I was afforded the unexpected opportunity to go on a writing retreat in mid-May. It was a great success, but I have to start by telling you about the first time I went on this retreat, in 2019, which MIGHT have been the first year this retreat was held. That week, I wrote 41,000 words. Which is a lot. In fact, it’s enough that they said “we’re now going to use ‘murphy’ as our unit of measurement for this retreat forever,” which I thought they were joking about, except it…
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…