After years of preparation, Worldcon was held in Dublin this week, for the first time ever. A month ago I was, I confess, pretty exhausted by the very idea of it, even knowing that I tend to dread, rather than anticipate, big events. By a couple of weeks ago, though, my friends feeds were starting to fill up with variations on “Ireland, I am in you!” and I was starting to get pretty excited about the whole shebang. I’d been claiming it was CatieCon, and while I *guess* there was…
Here are the formal (and some less formal, but already-booked) places I’ll be for Worldcon 2019 in Dublin! YAY! The popularity of Anti-Heroes in Comics Format: Panel 15 Aug 2019, Thursday 11:30 – 12:20, Odeon 3 (Point Square Dublin) Deadpool, Harley Quinn, The Punisher, Ghost Rider: in many ways insane, evil individuals – hardly what we would call heroes! And yet they are some of the most popular and interesting comics characters around! Are they better-written characters (and if so, why)? Do readers, and creators, need a counterpoint to all…
This is especially for people coming to Dublin 2019: If an Irish person (or website, for that matter) tells you something is a 10 minute walk, they are almost certainly lying to you. It’s a well-intentioned lie. They reckon anybody can walk for ten minutes, I think, so if they say it’s ten minutes, well, that sounds grand and not a bother and you can manage that. But if it is actually a ten minute walk, that is a matter of sheer coincidence and should not be used as a…
Octocon was this past weekend, and a fine Octocon it was! I decided to do a dealer’s table at the last minute, and it went…well. I brought jam and books. About…70 jars of jam, and 30-40 books. In fact, I had to restock for the second day, because what I’d brought on day one had sold out to the tune of about 80%, which was sort of Beyond My Expectations. I don’t seem to have gotten a picture of the books on day one, but (first photo courtesy of, by…
Sunday morning at breakfast looked like everybody at the con hotel had just gone, “…yeah, no, screw it,” and not gotten up to eat. :) *I’d* gotten up because I wanted to go to Walter Jon Williams’ guest of honor interview, which I did (although I went into the wrong room first and was pretty torn about leaving what proved to be an astronaut’s lecture, but did anyway). The first half of it was full of what I thought were really great general questions for a writer and I wanted…