Post Liberty Con Post

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

So, one of the things I like about Liberty con is that every year is different.  See, it’s like a family reunion and that changes, as the time goes on, and the people change.  Kids grow up, people pass on the torch of this or that, but the family reunion goes on.  It changes, is all.

This year the theme was : fans.  I already knew I had the best fans in the world, but you guys clean up nice in person too.  We saw/talked to a lot of you (I couldn’t go ten steps without someone saying “Loved Darkship Renegades” or “Loved A Few Good Men” which, let me tell you, does more for my confidence than… anything else just about.  And confidence is very important, it boosts a writer’s voice, which makes the books better.  So thank you to everyone who did that.

Mostly, among the fans, we hung out with Dot and Peter and Cedar and Sanford.  We also spent a lot of time with Speaker, but as Science Advisor To Baen Authors I’m not sure he counts as just a fan.  I got to meet Stephen Simmons, Evil Penguin who is neither a Penguin nor Evil brought me a stuffed penguin who will be added to the Hoyt menagerie (yes, your worst suspicions are true.  I do sleep clutching a stuffed doll of a bald eagle.  Dan bought it for me years ago.  We will not discuss my stars and stripes pajamas.  You THINK I’m joking) and I think Kilted Dave is now my third son.

We also spent a lot of time with Kevin (some with Rebecca, but her health doesn’t let her stay up that late) and I’m not sure what it means when writers from Colorado go to Tennessee to hang out.  But he seemed to “get” Liberty con like we got it the first time we went: “this is fun” and “oh, wow, it’s like family.”  So maybe we can tempt him back sometime despite his hectic schedule.

We spent even more time with Larry and Bridget Correia, whom we hadn’t seen for … four years?  But they’re family (possibly literally.  No, we’re not taking a DNA test!) so it was like we’d seen them just yesterday, except for the catchup on what the kids were doing, etc.

I wasn’t IN the mad scientist panel room because it was SO hot (and I LIKE hot weather) that I hung outside the door with Kilted Dave and Richard Evans and other barflies, so I missed whatever it was, but my husband assures me that if you upset the Correias Larry is NOT the Correia you should be scared of.  Make a note of it.

I’m sure I’m forgetting about a dozen people I had long conversations with.  I know I saw a lot of old friends only in passing.  I wish we’d had (a lot) more time with Kelly and Star, for instance, but they’ve promised to visit soon.

The first Hoyt’s Huns breakfast was a rousing success for 9 am the day after the party night.  Let’s think this through for other cons and have it on Saturday morning, as the con is starting.  I mean, my own younger son (who came in at five am the night before) didn’t make it.  Robert made it despite having made of rousing tour of the world in alcoholic beverages.  (The Portuguese bred through in that one.  In Portugal, those who couldn’t hold their liquor died young and without children.

I also loved seeing and talking to Toni Weisskopf.  First because we’re always doing a million things at one time, so it was good to sit and talk.  Second because there are a couple of projects maybe coming down the pike (things need to be done/fixed/etc) that we’ve been discussing fragmentarily, and, as always, it’s much easier to get stuff solved in half an hour talking than a year of emails.

Oh, the Basset antho will be a Baen fan antho (though I’ll write for it, as will my family) mostly because every other pro I know is going nuts.  We already have some stories banked, but will also open for submission.  No pay – it’s a charity antho, but if you write give it a thought.  I’ll explain the purpose, etc, later.  It will come out Baen Webscriptions and in NRP for the other outlets, electronic/paper.

Anyway, my husband is thinking of coming down for Fencon, money permitting, particularly if he has Ninth Euclid out by then.  So maybe we should have  Hoyt’s Huns Breakfast then?  I don’t know how many of you there are in Dallas, but I know there are a lot in TX.

Oh, yeah, and on Friday I wrote the short story for Raygun chronicles.  The edits are even now waiting in my mailbox.

This all was a little marred by Dan coming home sick.  The going-around which seems to be a form of norovirus might have caught up with him.  Or it might be food poisoning.  Hopefully it’s the second, but from the fact I’m starting to get the same symptoms I suspect the first.

