat to go back to that world and learn more--the book took turns I hadn't been expecting, which I liked. I'll read the third one when it comes out, although the concerns of the books/world aren't quite something that hits me hard right now.
The Seven Towers, Wrede: All the way through I was trying to figure out who Amberglas reminded me of, and then the author's note told me that she was a mashup of the Dowager Duchess of Denver and Chrestomanci, and I went "wait, what? What?" and laughed for a while. Which tells you nothing about this book. Heh. Not sure the plot completely made sense to me, but it was a neat solution, anyhow. And I liked the characters and how information was concealed/revealed. I'm glad it got reprinted and I got to read it.
Welcome to Bordertown, ed. Black and Kushner: Okay, so when I was at WisCon this weekend I kept having to choose between three or four panels in a timeslot that all looked interesting. When the dilemma was between the panel on anthologies and some other ones, I ended up picking one of the other ones. Part of the reason was indisputably that if they had gotten to the "is it possible to construct a perfect anthology?" question, I would have had to seriously restrain myself from jumping up and saying "BORDERTOWN!". Some of the stories were more like those in the previous anthologies, some of them were like those in the previous anthologies only with a serious twist added from modern Internet stuff, and some of them were perfectly Bordertown and very much different from either of these options (see Nalo Hopkinson's: yes, please). There was more than one story with queer characters--there was more than one story featuring queer characters--there was, I think, more than one story featuring lesbian characters. (This is part of my benchmark because The Essential Bordertown made me have a revelation about my sexual orientation.) There was a Bordertown Jackaroo story. It just... yeah. Probably in a while I will be able to come up with logical critiques of it as a collection or of any of the stories--nothing is perfect, and I did have moments of "huh?" or "um" while reading it--but right now mostly I am in a state of squee.
I also have been reading a collection of Sayers short stories, which I'm not sure I will finish before I leave town, and Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse (ditto). And when in bookstores I tend to read bits of Holly Black's Red Glove, because I reserved it from the library but I feel like it won't get to me before ditto two previous. Also Delany's Nova, which I don't like quite enough to pay fifteen dollars for at the bookstore but which intrigues me whenever I do end up reading it in the store.