gwynnega

This was my first World Fantasy, and I think it was the first con I've ever attended where I actually met up with everyone I'd planned to see. It was a weekend of great conversations.

I had a lot of fun moderating the speculative poetry reading that samhenderson (who wasn't at the con) organized. Tina Connolly, Camille Alexa, Shweta Narayan, Joseph McDermott, Phyllis Holiday, David Lunde, and Larry Hammer read, and it was a great mix of different poetic styles.

I'm not going to write up all the panels and readings I attended. A couple of highlights: Ellen Klages read her chilling YA story "Singing on a Star." N.K. Jemisin read from her upcoming novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and ended at such a suspenseful point, I wanted to yell, "But what happens next?" I guess I'll have to wait until February to find out.

On Saturday I took a little break from the con for lunch and Ryan's Hope conversation with willowgreen. Saturday night I read poems at the Broad Universe Rapid-fire Reading, which was well-attended and very enjoyable. On Sunday, after the awards banquet, I went to Barnes and Noble for a reading for the brand-new Interfictions 2 anthology (thanks to Ellen Kushner, who organized car rides for me and various participants and audience members!).

The food at the hotel was rather jawdroppingly overpriced, but I did enjoy having sushi room service!

Chapter 19 of the Jo book is being a bit recalcitrant tonight, possibly because I'm gearing up for World Fantasy. Cons always seem to sidetrack my writing brain a bit, beforehand and afterwards.

I've been watching the Dark Shadows compilation DVD The Vampire Curse, which mostly deals with Barnabas Collins' origin story (i.e., how Angelique cursed him with vampirism and made his beloved Josette marry the wrong guy and fall off a cliff). They did a good job of boiling the story down to essentials, though a few of my favorite bits are missing, such as the aftermath of the Barnabas/Angelique wedding, with Angelique pouring champagne that turns out to be blood, and the ghost of Jeremiah burying Angelique alive. I love how the compilation starts out with the 1795 story, which concludes with Barnabas being chained in his coffin, and then caps that off with Barnabas being freed from his coffin in 1967 (though the story aired in the opposite order).

I finished reading Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey (via dailylit.com) and Edna O'Brien's House of Splendid Isolation, which I found quite impressive aside from one shockingly clunky plot point towards the end.

Meanwhile, a piece of the inner workings of my dishwasher seems to have snapped off. Weird.

I had a week off from the Jo book, due to Writercon, but now I'm working on chapter 16. Wrote 430 words just now during lunch. Two of my characters are at each other's throats, which makes it extra fun!

Trying to decide whether to go to World Fantasy. It's a very short plane ride to San Jose from LA, though alas, there are no direct flights from Burbank, so I'd have to fly out of LAX (so the drive to the airport would take about the same amount of time as the flight!). Quandariness...