I meant to do a real post but after a weekend of shortened nights and a long trip back (not bad, but we drove to Atlanta and then had a wait time, and finally dragged home at midnight.) the will is there, but not the strength.  Older son dragged self off to volunteer at hospital (HE’s not sick, but I think he might have slept eight hours – over the last five days) but as we know he’s not human.

I’m going to do a quick clean on litter boxes and house and go get the cats back.  Then look at edits on short and (if the scattered symptoms haven’t crashed into me by then) settle down to work.  The fact that I’m considering a nap before I do ANY of those tells you either I’m ill or very, very tired.  I’m hoping the last.  I think that’s all it is.  In the car from Denver (not driving) I kept drifting off and waking up saying the oddest things, including “We have to put on duck suits.”  No, I have no idea why.  Yes, it was quite literally fun for the whole family.

(BTW younger son said there was a dancing guy in a bear costume at the con.  Was there?  I think he dreamed it.)

There will be subscriber content later.  Now I might take a nap before tackling the boxes.

 

 

87 thoughts on “Post Liberty Con Post”

      1. I hear from Jennifer that she sees herself as a goth; make sure that there’s torn black clothing to go along w the ears.

        (Speaking of ears, I’ve got a woman who’s said that if there’s a singularity, life-extension, and swallow-a-pill body-hacking, that she wants elf ears. I am unable to rightly understand some things…)

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        1. I once heard of an orc chieftain who wanted elf ears. I believe he had made a necklace of them …

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          1. There’s a fair number of the elfin-eared already among us, and with no need for cosmetic surgery. There was a girl in my school like that. The fact she was cute and short,and her mother sent her to school with a pixie haircut, made it even more obvious that her ancestors probably hung out on hills. She did not, however, embrace the Tinkerbell motif like I would’ve. (Eh, we all get dissatisfied with our looks….)

            Her family was Italian, though, which you don’t think of as a pixie hotbed.

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        2. No, No, old-school goth. The clothes more go for hard-wearing black leather boots that have seen several thousand miles, faded black jeans, and an old black concert tee worn to grey, both faintly perfumed with woodsmoke, cordite, the tang of burnt metal from welding, and a hint of hoppes #9… though I do possess a few outfits as spiffy and dressed-up as my custom holster, and carefully customized to accessorize.

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            1. That’s just because they haven’t thought about being close enough to regularly be in range for mischievous moods… witness: catnip sardines.

              Oh, wait, that’s not discouraging your case on calling me a pixie…

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  2. Please remind Robert to add me on Facebook, so that elephants and devil ducky details can be hashed out.

    As always, it is good to talk and socialize with Clan Hoyt.

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    1. OMG. He was talking about how smart you were on the drive back. I THINK it’s because you let him sing you the amino acid song. (We just tell him to shut up the minute he starts.)

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      2. Aww!
        It was a lot of fun to hang out with Eudyptes, Robert, Speaker, et al. at the Dead Dog!
        The conversations are always the most fun part of LibertyCon.

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  5. That would explain it.

    I greatly enjoyed getting to know the Hoyts and the Huns and all the others in person. My only real downside for the entire weekend (aside from the humidity and an … exciting episode on the ride there. details to follow on my blog when I get there) was that Mrs. Dave spent it at a place not co-located with me. Such is the active-duty life, and a thing to which we’ve become accustomed, but neither of us likes it. Upside is that I’ll have the opportunity to introduce her to everybody next year, if not before.

    Re: con-going. I enjoy the panels, but Mrs. Dave and I observed after Renovation that we really go to cons to meet and re-meet people. That said, it was a delight to let Robert talk my ear off about developmental neurology, to meet the lovely Cedar and DotAK and their respective gentlemen, to connect with Speaker and various LabRats, and reconnect with Larry and finally meet the formidable Mrs. Larry. I’m more or less spoiled for other cons. I mean, I’ll attend (I’m told my presence is required at the first DragonCon opportunity that presents), but without a contingent of Huns, other cons with have a distinct disadvantage attracting my interest.

