I’m back from the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) where I was a guest of honor over the past week, and I am ridiculously tired but had a wonderful time. I am, in fact, too tired to type coherently, so if this is fully of typos, I… will assume you can read through them bc omg. so tired. :) I’d never been to ICFA and was, tbh, very very nervous and feeling quite imposter-syndromey, which is not my general modus operandi, but my god, guys, the…
This weekend I went to the National Irish SF Convention, Octocon, for the first time in *years*. Since 2017, I’m pretty sure. It was lovely to see everyone. I wasn’t sure until Friday that I was going at all, so I didn’t mention it to anybody except one friend, so people were Very Surprised Indeed to see me, and almost immediately upon arrival I was invited to do a panel, which was both flattering and funny. Furthermore, to my delight, the panel was with my friend, the magnificently talented Sarah…
Today has been a rather lovely day. A long-time reader whom I’ve corresponded with for years is in Ireland, and we met for breakfast, which was a genuine delight. Even though she’s still mad at me for something I wrote in the Walker Papers, and took the chance to tell me I’m not yet forgiven. But I also told her a couple of SECRETS, so we were all even in the end, or something. *laughs* I brought her a copy of GLADIATOR TIGER, which she had not known was dedicated…
I actually still have the event app on my phone so I can even REMEMBER what I was doing on these days. Sunday I had an interesting panel, “Fantasies of Irish emigration,” about why so much fantasy–especially urban fantasy–seems to get written ABOUT Ireland without much of it being set IN Ireland. I called out RF Long as somebody who’s written UF both in and about Ireland, and I think there were a couple others I could think of, but it was a really fun panel (and my friend Deirdre…
I am forgetting SO MUCH STUFF it isn’t even funny. Like moments where I saw a friend Thursday evening, gave her, in fact, a Word Warriors ribbon, and then saw her again at the Friday morning Word Warriors meetup, then saw her AGAIN on Saturday and was like “OMG I haven’t even seen you AT ALL this weekend! …oh, except the meetup…” and she was like “…and Thursday night…when you gave me THIS…?” It reminds me of when Dublin actually got the Worldcon bid, and I saw Ian McDonald (whom…