Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

No Writing Wednesday this week, today being Thursday. My time sense is still a little warped from NASFiC/ReConStruction this past weekend in Raleigh. It was a great time, and this time I stayed over until Monday morning which is part of why my time sense is screwed up. It feels like Wednesday to me.

The con was a little on the small side as such things go — the final attendance figures were somewhere in the 700-800 range, smaller than a regional like MileHiCon. I imagine part of that is the economy, and part of it may be that Raleigh’s a little harder to get to. Well, it is from Denver anyway. I went out via Newark and came back via Houston. My buddy Lou Berger came back via Tampa, I think.

But good things can come in small packages. There was a lot of great programming, and I got to meet and hang out with some fellow writers from Codex that I’d only met on-line before, including Lawrence Schoen, who I shared a table of contents with in Footprints and whose story there is up for a Hugo this year, and [at this point I am pausing with the sudden realization that if I start listing people, I’m going to feel obligated to list everyone, or feel bad about those I left out. Okay, I’m not going to list everyone, apologies and no slight intended to the rest of you] Mary Robinette Kowal, (2008 Campbell Award winner, current VP of SFWA) who hosted a release party for her first novel, Shades of Milk and Honey. She’s a charming and intelligent lady, and a darn good writer. She reminds me a bit of Connie Willis in some ways.

Baen Books has their galactic headquarters near Raleigh (Jim Baen was smart enough to move out of expensive New York years ago) and there were a number of Baen folk in attendance (although they run a distributed operation). The Baen party Friday night was well attended and a lot of fun, with Toni Weisskopf being her usual intelligent and entertaining self. (And no, I’m not just saying that because I want her to buy my novel — although if I thought it would help, I might.) There were the usual Worldcon bid parties, too — Chicago in 2012, Texas (San Antonio) in 2013, and perhaps the best, London (UK) in 2014. These are all largely, so far as I know, uncontested, although there’s time for someone to mount another 2014 bid, and even a 2013 bid although the timing is tight on that one. Since London is my original home town, I’m supporting (technically, pre-supporting) their bid. They put a cool London 2014 video together to promote it, see how many SF/fantasy shows or movies you can identify. If London does win, then there’ll also be a NASFiC that year (location to be determined, I’m sure bids will start showing up as we get closer to the date.)

There are a lot of reasons that sf cons are worthwhile. I had a chance to meet with Analog editor Stanley Schmidt, who bought me (and writer Shane Tourtellotte) lunch in part so that I’d “feel obligated and send more stories” Stan’s way. That’s quite a compliment. I also find that the interaction with creative and intelligent people stimulates a lot of new ideas. I have several stories already in mind since coming back, and I’ve heard the same from other writers. You need to keep up the input to keep the output flowing.

And on that note, I need to sign off here and go write some of those stories down. Ciao.