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    1. > Re: con-going. I enjoy the panels, but Mrs. Dave and I observed after Renovation that we really go to cons to meet and re-meet people.

      Blog meetups are the same for us – the first one or two are weird, but then after you put names with URLs (hah!), it’s fun to see the same old crowd every six months or so. Speaking of which, need to check in with Jay of Marooned in MA and see when the next get together is…

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      1. As much fun as London might be (I’ve heard mightily conflicting reports of late, and consequently would forgo my guided tour of Cheapside) I doubt Mrs. Dave and I will be heading to WorldCon next year. That said, I suspect something could be arranged, though we’ll be DragonCon virgins as well. I suggest we ping Speaker and partake of his Sage Advice and Wise Counsel in the DragonCon manner of doing things. I have evidence (in my lead-lined Farraday cage slash secret bunker) that leads me to believe other Huns may have wisdom to share, as well.

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  7. Basset Antho? I will want details soonest so I may submit something to it.

    Liberty was wonderful I was so tickled to add Hoyt’s Huns to my list of people met and admired in real life as well as my Barfly family. Unfortunately I woke up yesterday sick, and by last night was very sick. I’m getting better, which I must since I work this evening.

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    2. I’m interested as well. Even if all I do is add to the slush’s recycling bin, it’ll be a step further than I’ve done before.

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  8. The only good thing about norovirus is that second and subsequent bouts seem (SEEM) to be less severe. IANAD, but had the poor fortune to get it twice.

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  9. The occasional bout of con crud is almost inevitable. Just keep telling yourself that this too shall pass.
    What, no comments on your new best friend Janet M.? I’m sure you’re just saving up until you have the energy to properly laud her many virtues.
    (ducks and covers)
    I still think Dan is perhaps the bravest soul I know for sitting between you two, and may have actually saved her life or at least kept you from peeling the hide off her.
    A true pleasure to meet you three. Looking forward to adding the least Hoyt to my collection next time. Really wish I’d been able to stay for breakfast, but the situation that pulled me back to Huntsville could not wait. Properly dealt with and I didn’t even need to resort to WMDs, just a minor surgical strike.

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    1. I was invited to the group, and I never really turned them down, and I have tons of friends there — so the fist of death is somewhat hampered. I’ve explained the issues to ALL my friends, but the lure of being published by a “real” publisher is too strong…

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      1. Reference to Terry Pratchett disquisition on dogs and wolves hereby made, with note that authors are to dog as publishers are to man.

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        1. And just as dogs may be owned by kind and gentle masters or evil abusive tyrants, so to can the relationships between author and publisher run the gamut from supportive and rewarding all the way to emotional and financial rape. From what little I’ve seen personally and what I’ve heard from others the publisher in question has all the moral authority of an HIV positive rapist. But that’s just my opinion and I have been known to be wrong on rare occasion.

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    2. Con crud, like rust, is inevitable.

      At least until some con gets it together to employ a HazMat suit theme. Perhaps for a ZombieCon?

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  10. Well I’ll almost certainly be there next year… If I do it right part of the airfare will be a business trip

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  11. We saw the bear at breakfast on Monday morning, but he wasn’t dancing…clearly a collective hallucination. (she says with a grin)

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    1. Mrs. Dave and I just moved to the Pax River area, so that may be in the cards. We’re still trying (desperately, as I’ll have a major trip each month since we moved, all of two months ago. Until at least Labor Day) to get settled, but I’m learning to embrace the chaos, so who knows?

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  13. And it was very nice seeing you again, Sarah.

    The frustration one can feel at my stage of the game (particularly when one has been at that stage for as long as I have) makes the encouragement you can give to a novice writer like me loom large indeed.

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    1. Ah! I see your avatar and finally I know why I kept looking over during the odd panel and thinking “Why does he look familiar? I know I don’t know him… do I?”

      Next year, I shall be smarter and simply say hello, asking you why you might look unlike a stranger!

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      1. That’s okay. I probably won’t recognize you either. I’m very good at remembering faces. I’m also very good at remembering names.

        It’s putting which face goes with which name that gives me trouble. ‘)

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  14. Glad to know your fans enjoyed your work. It seems that Baen is quite popular over there.

