beautiful one day, speculative the next

I'm home. I'm cold. My heater is still in hibernation and my other heater needs liberating from dingy cupboard depths. I promised reports on Conjure though, so I will do a post before I allow my toes comfort. I will also permit you to be impressed at my self-sacrifice.

Conjure was totally fun. Early on a bunch of us decided it was Diana Wynne-Jones' conference, because the corridors were remarkable in their capacity to change in length and direction and to lead the unwary astray. It was awesome. The dinosaur on the flying carpet was equally awesome but *not* quite in the same way. I think we were supposed to close our eyes to the three hefty blokes carrying the rug.

And why did Sean Williams need storm troopers to prevent people leaving when he did an erotic reading? I needed the stormtroopers for my reading, though, because some people got trapped in shifting corridors (and I promised to talk to them afterwards and that got derailed - if you are reading this, I am sorry and it really was beyond my control) and other people followed Bruce Sterling out of the room just before I began. I am hoping they thought the session was finished when he left, rather than leaving because they *knew* I was coming next.

I read that last bit back and it founds a bit depressing, but it was actually incredibly funny. Picture yourself in a room with a famous author and a sparse but very real audience. Famous author excuses himself to go to a signing. Most of the audience leaves, save for three noble souls.

Anyhow, there was me, and there were the three brave audience-remnants, and we were halfway through the story. And then this guy comes in and says nothing. He goes straight to the audio stuff near me and does something and then walks out, still saying nothing. And then music starts up for that machine. And we were all wondering *why* an expert in Japanese fighting techniques would put music on in the middle of a reading. And I decided the whole thing was hysterically funny and have been giggling about it ever since.

There was a lot more to the Con than flying dinosaurs and slightly surreal incidents, but my toes are becoming seriously cold so I will post this and get back to you.

(no subject)

My toes are warming up, but my soul is in rebellion: I feel achronological. So this post dumps any indication of what happened when and is just a series of quotable quotes. The first comment was the only one I specifically solicited.

"Trust Brissie to bring fifteen bellydancers to the masquerade and finally make science fiction cons sexy." Robert "Sexy" Hoge.

If you want more on the sexiness of Conjure, check out Donna Hanson's blog http://www.livejournal.com/users/austspecfic/ Sorry about lack of clever code: too much fun, too little sleep and not quite enough coffee. I am adding stuff from my notebook to Donna's comments just to confuse things - you will find a complete list of Ditmar winners there, for instance.

Trevor Stafford announced a light sabre workshop for Conflux in June.
Audience member: Are light sabres provides.
Trevor: Yes, there will be spare light sabres.
Another audience member: How about spare arms?
Trevor: No, I don't think we provide spare arms.

panel on SF musicals (alas, my notes do not show who said that most of the time):

"Xanadu should never be mentioned in any polite conversation"
"I own the poster, move and DVD."
"I'm surprised the universe can cope."

Sean Williams on the movie "Charlie and Algernon" "We actually had people crying during the muscial .. and not because we were very bad."

Must see muscials: Alien the Musical (especially the bursting chest scene) and The Eye of Argon (can it match the book?).
Dream musical: Rocky Horror crossed with Xanadu "Men in tights on rollerskates"

Peter Nichols acceptance of Peter McNamara Achievement Award "Hard work is not a pleasure, but it certainly beats entropy."

Richard Harland "Not many novels need a country any bigger than new Zealnd."
Russell Kirkpatrick "Lord of the Rings didn't need a country any bigger than New Zealand."

Jennifer Fallon "I lost an army once."

Russell Kirkpatrick "The story only exists in order for me to play with the maps."

And there were more but LJ lost them.

I will be back tonight with the rest of the Conjure stuff. Right now I have emails that need thoughtful disposal. And coffee. I need lots of coffee.

Conjure - the people factor

Each and every convention has its own shape. Conjure's shape was the shape of particular people. Not one person. Not fan or author groupings.

Every single individual had his or her (or its, in the case of rubber dinosaurs) own person-shaped hole which they filled: they were what made the convention. It wasn't grouped pirate noises, or sexy dancing, or the drinking that went on after the bars were shut, or the caliber of the panels, or the natural tendency of people to sit near the registration desk until the exact right group had formed for a delightful dinner party. It wasn't the unlimited chocolate or the room parties or the Brisbane weather.

