Aggiecon recap the fifth

I know, I know. All the other bloggers finish their con recaps the day they get home, or, better still, give real-time reports from the convention itself. So sue me.

All that lack of sleep caught up with me, and I didn't wake until close to 11 a.m. Which means I missed two panels I really wanted to see because I had to check out of the hotel room by noon. I did manage to make the Andre Norton memorial panel, featuring Elizabeth Moon, Michael Moorcock and Martha Wells. The panel was Elizabeth's idea, and was very well attended. Norton had a tremendous influence on the genre, not just through her writing, but also through the help and encouragement she offered other writers. I haven't read much of her work, but that's a deficiency I'll have to remedy in the future.

I caught Moorcock afterwards and got him to sign my copy of Wizardry and Wild Romance. He confessed a certain degree of embarrassment about it, regarding the intro and afterword by Chine Mieville and Jeff Vandermeer. Moorcock praises their writing in the book, and they praise Moorcock in their companion pieces, so the whole thing comes off as a quid pro quo mutual admiration society. At least, that's Moorcock's take on matters.

With the convention winding down, I decided to skip the "Rate our Con" panel, as the concom already had been made aware of my concerns and criticisms. Instead, I hit the road back home, because in all honesty, while cons tend to reignite the creative fires in me, they're physically exhausting. And writing had become a renewed imperative, especially since Joe Lansdale admonished me to get off my lazy butt and start writing fiction again (after I confessed I'd been distracted by the siren song of reviews and other non-fiction work of late). Fortunately, that metaphorical kick in the pants has done the trick, and revisions that should've been taken care of months ago are falling away under the assault of my razor-sharp keyboard.

When I arrived home, I distributed the obligatory convention gifts: Keela got a copy of Neil Gaiman's The Wolves in the Walls, which she's made me read to her approximately 187 times since Sunday; Calista got A Circle of Cats by Charles de Lint and Charles Vess, which annoyed her at the end, because she wanted to know "What happens next?"; and Lisa got a Barbie, or rather, "Ken as Legolas" since I'd seen the "Barbie and Ken as Arwen and Aragorn" set a year before at a con and not gotten it for her, and now that set's out of production and astronomically priced. So at least she's got Legolas. And I got myself a copy of Steve Gould's Reflex, the long-awaited follow-up to his spiffy teleportation novel Jumper.

Then, with all of that taken away and my dirty laundry deposited in the laundry room, I sat down and watched the Tarkovsky version of Solaris. Interesting movie. It would've benefitted from cutting maybe 45 minutes of meandering, artsy footage from the beginning, but once the film actually reaches the space station in orbit around Solaris, things get interesting. And then I went to bed. The end.

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