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  16. It was wonderful finally meeting youse guys in person — though the MFB remains a mythical creature for me.

    The Bassett story is still in your hands, n’est pas? If not, I can re-send it.

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  17. Sarah, if you had left Dan at home he would not had gotten sick and I would have been able to flirt with you more. Would have been a win win situation. Will you and the gang be doing World Con in San Antonio? I will be in the dealers room. Look for the Spades game

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    1. We’re still not sure. I forgot to answer the program inquiry so it’s probably too late (I WAS writing.)

      I think in the unlikely event I win the Prometheus, I’ll just go down for the award and short vacation with husband.

      And I totally agree the man gets in the way of our flirting. He says you’re a dangerous man, and I should be careful ;)

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  18. Glad to see you’re all back safely to the comfortable chaos of home. Hope you skip the con crud (I forgot to warn my dear husband about that downside to cons… ooops.) Was great to see you again, and get to trade more conversation than an incoherent greeting with Marshall. :-)

    PS – what’s the ETA on Ratskiller? ‘Cause curmudgeonly cat is hilarious!

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    2. Hopefully it will be up later today, Dot. AT&T is not my friend. They had a network outage that lasted almost 24 hours. It put me majorly behind on stuff. As soon as I have enough caffeine in me to function, I’ll start the upload process. If everything passes the conversion checks — something we’ve had a problem with on a couple of titles due to junk code I’ve had to hand code out — it will be live. I’ll post a note here and on facebook when it happens.

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  19. Sarah, on her con report Cedar mentioned you steaming after one panel, and I was hoping for some good gossip from you as Cedar didn’t provide any details.

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    1. I did cover it in more detail in the comments But that report was cross posted to Amazing Stories Mag. So I felt it impolitic to bring up there, where no-one would know what I was talking about.

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    2. It’s complicated. It was a panel on Hybrid Writers (who go both indie and traditional) and She Who Shall Not Be Named said that she based the contract she used for her writers on an RCA contract from the seventies. Anyone who knows music contracts of the time, is then forced to ask “from money?” It explained why their contracts are so horrendous. The problem is that I was forced into saying nothing because I have several friends who work for her. I have warned them in private, but commenting on it in public was tantamount to calling my friends stupid. So I bit my tongue. (And I don’t think my friends are stupid, they are however desperate for validation in a world that offers even less than I got back then. Unscrupulous or perhaps rock bottom stupid and predatory people take advantage of that. This is NOT an isolated example.) Anyway, I thought I’d kept my face impassive. Now I wonder how much my face showed through those “Howard Dean, our future president” speeches at World Fantasy. Gee, no wonder I was sidelined.

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      1. You’re not the only one whose face betrays you. I can’t hide anything, no matter what i do, except for concentrating intently on some other subject. Of course, then I looked angry, so in a case such as you were facing, it would be a lose-lose.

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  20. I hear so many good things about this con I so want to go some day. Becky had a good time when she was there a few years ago. Glad the Hoyt clan had a good time.

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  21. Yes Ma’am! Actually I can see us driving out for the con, then continuing on to VA to visit our family there. Hoping I’ll be well next year and we can do that. I now have a goal. :-)

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  23. I was in the audience and I remember thinking that Dan was both a brave and a smart man as the panel went on. I had hoped for more info in the self pub direction but…*shrug* oh well :)

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  24. Sarah, I am sorry that you misunderstood me. As a professional writer, editor, and publisher, my reputation can suffer when people make false statements about my work. I would encourage you to review your statements more carefully so as to avoid potential legal consequences. – Janet Morris

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    1. Janet,
      DO bring on the legal consequences. And btw, this is stupid and you’re making a fool of yourself. The only thing I said is that you said you’d modeled your contract on RCA. And that’s not just me but everyone else on that panel and in the audience. Are you going to sue us because you can’t help running your mouth? REALLY? Oh, that will be a public relations nightmare, but DO bring it on.

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      1. I laughed out loud even before I saw your response. She obviously doesn’t know you very well. When I saw your response I laughed again thinking, “Yup, that’s our Sarah.”

