gwynnega

I had a lovely time at WFC. It was so great getting to hang out with friends and meet new friends. I managed to run into most (but not all!) of the people I wanted to see.

The open poetry reading organized by

rose_lemberg was one of the best, most consistent poetry readings I've ever attended. Among the many participants were Rose,

shweta_narayan,

csecooney (reading her Rhysling-winning "The Sea King's Second Bride"),

samhenderson,

mer_moon,

lnhammer,

upstart_crow, and me.

My panel (When Does Genre Become Literature?) was a lot of fun, and mostly devoid of Genre Fiction Rules and Literary Fiction Sucks! rhetoric.

deliasherman had a book release party (complete with sweet tea and pralines) for The Freedom Maze, which I can't wait to read. At the party,

ellen_kushner happened to introduce me to D. Lynn Smith, a writer who, like me, lives in SoCal--and then I discovered a couple of minutes later that she writes Dark Shadows audio dramas for Big Finish!

Neil Gaiman read a wonderful Sherlock Holmes story (a brand-new one, not "A Study in Emerald"). Among his various appearances at the con, I think my favorite was his conversation with Connie Willis, which was hilarious and inspiring. I also got to hear Peter S. Beagle read a short story ("Olfert Dapper's Day").

One not-so-good thing about the weekend was the hotel. Its sprawling set-up seemed to me inconvenient for a convention of this sort--but I've since found out that it has massive accessibility problems. I hope convention programmers will take this into account in the future.