Now the carnival is over… and I’m sooooo tired. Over the last five days, I’ve been getting about fours hours of sleep a night. Tomorrow will be a sleep in and catch up day.Today was an excellent finale to the convention. I went to 2 Kaffeeklatches (strictly 9 participants at most, one author-host, and the hot drink of your choice). I hadn't considered attending any of these, but on the Saturday, 2 of my fellow YOSF&F workshoppers highly recommended that I try them, so I signed up for a few on the Sunday and Monday to break up the panels, workshops and films.
The first KK today was with Catherynne M. Valente, a wonderful, though visibly tired (day 5!!!) hostess, who gave me a signed galley of her upcoming book Deathless with instructions to blog a review of it once I’ve read it. Three other lucky participants also got copies and instructions. This had nothing to do with Catherynne having a clue about who any of us were. When she asked who hadn’t read any of her books (I’ve only read her short stories) we four were the ones who honestly, but shamefacedly, put up our hands, each of us thinking we had just effectively removed ourselves from consideration for the much coveted prizes. But lo and behold, fate did a squirmy twisty back flip, and we apparent losers were *punches air* in fact the winners!The other Kaffeeklatch was with… wait for it … George R.R. Martin! What a lovely man! Given that there was a queue a mile long for his much hyped KK yesterday, that I got to meet him at all was a stroke of absurd luck. I went to sign up for Catherynne’s KK, and there was a sheet for George utterly devoid of any signatures. I thought it was a mistake, but no, he was sneaking in an extra session, which no-one seemed to know anything about, and so I put my name down as the #1 participant. He told us about his career and gave lots of good advice. I was particularly interested in what he had to say about the upcoming HBO series Game of Thrones based on his work.
I also attended 3 panels today, with names like John Scalzi, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Greg Benford and Charles Stross sharing thoughts, techniques and good advice. Then it was time for the closing ceremony, and finally, time to return to the Real World.
Over the past 5 days, I’ve met so many clever, funny, down-to-earth and generous people, but there’s simply no point going into it any further now, for I am too pooped to do any of it justice.
2 comments:
Wow, lucky to get that extra Kaffeklatsch in. But... what _did_ he have to say? Would love to share a report from the Kaffeklatsch at Westeros.org's So Spake Martin collection of reports from kaffeklatschs and the like. :)
I know!! As I said, I simply could not believe what I was seeing at first. I hovered around the sign up table for a good five minutes trying to figure out what was going on. I was convinced I had misunderstood something and was going to make a huge fool of myself, but nope, it was one of those freaky bits of good luck that sometimes happen at conventions when you least expect it.
I'll definitely post more about it when my head is working properly again.
And thank you for the invite, and for dropping by.
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