mariness

Ah, ICFA. The conference centered around a pool. And tropical drinks. These are good things.

Tidbits:

1. For the all of two of you following this saga, the queen bee has successfully been moved from the owl house to the new beehive, and two jars of honey -- labeled Blak Kat - have been harvested. (Technically none of that happened at ICFA, but it did happen during ICFA and was mentioned during ICFA, so it kinda counts.)

2. I read a poem in front of Patricia McKillip again and didn't feel the need to throw up this time! ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED.

3. Speaking of that reading, have you ever noticed that a Samsung Galaxy will happily enlarge every font on every webpage ever for you, often when you don't want it to, except the one time when you really need it to, at which point you will be forced to do some fancy eyeglasses adjustment and do a poetry reading with a Samsung Galaxy for all intents and purposes covering your mouth (seriously, it was maybe three, four inches from my face). On the bright side, this will serve to distract you from your audience.

For the curious, you can find the other chain poems here. I do not recommend attempting to work with the decalet form used in the earliest two examples, which is why I worked with a different form in "Snowmelt," "Feather," and "Demands."

4. Fortunately, I was able to increase the font size during the spontaneous pub sing around the hot tub - fortunately because I was the only one not in the hot tub and therefore the only one who could safely check the lyrics for "Wild Mountain Thyme." On a related note, if you don't want to become the designated lyric checker, get into the hot tub.

5. It was somewhat disconcerting to run into people and realize hey, the last time I saw you was in London. Or Ireland. Or DC. It reminded me of how much in many ways Loncon was a big group trip.

6. This isn't exactly ICFA related, but I got into two very interesting discussions about the Hugo Awards, the gist of which boiled down to "too many categories." I think this was the natural result of meeting with some people who were also Hugo voters just a short time after filling out that long ballot, but I was surprised by the consensus. (And convinced that this isn't going to change - almost none of the people involved in the discussions wanted to attend the Worldcon business meeting where that sort of thing can be changed. I'm not even heading to Worldcon this year. But I'm throwing the thought out there.)

7. ICFA also included several really marvelous meals with really marvelous people. And yes, conversations that just happened to bring up clowns, kink, and cousins in the same sentence. Something that I'm sure also happens to other people.

8. Much thanks to the various people that helped me get around the conference in general and on Thursday and Friday when I got too sick to make it back to my hotel room on my own. You guys were great.

Various tidbits that we will pretend make a post!

1. I spent most of last week and weekend at ICFA, the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, which for many people is an academic conference offering important insights about fantasy and the arts (literature, film, television, apparently tarot cards) and for me is a time to have a nice drink by the pool. Various personal issues and getting extremely sick prevented me from enjoying this conference as much as I would have liked, but I did have a chance to do a reading with Eugene Fischer and Dennis Danvers By a complete coincidence, we had all managed to choose stories on a similar theme: horror stories about the process of creating story. And by horror, the excerpt from Eugene's novella strongly suggested that we are all going to die, Dennis' story chatted about a puppy strangler – and by this, I mean, someone who strangles puppies, and my story had a house built from the teeth of small children. All very cheerful for a Saturday morning, though the puppy strangler story had us all collapsing with laughter. I think you have to read it to understand.

Special thanks to Julia Rios and Keffy Kehrli for helping me out during the conference.

2. Alas, attending ICFA meant I missed going to Megacon – and seeing many of you – but it looks like next year the events are on separate weekends. I'll keep my fingers crossed that golf is on a separate week.

3. While I was at ICFA I did get various tidbits of good news, including:

The release of Mythic Delirium 0.4, April-June 2014, available from Weightless Books here, which contains my poem, "The Silver Comb." (If you check, you will also see that it lists my name right under Jane Yolen, which is pretty awesomely cool.)

The news that Upper Rubber Boot Books will be reprinting my short story, "Twittering the Stars," as part of their new upcoming SOLES series.

I'm particularly delighted by this second bit since prior to this, although "Twittering the Stars" was hands down my most widely and best reviewed story (well over 40 positive reviews the last time I checked) it was also only available in an anthology that briefly popped up in bookstores and then mostly vanished, although the ebook is still available, which in turn meant that it was also one of my least read stories. I've been hoping for a chance to have it released into the wild again, so this is pretty awesome.

I'll also just note that Upper Rubber Boot Books offers a lovely selection of poetry books.

4. And while I was at ICFA and recovering from ICFA, Tor.com blogging continued! Two more posts on Mary Poppins, here and here, and also a second post chatting about Once Upon a Time and Oz here where I am VERY DISTURBED about the biological implications.

The Once Upon a Time Oz posts are not going to be a weekly event, primarily because so many parts of the show leave me wanting to throw things at the television or slam my head against something, and this sort of emotional reaction is a) not appreciated by the cats, who, as they have noted, do not deserve to have their hard-earned cat naps disturbed by this sort of thing and b) not really helped by friendly contact from the ABC publicity department (though I appreciate the effort.)

5. But regarding the upcoming Game of Thrones season four: yes, I do plan to snark individual episodes here, but I may be a bit delayed depending upon when exactly the new computer arrives.

So the parts of last week not focused on golf were more or less focused on ICFA when I wasn't sleeping through it. Sorry, guys, that most definitely counts under the "it's not you, it's me," umbrella; the worst thing about ICFA was that I didn't get to spend nearly enough time at it; I was there for maybe 1/3 of the con. The second worst thing was that the poolside bar a) had no amaretto on hand – cranberry juice, yes; amaretto no, and nearly drowning a later cranberry juice in vodka did not quite make up for this, and b) was under the impression that pina coladas are best made with tequila, and not the best tequila at that. Sigh.

(Not really a sidenote: I get that the ICFA organizers really, really want everyone to stay at the con and not get tempted away by the many distractions of the greater central Florida area, but, honestly? This hotel? Not just stuck in one of the least interesting areas of central Florida, but also, really not near any restaurants, which is a problem if you are either in a wheelchair or with someone in a wheelchair. I'd be less frustrated if I weren't aware of all of the available convention space in the area. Sigh.)

Not that the conference was entirely based on the pool bar or drinking. I also, and I take great pride in this, managed to get to the lobby, and to the little ICFA bookstore (where, to my surprise and pleasure, I ended up getting to sign copies of Future Lovecraft. While I'm on the subject, I should note that Future Lovecraft will be appearing in trade paperback from Prime Books later this year – more announcements when that happens) and even one of the conference lunches (where once again the noise made me feel ill and I ended up having to duck out early. Next year I am following the excellent example of the Tachyon crowd and having lunch someplace else.)

But most of the time I was by the pool, drinking things (not just alcohol) and enjoying various marvelous conversations, which is not a bad way to go to a conference. Or sometimes napping in the pool chairs. Or in one case getting a sneak preview of Charles Vess' upcoming illustrations for a Charles de Lint book before we both realized that however much drinking might be going on at the moment this was most definitely not Our Crowd and that we needed to go find other people doing a lot of drinking to find Our Crowd. (Rumor had it that they were pharmacy reps.)

This is, I suppose, the place for the traditional list of "people I hung out with at IAFA" but it is the sort of list that is too long for this post – and yet not really long enough, either. I can say that if I talked to you, I apologize for going "YAY PERSON WHO GETS ME" and babbling all over you and only wish the conversation could have lasted longer, and if I didn't get a chance to talk to you, next time!

Thanks to everyone who helped with doors and drinks, and especial thanks to rachel_swirsky and her husband Mike who went above and beyond with rides last week. I can only hope that showing them a small baby alligator (well, technically, three years old alligator, and, well, technically I had very little to do with arranging that) sorta made up for that.