Cosine, the Con Report

Well, sort of.

Cosine is always a very odd con for me.  Cons are supposed to happen in other towns, and I can stay at the hotel and usually (okay, I confess, I’m compulsive) get in some writing in between panels.

They’re not supposed to be a few minutes from home, with the panels frantically fitted in amid what we call around here “the weekend firedrill.”  But because we ARE in town, it hardly seems justified to spend time or money at a hotel.  Besides, as Kevin J. Anderson told us, it gets tiring to pack clothes, and the away computer, and all, to go a few minutes.

So, we fitted panels in between editing copy for the back of A Fatal Stain (Yes, children, the third Elise Hyatt mystery WILL come out.) making sure dishes were done, putting loads or laundry in, taking younger kid to robotics club, making a grocery run, etc.

This always lends the Cosine weekends a surreal feeling.  It’s like the parts of my life where I’m an anonymous mom, and the parts of my life where people actually try to talk to me at cons hit each other at high-speed and fall into no particular pattern.

Anyway, the panels were generally good, though I could live a LONG time without the panel I moderated on Friday because I swear I’ve been on the same panel with roughly the same people a dozen times.  It’s the panel about trilogies and how they tend to run long, you know?  It seemed less relevant this year, as we’re more divorced of the “realities of publishing as it was.”  No that most of my colleagues seemed to be aware of that, and I was too low on energy to get into arguments or even disagreements.

In fact, I realized, at the end of Friday, that, while I am outwardly recovered from the massive ear infection, there are lingering effects, one of them being that I get tired very easily.  Unfortunately, as some of you who have had the misfortune of being around me when I’m tired, I have two modes: if I’m home and left to my own devices, I go frighteningly quiet and zombie like; however, if I’m away and feel the need to be “on” I keep talking for the sake of staying awake.

I HOPE I didn’t run over the other panelists too badly, and I don’t think I did, except for the panel I moderated, where I didn’t so much run over them as keep losing the thread of where I was and what I meant to ask.

My most puzzling panel was possibly the last one today about fans who turned pros and pros who were never fans.  Since it dealt with fandom it was a big giant puzzler to me.  I have nothing against fandom, mind you, so it was not like “I was never a fan.”  But fandom in other countries is not the same as here, and I didn’t even know conventions existed until I had sold my first book.  So I felt a little weird and… well… sideways to the panel topic.

But I must be getting to be an old pro, because the point of the cons has long since stopped being panels — either those I’m on, or those I watch.  I enjoyed hanging out with the Lickissi — Rebecca and Alan Lickiss — and with Kevin Anderson and his lovely wife Rebecca Moesta.  (They have a middle reader about space exploration that sounds wonderful, at least from the first two chapters, and which I’ll review here as soon as I get the time/space.)

I also need to review Ric Locke’s book,  Temporary Duty, though the short review is “buy it, you’ll probably like it.”  Of course I have more to say about that.  Have you ever known me to be tongue tied?  And Rebecca Lickiss has sent me her soon-to-be-published space opera to review as well.  So, there’s that in store.  I read it when she wrote it first years ago (like Darkship Thieves it got backburnered because ladies weren’t supposed to write science fiction and besides, space opera NEVER sells.)

You’ll also get — I promise — two chapters of Witchfinder this week, and eventually a nice, long stretch of fanfic.

Meanwhile thank you for not holding it against me (you don’t, right?) that I took an unscheduled break.  Apparently I was more run-down by the illness than I thought and I could barely handle weekend-chores plus con.

My brain is still absent (I suspect on a tropical beach, sipping drinks with umbrellas and looking at tanned young men.  My brain is like that, and it NEVER takes me along on these vacations.)  But it has sent a postcard and said it will be me soon, so there’s hope.

Tomorrow I’m hoping to go to officeish, and then I’ll post something (maybe even coherent) early evening.

[BTW, turns out that the way to this writer’s heart does have weird pathways.  I am in NO WAY requesting gifts of food, because that would be weird, but I was charmed and touched at receiving a dozen of freshly laid eggs from Michelle Ossiander. Thanks, Michelle.  It’s not every fan who brings eggs to an author, but then I’m not every author. :)  We’re looking forward to having them tomorrow.]