Each and every one of these things helped, but somehow the Conjure committee managed to make everyone I spoke to feel as if they belonged there. David - whose first story was published in The Outcast - was walking round in a private haze of delight at his first signing and his first cross-questioning by a potential fan and his first launch and his first story every published. Lynne was in a purple haze because it was her first convention and she was meeting vast members of people she knew very well but had never met. I was wandering in an equally private haze from the exceptionally interesting people I taught, and threw chocolate at, and who bought my book, and who asked me difficult questions, and who bought me drinks and who I bought drinks for and who I had dinner with. Dinner with the Purplezone mob from Voyageronline was gorgeous, but so were drinks with Fiona McLennan (web goddess) and Marianne de Pierres (parish plessis goddess) and Maxine McArthur (space opera goddess) Stephanie Smith (editing goddess) and Donna Hanson (convention goddess) and Cory Daniells (just goddess: no qualification necessary - in my next life I will be her) and so was the extraordinary room party Nicole Murphy hostessed for the latest CSFG book and so were those very last drinks at the dead dog party where we worked out that our dream panel at Conflux would be for the medical person to host a panel where they argue about the cause of death of my father's disarticulated skull.

This last says it all. We ought to have been conventioned out. It was one am, after all, and none of us had really slept much in days. And all we wanted was for the mood to linger long enough so we could extend it to June. That's what a hole that is exactly your size does for you in a convention: it turns it into a safe and lovely place.

This wasn't a convention of glitz or glory: it was a convention of people.

Conjure snippets

How to tell a Purplezoner.
Purplezoners are fan who have a sad addiction to Harper Voyager books. I am one. We wear purple, true. Conjure produced another way of spotting them. These were the people who looked at my name badge and hid a chuckle. I'm tempted to say they sniggered. I can't see what the problem is in me forgetting my alias for the purplezone. I can't see why it should be this dead giveaway of voyagerness. It is though. (OK, so my alias is "Gillian" - and yes I forgot it for six whole months.)

Maxine McArthur has legs. All sorts of fascinated male friends discovered this one night when she dressed up for dinner. Conversations with them were difficult until the lift door closed.

An Aussie Convention would not be right without a reading by Richard Harland. This time, he apologised because he forgot to write any screams or fainting fits into his story. No dramatic death scenes on the floor, even. Just a yelp.

Yes, there were quail eggs. I can't call them Easter eggs, because I don't celebrate Easter. Besides, they *were* quail eggs and I declared war on them. I ate as many as I could.

Sean Williams is officially "possibly the most adorable person on the planet." I asked him was he going to work at ruining his reputation, and he started laughing evilly, so watch him. His secret role as Haiku Man was outed during the Ditmar Awards, after all, so he might have to transform into his own nemesis.

The Conflux program is bigger than Ben Hur. Trevor Stafford announced so many guest I can't keep track, but I had a moment of revelation and told him that he had obviously trevored Arthur C Clarke and Ray Bradbury. (Being trevored is the affliction of fining yourself committed to doing something entirely unexpectedly and generally enjoying it.) This made giving out complimentary copies of Cosmos and talking people into joining us for Conflux feel strangely distinguished. I mean, look at the company we keep!!

Writing insights from Conjure

Everyone passes out gold nuggets of thought at conventions as if it is as common as cassiterite. Sometimes it is gold. Sometimes it is dross. Mostly I take mental notes or write things down so I can work it out for myself when my brain stopped gasping. Here are some of the material I collected during my panning for wisdom at Conjure.

When is detail and daily narrative not essential in a novel? When it is boring.

Hacking is just as possible with clothes as with electronics. This thought made me realize that the dubbers of my Winchester list of occupations were heart-companions to Cory Doctorow and Bruce Sterling.

Lots of important world development needs to be dropped from actual novels because it is just not needed for the story. Gestation might take eight years, but that doesn't mean that reading ought to take that long.

If you don't know how your world works (from Jenny Fallon) then you are not able to write another world: each world you create ought to be better-constructed than the previous one.

Readers differ in their needs. Some want more detail; some want action. Don't try to be all things to all people.

Richard Harland pointed out that you can often give a sense of a bigger world in your writing without actually using terribly much detail. This was interesting, because my historical fiction novelist friends use the phrase 'telling detail'. They suggest it isn’t the amount of detail but the type of detail, and its careful deployment that counts.

Russell Kirkpatrick said that if you win people over, they will forgive a great deal else. He didn't explain the reverse side of the coin which is if you want to be hated and reviled, you have to write incredibly well. My mind sees a pair of scales and on one side is charm and on the other side is literary genius. Of course, in a perfect world, we all have both charm and literary genius… and everyone who reads has unlimited amounts to spend on books and unlimited space to store those books.

Genres operate around readers' expectations, so the default setting of any novel (what readers expect to read when they pick up a fantasy, for instance) is European. If you use European-based settings, the plausible is more possible with less effort. Kim Wilkins suggested that European folklore operates as our cultural Dreaming. (Which makes me wonder what anyone outside Australia reads when they see words like Dreaming, or Women's Business, or walkabout: they are very culture-specific.)

