MemeMachineGo!

Some random and disjointed notes on Worldcon. If I wait to write up a comprehensive report, I won't get to it.

Took the BART to Fremont, the bus to downtown San Jose, and walked to the Fairmont, rolling my luggage: my cheapest and quickest Worldcon travel ever.

Thursday night my friend Avi co-hosted a Clarion party. I made friends with a bunch of the Clarion West 2002 class, and continued to hang out with them a lot for the rest of the con. Two were already friends: I've been in a writers' workshop with Wendy Shaffer for four years; Genevieve Williams is an old talk.bizarre friend I haven't seen in some five years. Met Blunt whose Clarion journal I'd followed intermittently, and several others who don't have web pages I know of.

In ways it was an odd recapitulation of '98 — as then, I was the only representative of my class (Clarion '98) at the Worldcon, and imprinted on that year's Clarion West class. (Sadly, I ended up seeing little of the several CW '98 folks who were there.)

It's been four years since my Clarion: between Clarion and Clarion West, 8 classes have passed through those hallowed halls. Over 150 people. I found myself working hard to try to associate people with classes at the party: do I maybe need to introduce these two people or did they spend six weeks in each other's pockets?

Had dinner in a group with Jim Kelly one night, and told him about my analysis of his "Itsy Bitsy Spider". He was very surprised it mapped so exactly to 7-point plot structure, which served to answer the question I'd been planning to ask him as to whether he had it in mind at any level during composition or revision.

When Ted Chiang first saw me, he said "You look different. You look like a villain." I can live with that. (Ted had only ever seen me clean-shaven and with my hair braided in a ponytail; lately I've grown a goatee and often wear my hair loose.) I was with Ted when Lawrence Person told him he'd won a Hugo. Congrats, Ted! (Like Cory says, best novelette was a very strong category this year.)

I went to readings by Robert Reed, Sean Stewart, Lucius Shepard, Jim Kelly, R. Garcia y Robertson. Gushed to Sean about how much I loved Galveston.

Went to Kaffeklatsches with China Mieville and Charlie Stross. For reasons that will likely remain obscure to me, China was the most lusted after person at the con. No slur intended; I'm just mired in a male-Kinsey-0 perspective.

The con had an elaborate restaurant guide bound as a paperback book, featuring not just dozens of restaurant reviews, but anecdotes by sf writers and other figures in the field about food and dining. And no freakin' breakdown of the availability of even vegetarian food let alone vegan or any other restricted diet. How lame is that? The con's Internet Lounge wasn't lame, though, and I researched all the vegan options in striking distance. God bless the web. A couple of times I walked about a mile and a half to a vegan Vietnamese place, and Thursday evening met an Oakland couple behind an organization called Earthville, with wonderful plans for earthy-crunchy global dominance featuring sustainable development, community-building, and the Vertical Village.

I've got sleep to catch up on and a neglected workout schedule to resume early in the morning so I'm going to wrap this up, ping More Like This' Worldcon Metablog and get to bed. Maybe tomorrow I'll have more to say about Socialists in Kilts, the books I bought, and the secret language of racoons.