He Does Everything/Like The Spiders...
Jul. 18th, 2011 11:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustSo, that Readercon post. As ever, I think it unlikely that I won't skip something important, so I'll just begin by saying the entire long weekend was a blast; I got love and acknowledgement from people I respect, met people I hadn't before, connected with people I wanted to, though there were always the twin problems of "too many" friends and not enough time. My lecture on How I Wrote the Hexslinger Series went very well indeed, mostly because I'd expected to be telling the truth in advance for the latter part of it, but spent so much time talking about the lead-up and building blocks of A Book of Tongues I basically didn't get there at all. My Kaffeeklatsch went similarly well, as did my reading, and even though few people showed up for my autograph session, I was able to occasionally go off and trawl the Dealer's Room. Plus, my table-mates (Jim MacDonald and Debra Doyle) were very nice about the books, which was at least part of the reason I bought Jim's book What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?, a scholarly exegesis of unexpurgated sea shanties published under the name Douglas Morgan. That, and I (obviously) like period filth/folk songs in general.
All the food was great, both inside the hotel and outside, but the conversation was better. In terms of book haul, I gave away both copies of my own work that I'd brought down but ended up receiving my promised two Rope of Thorns hardbacks, which are unspeakably gorgeous--chiaroscuro end-papers, foil spine-stamp, with "sheer, futile defiance" written inside one cover-flap and that "Warning: This Book Contains" list inside the other. I was also chuffed and amazed when Kelly Link gave me a copy of Magic For Beginners, with a very flattering inscription; I gave her yet another copy of Rope in return, with CZP's blessing. I was also given a free copy of Wilde Stories 2011, along with my free copy of the Icarus issue containing my interview--fittingly, just in time for it to form a great cheat-sheet for my lecture.;)
Also bought: Greer Gilman's Cloud & Ashes, Patricia Geary's Strange Toys (very Shirley Jackson/Kelly Link, actually, thus far), Nicole Kornher-Stace's The Winter Triptych, a signed, hardback first edition of Kathe Koja's Skin (for ten dollars!) and two books for Steve--Gail Carriger's Heartless and George Mann's The Osiris Investigation. Sniffed around a hardback replacement copy of Esther Forbes' A Mirror For Witches, and thus found out that startlingly, the book itself had been written not in the 1970s (when I first encountered it), but in 1929! Another instance of female writers going in and out of print/favour, I guess; God knows we'd already talked a lot about that, on the memorial panels about Diana Wynne Jones and Joanna Russ.
Through a chance encounter with its author, meanwhile--introduced to me over pub lunch by fellow Canadians/two parts of the Unholy Three Simon Stranzas and Ian Rogers--I bought a copy of Daniel Mills' Revenants, which I'm already enjoying immensely. It's a bit like Picnic at Hanging Rock crossed with that prospective Blair Witch Project prequel we kept hearing about: "A poetic meditation on the colonial landscape of New England", as its back cover states, with fine language and psychological realism attached, along with a suffocating, elevating sense of dread. It reminds me sharply of another fine volume I bought recently, in Austin--Scott Thomas' Quill & Candle, which is a collection of M.R. Jamesian/Nathaniel Hawthornesque short stories set anywhere from 1763 to 1825, and scattered over the whole of the same region. In particular, the story "Sagadahoc", which details in five cryptic pages and one pencil drawing the Roanoke-like founding, decay and disappearance of a small Maine settlement. Both are writers to watch, IMHO.
Finally, I was also able to discuss the hot mess that is A Tree of Bones with both sovay and cristalia, and lots of good ideas resulted. Naturally, I'm going to have to rewrite sections of what I've already done, but...yeah, I think I'm going in the right direction now. We'll see. It's crunch-time, for sure.
Next trip: An Ontario appearance in August, followed by KGB's in New York, maybe in October--I have to check. That'll be fun. But otherwise, my travels are at an end. I'm satisfied.