Cultural fair use is very complex. Do we understand our own cultures enough to understand the uses that we wish to make of the cultures of others?

What cultural borrowings in literature are allowable and what are unfair appropriation?

Why does Brisbane keep offering to build statues to out of towners to lure them to live there (I was offered two).

Why am I haunted by Cory Doctorow trying to make up his mind whether a Brisbane-origin scientist working overseas should be called a Brisraeli or a Brislamic Fundamentalist? Why is this more worrying than the 20,000 spam messages he receives in a day?

Why is a room uncool when Cat Sparks leaves? (It is, this is a fact: I want a scientific explanation.)

And where, oh where, are my other notes? I might have to stop at the next post. Day One is missing. The search party failed to turn up anything except lists of work I don't want to do.

Sterling and Doctorow

I only saw Cory Doctorow from a distance and so have nothing illuminating to say about him. Well, except that he seems a nice guy and his persona is consistent. He emanates a Boing Boing fascination with bright and shiny (hm, visions of Jenny Fallon and Cory Doctorow shopping together) and all that political passion and all that skill with language. In fact, Doctorow sounds like Boing Boing transformed from blog to panel. Paragraph bursts of information and analysis and secrets revealed and just enough excited curiosity and humor to keep everyone's attention... He speaks faster and faster until you end up skim-listening, hunting for key points and waiting for jokes. He is cool.

Sterling's vocal patterns are terrifyingly like my impression of 1950s US voiceovers. This is underlined by his own assumptions, so we have the voice and the undercurrents, contradicting the sophitication of the topic under discussion. For one thing, everything he says assumes we know his full spectrum of referents. He sees his world through very US eyes. He blogged Conjure, too, and comments on how like Austin Brisbane is. I love Austin and I love Brisbane but no, they are not alike. Brisbane is business central and tourist central and is bang in the middle of some of the world's most famous beaches. Austin is an inland university town. Where they *might* be alike is that they are both a tad to the left of most of their State. Ah, the glorious days of Bjelke-Petersen, where walking along the street could be considered an illegal gathering.

Bruce is a global citizen, but his cultural mindset is still US. I need to re-read his writing and find out if my interpretation of it changes with this knowledge, because of course I read everything with an assumption that the centre of the known universe is Canberra. John Scalzi picked this up and twits me gently about it in the introduction to the story in the next Subterranean Magazine. I wonder if we should make Scalzi an honorary Australian: he has the sense of humor sorted, which is the hard bit.

I was fascinated by Bruce Sterling's vocal style. The poor man ended up next to me for a while at the Dead Dog party and I made no sense whatsoever (forgot basic word derivations an' all!) because I was so busy analysing his speech rhythms. They are worth the analysis. He always punctuates things with apostrophes and adds capital letters. In personal speech the letters are lower caps, but when he hits the platform his phrases begin with upper case letters that are a whole font size bigger. When he is vehement, he sounds like a series of newspaper headlines. Cogent and intelligent and articulate. Grammatical. Insightful. Lots of good stuff. But all said in a form of front page headline

Doctorow and Sterling had a bunch of content in their speeches. The trouble, however, is that if you follow careers and if the writers in question madly blog their thoughts, you have often already heard much of the content. So when Cory Doctorow reminisced about the fabulous days when you could do fun things with computers using punch cards, I dreamed of my childhood. My father, you see, was determined to understand computers. He would bring home a ton of used punch cards from his evening course, and we would make them into pretty paper ornaments for our friends' doors for Christmas and then spray them pretty colours. We made an unholy mess and Mum banned us from spray paint forever. Ah, the things one can do with punch cards and a decent stapler. And spray paint. Verandahs and spray paint….

You know, I am not terribly respectful to important international guests. This is so much not a good thing.

(no subject)

One last entry then much sleep will ensue.

At Conjure, a game was launched. It looked seriously interesting. It's based on Marianne de Pierres Parish Plessis novels. It is, in fact, why I called her a goddess: not very many writers create a character so very big that someone decides to write a game to extend the experience of the reader.

I am really, really curious to know how that game plays. Not from my point of view, but from the point of view of a regular reader who is also a gamer. So if any of you buy the box and enter that world from the gaming angle, and have any comments, I would love to hear them. If you didn't know about the game and would like details, I can find them out easily enough.

The reason I want to know is just general inquisitiveness. I love knowing how people shape imaginary worlds and I am *so* curious how something like this changes and grows and transmutes as different people make it their won. And games are so much more capable of being made one's own than a book is. I just want to know, i guess, if you are still in Marianne's created world when you are experienced with the game, or whether it has changed in any way. And what the world feels like. And whether it is the same shape as the novels in your mind, or the process of transforming it into a game gives it a different headspace. Where canon stops and personal experience begins. Simple questions like that.