Young Indiana and I had a positively splendid, utterly exhausting bank holiday weekend while Ted was off gaming. Saturday we defied the not-running trains to go to the zoo (a thing we would not have done if I’d known the trains weren’t running, but I didn’t find out until we got to the train station, at which point a bus was available, so…we went. Later than we intended, but we went.) We had breakfast out and went to the zoo and the lions were in fine form & I got…
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…
Picoreview: Valerian & the City of a Thousand Planets: much worse than it had to be. I went to see this with a friend who’s visiting, and we agreed that it really was much worse than it had to be, which is different, perhaps a step up from, “not as good as it could have been.” The dialogue, specifically the dialogue between leads Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne, was excrutiating. They had roughly the chemistry of two wet paper towels (although that may be doing wet paper towels a disservice),…
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…
The trouble with the first several days of Worldcon was that I was having so much fun I kept lying awake at night grinning like an idiot and keeping myself awake with happiness, which meant that although I technically went to bed about 3:15 on Saturday morning, it was tragically closer to 4 before sleep actually arrived. And I had a 10am panel. Frankly, my friends, I did not expect it to go well. None of us did, in fact. We were all privately agreeing that this was probably going…