This past weekend I once again attended World Fantasy Convention, this time in lovely Saratoga Springs, NY. Not only is it a nice town, but the upstate NY location was close enough for me to be able to avoid needing to visit an airport to get there, which is always a good thing.
Rather than trying to do a play-by-play of the entire long weekend, I’ll just mention a few things:
1) I had a great dinner on Thursday with arcaedia, kenscholes, jaylake and lasirenadolce, and then another very enjoyable dinner (for the company, if not the food) with arcaedia, mizkit and chefted on Friday.
2) I feel fortunate that I got to meet the excellent kenscholes, the lovely lasirenadolce, and the apparently real chefted. I would have gladly spent more time with any or all of them. I also met several other cool people that I’m not going to attempt to list here, as I’d inevitably leave someone out.
3) The ZOMBIES NEED BRAINS party on Thursday night (run in part by pbray and mizkit) was great, and I quite enjoyed dropping by Friday night’s Prime Books/Senses Five Press party for Ekaterina Sedia’s new books. The Orbit party over at TizNow was well worth it for the very fine open bar, the lame canapés, the swag, and seeing Dwayne win second prize in the raffle. I skipped the Tor party this time around, as I wasn’t looking forward to the usual crushing, which meant I missed both jaylake and kenscholes drinking the mysterious golden liquid in the bathroom. And of course, I made it to the bar every evening, the highlight of which was Saturday night’s serenading of arcaedia with first a birthday dirge around the table and then most of the bar singing a more upbeat version (led by jaylake).
4) Yes, there was cheese. I quite liked the selection before dinner at The Wine Bar on Thursday, but I missed jaylake‘s cheese fest on Friday evening. Fortunately, the very considerate katfeete and icedrake saved some of their latest creation from Meadow Creek Dairy for arcaedia and I to enjoy on Sunday.
5) This year I went to one panel, and I was there for a reason other than learning about the topic at hand. Which was good, because the topic they were talking about seemed to have little to do with the name of the panel anyway. I also went to readings by Jay Lake (aka jaylake), Hal Duncan, Anne Bishop, Gene Wolfe, Guy Gavriel Kay and John Crowley (aka crowleycrow), all of which were excellent, though I think I liked Gene Wolfe’s the best. He’s not an especially engaging reader, but he read an extraordinary story and the Q&A afterwards was great.
6) People seem to like it when you share your hip flask filled with Balvenie Doublewood single-malt.
7) In addition to the free books in the WFC totebag (which were, as I understand it, a little sparser than usual due to a snafu that kept Tor and Nightshade books from being included) and the books I picked up at the Orbit party, I also bought a few things in the dealer’s room (or, in one case, at a party).
- The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia
- Heart of Stone by C.E. Murphy
- Nova Swing by M. John Harrison
- Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
- The River Knows Its Own by Jay Lake
- Realms: The First Year of Clarkesworld Magazine edited by Nick Mamatas and Sean Wallace
8) I also ended up buying one thing in downtown Saratoga. In the back of one of those “celtic” stores that usually mainly sell crystal, sweaters and Guinness merchandise, I found a pretty impressive collection of Irish music, which included Peter Horan & Gerry Harrington’s Fortune Favours The Merry. I therefore bought it, mainly because of the many good things colomon has said about Peter Horan. It’s amazing.
9) I’m not planning on making it to WFC 2008 in Calgary, and I’m undecided about WFC 2009 in San Jose (though that year I’ll likely be at Worldcon in Montreal). I’m going to miss the heck out of a bunch of people that I therefore may not see again for a while.