The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

To remember this - Ellen recommended today at Pat's birthday party.

WisCon 33: Favorite moments

My favorite moments of WisCon 33.


Also in reading the Chronicles of WisCon 32 I think I missed at least 60% of what was fun then - so I know this is just a small chunk of what everyone else experienced. But it is my chunk.

1. Ellen Klages' Guest of Honor speech
(Right afterwards I ran up to my room and wrote a long email to my husband about the impact of this speech).
Also glad that I planned in advance to sit with bindr and Vy (and it turned out, Rina, Jacob, Amy, Anna, Matt, and Rez) for the dessert salon, which offset quite a bit of "who am I going to sit with" anxiety that had started to kick in already on Saturday.
Getting to hear Ellen read ALL of "Time Gypsy" at her reading on Saturday, since I love that story. With lovely and well-acted English accent for the character Sarah Baxter Clarke.
And of course the Tiptree auction!

2. Finally getting to read the end of Pat's story from her reading!
(the portion she read at WisCon is the 3rd time I've heard a portion of it, due to faithful attendance at her Bay Area readings!). Very moved by the 2nd half of the story.

3. Hanging out with folks after the Governor's Club closed on Saturday night.
Eating rhubarb pie provided by Geoff Ryman after it had mysteriously appeared in his room (after we determined it was not Nisi's pie), watching Pat entertain people with her bristlebots, and discussing some "interesting" YouTube vids.

4. The strong emotion when K. Tempest Bradford (and Catherynne M. Valente) introduced Nisi Shawl and presented her with the Tiptree Award. (And Nisi introduced her mother Rose!)

5. Random conversation with Jennifer Stevenson in dealer's room which led to an invite to join her and friends (Margaret McBride, Anne Harris , and Victoria Janssen) for lunch.
Both conversation and lunch invite initiated by Jennifer - next year I will practice the art of striking up more conversations). Enjoyed the conversation at lunch (touching on many topics) and got some extra info from Jennifer re: targeted marketing, and also Roller Derby!

6. The panels overall! The Kickass Moms panel still sticks in my head the most. commented on it on live journal.

7. Parties on Sun night:
Getting more writing advice/support from Eileen Gunn and Diane Silver and hearing about Eileen's Microsoft past. Meeting Georgiette who has been coming to WisCon since WisCon 3 (and was wearing a beautiful dress).
I, on the other hand, was not wearing a beautiful dress! While I would not have ventured into the Fancy Dress party by myself with no fancy dress, I was with Pat which made it easier.

8. Signout - Briefly meeting Catherynne M. Valente (I love In the Night Garden but haven't yet read Palimpest, which she signed for me).
In chatting about my name she tells me that she too will soon have a "Russian Z name husband". (hers more Russian than mine since he lived there until he was 12 years old. Hopefully my Z 3rd gen Russian husband will come to WisCon next year).

9. Non-WisCon but still important to the weekend - Memorial Day picnic with my godparents at their house after they picked me up at the Concourse on Monday (and then dropped me off at the airport).
Really nice to talk to them and start transitioning back to the "real world"slowly. If I plan this well enough hopefully this can be a WisCon tradition, as I was also able to see them last year. Their house is so comforting.
They have lived there for over thirty years. They met my parents when all were young working in Monroe, WI, where I was born. It's really inspiring just to watch them interacting together - they are one of the main current role models for a long and happy marriage for my husband and I (since his parents divorced when he was two and my mom died when I was 16). My godmother wrote this email about my mom for me a couple years ago.

Regrets on WisCon:
I wish my flight hadn't been delayed since I missed all of Friday night - got in really late at 12:30 am by cab, but jazzed and hard to sleep.
Wish I had planned my panels out a little more, I feel like I missed several that I should have gone to (plotting the novel, romancing the beast, children's books that we remember... etc)
Wish I had talked to more people and put myself out there a bit more.
Wish I had read more of Geoff Ryman's work and Nisi Shawl's, before WisCon.
Or at least remembered that Geoff also wrote and coded the interactive novel 253, which I loved! So I could talk about it.

WisCon 33: Ellen Klages 10 am reading

I was trying to decide whether to see Ellen read at WisCon (as conceivably I _could_ hear her read in the Bay Area...) or to go to a panel on "Reinventing the Adventure" which featured Carol Emshwiller.

I'm so glad I went to the reading, as she was able to read "Time Gypsy" which is one of my favorite stores, in its entirety!



Basically she picked that since she never gets to read it this much time to read it anywhere else: "Where else do they give you more than an hour to read!?!"

Before she started, she told us that she'd had to go grab a copy of Portable Childhoods from the Tachyon table, since this is one that is a little long to have memorized:
- "Do you have a copy of my book?"
"Yes, you know, we published it!" and off she went.

There was also a bit of banter about the suggestion that she could bring the book back, signed, to the Tachyon table, with an inscription that reads "Mangled and Spine Cracked by Author"
(she had bent the spine back and then wondered if Tachyon would be upset about that). The audience seemed to agree that a book mangled by its actual author would be a pretty cool thing.

