Armadillocon 2008

Armadillocon happened this weekend, the 30th anniversary installment, no less. Friday I was scheduled to spend all day destroying dreams in the Writer's Workshop, which posed a problem. I'm taking classes at Texas State this fall, and Friday was my scheduled day to make late registration changes to my course lineup. A class I needed was being offered that wasn't available back during early registration in the spring, so if I missed my window, matters would become complicated. I ended up taking my trusty laptop--and armed with a list of Austin-area WIFI hotspots--drove to the convention hotel looking for somewhere I could eventually plug in and make my registration happen. After several false starts at various locations, I found my old standby--Freebirds World Burrito--was accommodating to my WIFI needs at 8:30 a.m. and I got all the adding and dropping done with relatively little bloodshed.

I got to the hotel in time for the start of the workshop and settled in. The workshop itself was a good bit of fun this year. I sat next to Asimov's editor Sheila Williams and got to point out to the assembled throng how she has graciously declined to by my prose on many occasions, and once told me she liked everything about a submission except for the story (that got great laughs). I was paired with Martin Wagner for the tag-team evisceration, and although I'd never done a panel with him before, nevermind a workshop, it turned out to be a pretty good pairing. We zeroed in on many of the same issues the manuscripts had, but also came up with enough unique takes that we weren't just repeating the other's critique. I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the manuscripts this year. Although none were ready for publication--some wouldn't be without some seriously major slash-and-burn rewriting--the actual overall writing quality was a notch above competent. For this I was very grateful. Martin and I didn't pull any punches with the manuscripts--my reasoning is that they didn't pay their admission fee just to have us blow sunshine up their asses--and they all seemed genuinely masochistic grateful to have such meaningful commentary.

After the workshop let out, I seized a break in the schedule to run across town to Austin Homebrew Supply to purchase some synthetic corks with which to complete my mead bottling, and a canned dark ale kit with a pound of dark malt extract. Once the blueberry mead is safely bottled, I'm starting a new batch of beer (I'm down to one bottle of the nut brown, see). Then I drove up Burnet Road to the newest Freebirds, which was a fun place to have dinner. This one's much more colorful than other recently opened 'Bird locations, and took hippie chic to a glorious extreme. Good fun.

Bill Crider handled Toastmaster duties quite effectively, and was able to generate good laughs out of Howard Waldrop's unfortunate absence due to being hospitalized with heart trouble. Then, to my utter surprise, I discovered Steven Utley was at the con. I've admired Utley for a long time. His anthology Lone Star Universe, co-edited with the recently deceased George Proctor, is a treasured possession of mine. I've exchanged emails with him over the years, and even published several of his stories during my fiction tenure at RevolutionSF. So finally getting to meet him was a real pleasure--although he had more hair in the photos I'd seen of him than he actually sported in person. My only panel of the night was "Neglected Gems of Genre Fiction" which had a great lineup with Steven Brust, Chris Nakashima-Brown, Rie Sheridan and M.K. Hobson. I started off by plugging William Hjortsberg's mind-twisting Gray Matters, Nevil Shute's On the Beach, then, after Jessica Reisman in the audience called the panel to task for not mentioning any women, I brought up practically the entirety of Patricia Anthony's published novels as well as Lillian Stewart Carl's early fantasy novels, Sabazel in particular.

I chatted with too many interesting people to remember, wandered through the art show in awe of the amazing talent on display (the sculpture of the Native American lion/deer/fish/eagle figure contemplating a human skull had to be seen to be believed) and spent a bit of time at the Apollocon party before heading home. Monkey Girl had a swim meet in New Braunfels the next day, see, so I drew the commuter's straw this year. But I took a lot of pictures and annoyed many folks in the process, and watched in amusement as the diseased minds behind Space Squid assembled box after box of their magazine manually in the hotel lobby.

That's it for tonight. I'm tired, it's late, and I figure if you've waited this long, you can wait another day for the rest of my report.



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