(no subject)
Had a fabulous time at the Nebula Awards weekend. Slept in this morning to recover. Was part of the volunteer group helping SFWA put on the event so my weekend started Wednesday night when we loaded large numbers of boxes of books onto the rental truck at the Sapienzas house. And then Thursday was mostly spent unloading the book boxes and packing the book bags for the attendees. Benefit of doing the heavy lifting - getting to pick out my bag ahead of time. Am now the happy owner of Embassytown by China Mieville and Hidden Goddess by M.K. Hobson amongst other books.
Got there relatively early on Friday to set up the Tiptree Award bakesale, which ultimately ended up making $120.50. I had closed up at around 11:30pm Friday and Janice Shoults from Edge Books had mentioned that several people came by the hospitality suite looking for the bakesale around 12:30am, so on Saturday reopened the bake sale after the Nebula Awards banquet and kept it open until the hospitality suite's official closing time of 1:00am. I ended up making around $40 during that time period. I think it was sort of a perfect storm of factors that contributed to the upsurge in purchases. (1) People were coming back from the Nebulas somewhat tipsy and in a generous mood; (2) the banquet dessert was fruit only, so people were feeling a bit of an urge for chocolate or cake type desserts (the fudge got just about cleaned out); and (3) Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr posthumously won the Solstice Award and accepting on her behalf was Shawna McCarthy, who had been a close friend of hers and gave a very moving speech. I think this put people in a mood to contribute. Shawna and her friends certainly bought a decent amount of baked goods after they came up to the hospitality suite after the post awards banquet cocktail hour.
Since I wasn't running the bake sale Sunday, whatever I felt couldn't easily freeze or refrigerate for a week or two became part of the hospitality suite spread and mostly got consumed for breakfast. The rest, most of which I baked or had been baked by friends of mine is now in my freezer or refrigerator awaiting consumption at Balticon at the Capclave party.
Having run the Tiptree bakesale as a full-time two day event, I did not get to a lot of the programming. As a part-time reviewer and mostly fan/reader most of the workshops weren't really things that made sense for me anyway. I went to the Friday night mass autographing, got my ARc of Alembical 2 signed by J. Kathleen Cheney and had a nice talk with James Morrow and Lawrence Schoen who were sitting at the same table. I'm not sure how exactly the conversation got to the point it did, but to illustrate a point I was making I noted that in many of morrow's books, as soon as a child showed up I had the expectation the child would die horribly. Although since satire is a often a fairly cruel for of humor, this really isn't that surprising. Morrow seemed a bit startled at first, but acknowledged that this was the case in City of Truth and The Eternal Footman (it's dead wives in Wine of Violence and Blameless in Abbadon). In City of Truth in particular, a child dies slowly of what's essentially fantasy rabies in order for Morrow to shred several philosophical schools of thought. I went to the short story plotting panel Saturday afternoon, which was well moderated and very interesting, and was able to get my Aqueduct Press collection of Rachel Swirsky's short stories and poems signed. I was able to go to both the morning and afternoon panels on Sunday. In the "Old Ways vs. New Ways" panel, I thought it was very interesting that a lot of the discussion centered around turn around time and how it is much faster than it used to be (I think this is probably just for novels rather than short fiction, since I get the impression that the older pulp style writers had a really scary output per month esp. considering they were using manual typewriters). While the afternoon panel on graceful and subtle self-promotion was geared primarily towards authors, I think some of the information could be applied to the promotional effort for Capclave.
Had a good time at the Nebula Awards Banquet. Michael Swanwick was a good Toastmaster and kept things moving at a decent pace. Michael Dirda gave an interesting keynote speech. It's always fun to see the awards themselves. I'm not quite sure why when announcing best short story it was not immediately announced that it was a tie. That seemed odd. It has also been interesting to read various blogs and listen to people's podcasts regarding the awards. Novel and novelette seems to have been very polarizing this year, at least based on what I've read.
Got there relatively early on Friday to set up the Tiptree Award bakesale, which ultimately ended up making $120.50. I had closed up at around 11:30pm Friday and Janice Shoults from Edge Books had mentioned that several people came by the hospitality suite looking for the bakesale around 12:30am, so on Saturday reopened the bake sale after the Nebula Awards banquet and kept it open until the hospitality suite's official closing time of 1:00am. I ended up making around $40 during that time period. I think it was sort of a perfect storm of factors that contributed to the upsurge in purchases. (1) People were coming back from the Nebulas somewhat tipsy and in a generous mood; (2) the banquet dessert was fruit only, so people were feeling a bit of an urge for chocolate or cake type desserts (the fudge got just about cleaned out); and (3) Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr posthumously won the Solstice Award and accepting on her behalf was Shawna McCarthy, who had been a close friend of hers and gave a very moving speech. I think this put people in a mood to contribute. Shawna and her friends certainly bought a decent amount of baked goods after they came up to the hospitality suite after the post awards banquet cocktail hour.
Since I wasn't running the bake sale Sunday, whatever I felt couldn't easily freeze or refrigerate for a week or two became part of the hospitality suite spread and mostly got consumed for breakfast. The rest, most of which I baked or had been baked by friends of mine is now in my freezer or refrigerator awaiting consumption at Balticon at the Capclave party.
Having run the Tiptree bakesale as a full-time two day event, I did not get to a lot of the programming. As a part-time reviewer and mostly fan/reader most of the workshops weren't really things that made sense for me anyway. I went to the Friday night mass autographing, got my ARc of Alembical 2 signed by J. Kathleen Cheney and had a nice talk with James Morrow and Lawrence Schoen who were sitting at the same table. I'm not sure how exactly the conversation got to the point it did, but to illustrate a point I was making I noted that in many of morrow's books, as soon as a child showed up I had the expectation the child would die horribly. Although since satire is a often a fairly cruel for of humor, this really isn't that surprising. Morrow seemed a bit startled at first, but acknowledged that this was the case in City of Truth and The Eternal Footman (it's dead wives in Wine of Violence and Blameless in Abbadon). In City of Truth in particular, a child dies slowly of what's essentially fantasy rabies in order for Morrow to shred several philosophical schools of thought. I went to the short story plotting panel Saturday afternoon, which was well moderated and very interesting, and was able to get my Aqueduct Press collection of Rachel Swirsky's short stories and poems signed. I was able to go to both the morning and afternoon panels on Sunday. In the "Old Ways vs. New Ways" panel, I thought it was very interesting that a lot of the discussion centered around turn around time and how it is much faster than it used to be (I think this is probably just for novels rather than short fiction, since I get the impression that the older pulp style writers had a really scary output per month esp. considering they were using manual typewriters). While the afternoon panel on graceful and subtle self-promotion was geared primarily towards authors, I think some of the information could be applied to the promotional effort for Capclave.
Had a good time at the Nebula Awards Banquet. Michael Swanwick was a good Toastmaster and kept things moving at a decent pace. Michael Dirda gave an interesting keynote speech. It's always fun to see the awards themselves. I'm not quite sure why when announcing best short story it was not immediately announced that it was a tie. That seemed odd. It has also been interesting to read various blogs and listen to people's podcasts regarding the awards. Novel and novelette seems to have been very polarizing this year, at least based on what I've read.