(I wonder what actually happened to that copy since i did buy a copy of portable childhoods from tachyon later in the day).

Anyway -it was really fun to hear her read "Time Gypsy" - I have the chapbook which I should get signed. I had totally forgotten that Sarah Baxter Clarke has an English accent! EK did a great job switching back and forth between the accents (of course!).

(oh and before the reading when I was hanging around near the reg table, she marched up and asked "anybody know where the Guest of Honor reading is?!?")

I also like the whole theme here of looking up to a mentor and then realizing that there is a real person behind the mentor (of course if you get a chance to actually see that person). In this case in the past they are the same age. But the two women meeting in the present would obviously be different.

SBC would no doubt have another side of herself (the professional mentorly side) that she would usually have for Carol.

I think Sarah S might enjoy these stories.

Great WisCon GoH and Dessert Salon Summary

The title of the post is the link.
From "Feminist SF - The Blog!"

A great summary, especially of the GoH speeches.

Also this post about the opening ceremony.

There is a Feminist SF wiki with a page about Pat...which I found linked off of another post on this blog.

Portable Childhoods by Ellen Klages

I'm actually rereading Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell right now, but I wanted to write about Portable Childhoods since I realized I only need a quick spiel on the Facebook thing.

And of course this is just me writing reading notes. I'm sick right now also and am writing this in bed on the laptop (having just had some generic Nyquil like cold medicine). It's kind of comforting to have Portable Childhoods and Max Merriwell hanging around. Also I just reread Points of Departure, but I guess that is a different post.

My copy is paperback and is signed but I think I bought it from Amazon, so that is mysterious. I didn't remember having noticed that it was signed when I bought it on the site. Maybe I should have bought it locally (and could have had Ellen sign it too, I guess) --- but I wanted it pretty quickly.

I like Neil Gaiman's intro because he paints a pretty good picture of what Ellen seems to be like in person (he calls her "a force of nature" which is quite fun) and how that differs from her writing. It's also obviously quite cool to have him writing the intro at all. I blogged here earlier about when we first met Ellen at the Gaiman reading in Berkeley - she was sitting behind us and we heard "nebula award" and our ears perked up. Then Dave actually asked her who she was. I think she thought we were more than a little crazy.

Basement Magic
I loved this one, maybe partly because I share this fascination with basements and I kind of miss not having one here in California. That one house we saw that was quite crappy, almost sold itself to me on the strength of having a huge, albeit unfinished, basement.
I also think Dave would be interested in this story with the stepmother theme too .
motherless daughter, strong female role model in Ruby, magic that comes true...

Intelligent Design
God as being almost like a spoiled child, making the world by whim, while his grandmother is the one who's been there even longer...
I think overall I didn't like this one quite as much as the others, but still liked it.

Green Glass Sea
Doesn't need much more description other than that I love Dewey (and I wonder when her birthday is).
And where is my copy of Green Glass Sea?

Clip Art
Nice "documentary" of a young girl who collects paper clips. amazing amount of detail with the clips and their names, and the cutting between different scenes...

Mobius, Stripped of a Muse
Ever increasing layers of authorship -- a scene...it goes for a while, and then the unseen writer is like, "no that's not working" and the scene starts again....
It sounds like an improv game almost (and maybe it is).
I liked this one a lot. Good pre-nano story.

Time Gypsy
I love this one -- woman goes back in time to meet physics scholar she's admired all her life, and winds up falling in love..

I bought this as a chapbook when I was at borderlands. Maybe at the same time I bought Green Glass Sea..
Part of why I like this is just the fandom of finally meeting and getting to know, someone you've admired for a long time.

A Taste of Summer
This is probably my favorite story in here that I hadn't already read before. I just love the feeling of adventure when she actually crosses the street, looking for refuge, and the cool science-y role model type that Nan is. Really similar to my character in the Nano (and not suprisingly).
I also liked how Nan isn't conventionally dressed - showing Mattie that's it's ok to wear men's clothes....whcih she hadn't really seen before.

Portable Childhoods
This one, sometimes I see myself in the unnamed child and sometimes in the mother, who always seems a little bit amazed to have this person in her life, her daughter, who is her own little person - different from the mom, and she wonders if the two would have been friends.
Also please note on p158 - there's a whole thing about St. Elmo's Fire, interesting because of Pat's affinity for St. Elmo.

And all the stuff about shuffling cards -- how important it is to learn and what a milestone it is. I totally feel that way too. I learned to shuffle at my grandma's house because we were playing a lot of solitaire, and I wanted to shuffle better. Dr. Gammell wound up teaching me.

And last but not least
In the House of the Seven Librarians
Which i had already read in the Firebird anthology but I love so much. And here kari is going to be a librarian.

And the best part -- the afterwod for me..
" I didn't start writing, or at least writing seriously, until I was almost forty."
there's hope yet for me!
Jon Hassler had said the same thing.