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        1. The hilarious thing is that — I’m too sleepy having finished a story revision at one am so I won’t check — I don’t think I MENTIONED her in the post, and I don’t think I mentioned her by name in the comments. I don’t care who took her tales of the evil things I’m saying, she should read and verify. All I’ve said anywhere (including FB) is that I would not sign that contract, which is true (though of course I’m an established professional and other people might make different choices) and that she said she based it on an RCA contract. The later was said in front of a 100 people.

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          1. I just checked — you did mention her name in your July 3rd comment at 6:36 PM. Googling her own name is probably how she (or whoever told her about this post) found it.

            But yeah, I see nothing in your post that goes beyond “This is what she said in public, and I would recommend that people not do business with her..” None of which is defamation of any kind. The latter could harm her business if people take your advice seriously (as they should), but people are perfectly free under U.S. law to call for boycotts for all kinds of reasons, and there’s nothing at all actionable in someone saying “Don’t do business with person X or business Y”.

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            1. At any rate she can stop this right now. Allow one of her contractees to send me his/her contract — someone I know, I want to make sure it’s the real contract and used — with names xed out. I’ll send it to my lawyer and PG. If it’s not as I thought, I’ll publically apologize.

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              1. I, for one, would love to see one of JM’s contracts. As I recall from the panel (which is, of course, merely the recollection I would be willing to make as part of my sworn testimony), JM said her company modeled their contracts after ’70’s music contracts (of which CM had plenty of examples, since he was in the biz at that time) because it was “unbreakable” (JM’s word, which is well-known to mean unbreakable by the artist) and that she felt that would best “protect” (again, JM’s word) the authors. As a learning exercise, I’m very interested to see how to modify an “unbreakable” contract from the perspective of the author to “protect” that author’s rights to his work, as well — which I would view as more opposing concepts than most contracts deal with. While contracts are, by definition, vehicles for balancing opposing concepts (i.e. the writer’s rights and compensation vs the publisher’s ability to exploit the writer’s work for profit), most literary contract executions I’ve seen only go so far as to use restrictive clauses, not “unbreakable” ones, to limit the writer’s rights. Since we’ve considered doing a shared-world series, but I’ve never seen shared-world contracts (which nobody is denying create an additional burden on the publisher to protect the shared-world assets), I’m curious exactly how to do this without introducing draconian measures.

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            2. Actually, Sarah didn’t even recommend that people not do business with JM. In fact, she pointed out that she has several friends who DID sign those contracts, and took care NOT to involve them in the discussion.

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          2. not so interesting– I just looked her up on wiki (not that wiki is a reliable source), but I wasn’t impressed with her non-lethal weapons for the military idea. And no, you didn’t even mention her company– I was going to ask– no need.

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            1. non-lethal weapons for the military? That is an utterly idiotic concept, anyone who endorses such an idea should immediately be handed such a weapon and dropped on the front lines.
              This is one of the major problems I had with Bujold’s later Miles’ works, also.

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    4. Just an aside, and of no relevance to the particular conversation, but I do like your icon for Paradise Morgans, a very effective visual.

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    5. TENN. CODE ANN. §§ 4-21-1001 -21-1004 (1997)
      Any person, who in furtherance of right of free speech or petition in connection with a public or government issue, communicates information regarding another person or entity to any government agency regarding a matter of concern of that agency, unless with knowledge or reckless disregard of falsity with regards to a public figure or negligence of falsity with regards to private figure, is immune from civil liability.

      Do yourself a favor, Janet, and google “The Streisand Effect.” Not only are you going to lose to an Anti-SLAPP measure, you’re going to lose in the court of public opinion.

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  25. Star and I very much enjoyed seeng you and the entire Hoyt clan. Robert left several new poems on our refrigerator (word magnets). We were amused. And yes, we hope to make a Colorado/Utah swing sometime soon to see our Western friends.

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    2. Hey, you could buy him, cheap. Robert, I mean. Oh, wait not cheap. Med school tuition. Sigh. there goes a lovely plan to hand him for landscaping work and house cleaning (Yes, he’s good at both.)

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