Amended to add: The entry title comes from a moment when, on our way back from seafood dinner at the Summer Shack, cristalia and I started demonstrating our shitty Ontario grade-school French by translating verses of the (original) Spiderman TV show theme, ie: "L'homme-arraignee, l'homme-arraignee/Il fait tout comme les arraignees...Dans le midi de nuit, dans le scene d'un crime/Comme un...streak...de lumiere, il arrive, tout de suite..." We then followed it with a version of "Hey, Jude" which I can't even vaguely recall, except for everyone breaking up when we started crooning "Le meilleur, meilleur, meilleur, meilleur--WAAAH!"
All the food was great, both inside the hotel and outside, but the conversation was better. In terms of book haul, I gave away both copies of my own work that I'd brought down but ended up receiving my promised two Rope of Thorns hardbacks, which are unspeakably gorgeous--chiaroscuro end-papers, foil spine-stamp, with "sheer, futile defiance" written inside one cover-flap and that "Warning: This Book Contains" list inside the other. I was also chuffed and amazed when Kelly Link gave me a copy of Magic For Beginners, with a very flattering inscription; I gave her yet another copy of Rope in return, with CZP's blessing. I was also given a free copy of Wilde Stories 2011, along with my free copy of the Icarus issue containing my interview--fittingly, just in time for it to form a great cheat-sheet for my lecture.;)
Also bought: Greer Gilman's Cloud & Ashes, Patricia Geary's Strange Toys (very Shirley Jackson/Kelly Link, actually, thus far), Nicole Kornher-Stace's The Winter Triptych, a signed, hardback first edition of Kathe Koja's Skin (for ten dollars!) and two books for Steve--Gail Carriger's Heartless and George Mann's The Osiris Investigation. Sniffed around a hardback replacement copy of Esther Forbes' A Mirror For Witches, and thus found out that startlingly, the book itself had been written not in the 1970s (when I first encountered it), but in 1929! Another instance of female writers going in and out of print/favour, I guess; God knows we'd already talked a lot about that, on the memorial panels about Diana Wynne Jones and Joanna Russ.
Through a chance encounter with its author, meanwhile--introduced to me over pub lunch by fellow Canadians/two parts of the Unholy Three Simon Stranzas and Ian Rogers--I bought a copy of Daniel Mills' Revenants, which I'm already enjoying immensely. It's a bit like Picnic at Hanging Rock crossed with that prospective Blair Witch Project prequel we kept hearing about: "A poetic meditation on the colonial landscape of New England", as its back cover states, with fine language and psychological realism attached, along with a suffocating, elevating sense of dread. It reminds me sharply of another fine volume I bought recently, in Austin--Scott Thomas' Quill & Candle, which is a collection of M.R. Jamesian/Nathaniel Hawthornesque short stories set anywhere from 1763 to 1825, and scattered over the whole of the same region. In particular, the story "Sagadahoc", which details in five cryptic pages and one pencil drawing the Roanoke-like founding, decay and disappearance of a small Maine settlement. Both are writers to watch, IMHO.
Finally, I was also able to discuss the hot mess that is A Tree of Bones with both sovay and cristalia, and lots of good ideas resulted. Naturally, I'm going to have to rewrite sections of what I've already done, but...yeah, I think I'm going in the right direction now. We'll see. It's crunch-time, for sure.
Next trip: An Ontario appearance in August, followed by KGB's in New York, maybe in October--I have to check. That'll be fun. But otherwise, my travels are at an end. I'm satisfied.
Amended to add: The entry title comes from a moment when, on our way back from seafood dinner at the Summer Shack, cristalia and I started demonstrating our shitty Ontario grade-school French by translating verses of the (original) Spiderman TV show theme, ie: "L'homme-arraignee, l'homme-arraignee/Il fait tout comme les arraignees...Dans le midi de nuit, dans le scene d'un crime/Comme un...streak...de lumiere, il arrive, tout de suite..." We then followed it with a version of "Hey, Jude" which I can't even vaguely recall, except for everyone breaking up when we started crooning "Le meilleur, meilleur, meilleur, meilleur--WAAAH!"
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Date: 2011-07-18 06:00 pm (UTC)That is also going to be in my head for months.
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