• Waiting for the train at South Station and they want $7 for an hour of internet. Insulting. #
• What is rabbit tobacco? #
• @neutronjockey thank you! I’m on the train with a sporadic wi-fi signal. #

Saturday I went to fewer panels and spent more time hanging out with friends.

The morning started with the Codex breakfast, which featured a completely different group of Codexians than we had at the retreat. It was good to see Elaine Isaak, Doug Cohen, Joy Marchand,¹ Cat Rambo, David Walton, Erin Underwood and Will McIntosh, who brought his lovely wife. We also had the special guests Kris Dikeman and Justine Graykin² joining us. It’s fun to catch up with writers who I know online but only get to see at cons.

After that, I headed for a panel, walked into the room which was FREEZING and decided to go get a sweater and, um, took a nap instead of returning.

Had lunch with Amy Tibbets, John Joseph Adams, Chris Cevasco, Doug Cohen and then two people whose names I should remember in full because I really liked both of them. Amy Eastment, the mask making engineer, and John the horror writer. ³

I listened to Ekaterina Sedia talk about how she wrote Alchemy of Stone. The book sounded fascinating so I picked up a copy and the first chapter is great. I’m looking forward to continuing the book on the train trip home. The main character is a mechanical girl! Sweet.

I also got to spend a lot of time hanging out with David Anthony Durham,⁴ who is one of my new favorite people. On Friday he hosted an interesting discussion about crossing over into SF. The gist of which is that there’s not that much difference between writing a historic novel and a fantasy novel, in that you are still having to let the reader know about customs and lands with which they are unfamiliar. Still have to create compelling characters and dynamic plots. The difference comes in how it’s marketed.

Let’s see… Sunday I went out for coffee with Mary Hobbson and Genevieve Valentine then headed off to the panel on the Aesthetics of Online Magazines. They spent way too much time talking about the market forces of online magazines. Granted, that informs the aesthetic, but I wanted to hear more about the aesthetics of content and form.

My panel on podcasting was similar, I think. We covered some interesting topics, but mostly it devolved into a “please use your microphone responsibly”⁵ with some brief flourishes of “this is where podcasting can go.” Liz Gorinsky had some good things to say about how other fields handle podcasting, but we kept tangenting away from those points so I’ll have to find her later and see what she had to say that we skipped.

On the whole it was a grand time. Highlights include: sushi with David Anthony Durham, drinks with Jenn Jackson and Michael Curry,⁶ the Codex breakfast, reading with my Tabula Rasa group — who had rocking stories that I’d never heard, and Friday’s steampunk panel.

Tomorrow, I leave all this behind and build that springer spaniel.

1. Did not get enough time with Joy [↩]
2. who was in Shimmer’s Pirate issue [↩]
3. I should start taking notes, because I am such crap with names. [↩]
4. Campbell nominee and author of Acacia [↩]
5. I am guilty of causing one of those tangents [↩]
6. not the award-winning puppeteer [↩]

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Friday 12:00 Noon
Vinyard: Kaffeeklatsch
Mary Robinette Kowal and Barry B. Longyear
This is my first kaffeeklatsch. Here’s your chance to ask me questions about writing, puppets, SFWA, Iceland… Come chat with me!

Friday 1:00 PM
VT: Tabula Rasa Group Reading
Readings by members of the New York-based Tabula Rasa writer’s group, including Saladin Ahmed, Christopher M. Cevasco, Barbara Krasnoff, and me. I’ll be reading “The Deacon of Dark River” a retelling of an Icelandic ghost story.

Friday 5:00 PM
ME/ CT: Steampunk and Beyond: What Would a “Gibson Chair” Look Like?
Holly Black, Paul Di Filippo, Liz Gorinsky, Mary Robinette Kowal (L) , Sarah Micklem

Steampunk, originally just an sf subgenre, is now also a burgeoning underground design movement. There’s precedent for this: modernism was not only a literary movement, but had artistic, musical, architectural, and design wings as well. Is the steampunk design movement an essentially fluky outgrowth of our fascination with all things retro? Or could other f&sf subgenres sprout their own design branches as well? Could the creation of actual, useful, physical objects lead to better-imagined literary art? How close is the relationship between the visually striking artifacts of steampunk and the literature that spawned them, anyway?

Sunday 12:00 Noon
RI: Podcasts of Mars.
Jim Freund (L), Liz Gorinsky, James Patrick Kelly, Mary Robinette Kowal, Cat Rambo

Podcasts like Escape Pod and Free Reads from James Patrick Kelly are presenting audio discussions, short stories, and even entire books in a free portable format. We’ll take a critical survey of what’s out there and discuss the future of this new medium. Is it possible to model the podcast on the science fiction convention, which also includes discussions and readings? Could new technological approaches allow the podcast to go places that earthbound discussions can’t?