Sometimes it's better when you're saying the wrong thing
I am home from Arisia. I'll lobby-con tomorrow if I have the energy, but I am done with my programming. All of it was fun and as far as I can tell it all went well, although I especially enjoyed the memorial for Le Guin, the Yiddish singing, and the Tolkien. I wound up reading new fiction mixed with selections from a borrowed e-book of Forget the Sleepless Shores, since I had sold all the print copies I'd brought with me. The Boston Park Plaza has its problems as a con hotel, but I must say I enjoyed being able to walk two blocks and find restaurants instead of wasteland. The hanging out with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ashnistrike, choco_frosh, nineweaving, awhyzip, and some people not on Dreamwidth was very good.
Against all my expectations, my first-generation Sacagawea gold dollar coin has returned to me. It was in the outer back pocket of my computer bag where I don't keep anything. I think it must have slipped out of my coat pocket and into the computer bag. I found it when I was looking for last-ditch cough drops. There it was, brass-gold and a little tarnished, with the familiar face glancing over her shoulder, from 2000. I am keeping it now in an inside pocket of my leather jacket which snaps shut. I don't think I can count on being so lucky again.
As if it was charmed by sympathy out of the overcast, the lunar eclipse is just still visible from our front windows, an ice-white brilliant circle with a distinct dark bite. I have been asking the cats which one of them is eating the moon.spatch says it'll be the one that bleps light.
ETA: Despina Durand reviewed Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (2016) and she says wonderful things about "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts":
Sonya Taaffe is easily one of the best contemporary writers of Weird fiction. Her work is often heavy with history—not "heavy," as in cumbersome or excessively dense, but "heavy" in the way anything worth holding sits in the hand.
All that and a blood moon and a talisman returned. I am happy.
ashnistrike, choco_frosh, nineweaving, awhyzip, and some people not on Dreamwidth was very good.Against all my expectations, my first-generation Sacagawea gold dollar coin has returned to me. It was in the outer back pocket of my computer bag where I don't keep anything. I think it must have slipped out of my coat pocket and into the computer bag. I found it when I was looking for last-ditch cough drops. There it was, brass-gold and a little tarnished, with the familiar face glancing over her shoulder, from 2000. I am keeping it now in an inside pocket of my leather jacket which snaps shut. I don't think I can count on being so lucky again.
As if it was charmed by sympathy out of the overcast, the lunar eclipse is just still visible from our front windows, an ice-white brilliant circle with a distinct dark bite. I have been asking the cats which one of them is eating the moon.
spatch says it'll be the one that bleps light.ETA: Despina Durand reviewed Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (2016) and she says wonderful things about "All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts":
Sonya Taaffe is easily one of the best contemporary writers of Weird fiction. Her work is often heavy with history—not "heavy," as in cumbersome or excessively dense, but "heavy" in the way anything worth holding sits in the hand.
All that and a blood moon and a talisman returned. I am happy.
Re: Arisia
Thank you so much! It was an especially fun panel. I hope yours—including the one you were moderating—treated you as well!
(And glad to hear coin found it's way back to you, moving through the world like a benign version of the One Ring.)
That is a very nice way to think of it.
Congratulations on selling all the print copies you brought!
Thank you! I had somehow underestimated what saying "My books aren't in the dealer's room, but I have some with me . . ." would do to a room.
Registration on the other hand, ugh!
Registration was a zoo. There was also an entire wing of rooms whose location I never successfully memorized; I always figured out where they had to be by where they obviously weren't. But I really liked being able to come aboveground from the T and walk half a block and be at the hotel and the thing with the restaurants was in my experience of Boston-area conventions unparalleled. I actually ate meals this Arisia. That not quite jokingly almost never happens.
Re: Arisia
People kindly said they enjoyed the panels I was on, but... on the panel I moderated after I mentioned Good Society (A Jane Austen RPG that addresses inclusiveness as a theater company might, by using non-traditional casting in the illustrations and reminding the reader that they can do so in play.) a participant responded with the thought that "both sides" are hurting the hobby: both those who want have diverse representation and those who object to it. I pushed back, and pivoted to another topic, because while I'm happy discuss the value of representation at length, it seemed likely that their quietism was so unthoughtful that they might inadvertently develop their ideas on the fly in a way in that might hurt people. Afterwards people of color in the audience said I handled it well, which was a relief. Anyway, I suppose, at a "year in" panel, people mostly want to hear about cool media they missed. Pens or smartphones out to take notes!
Representation also gave me a very happy moment at the con. In one of my RPG sessions, a young person who had played in a game I ran last year showed up really early, to be sure to grab the same character they had played before. They showed me a photo of the character sheet they kept on their phone. When everyone arrived and we got started they introduced their PC enthusiastically saying "This is Leslie, they're an expert cosplayer and a shapeshifting first contact specialist, and they are non-binary just like me!"