Scintillation, day two

Montreal custard buns are more like the pure light of heaven than New Zealand custard buns.

I got back from the bun shop just in time for the Good and Evil panel, or possibly just past time, I forget which. I did a lot of arriving slightly late to things. This one, happily, I took notes for:

( Scaffolding-style Good and Evil notes )

After that, much as I would have liked to hear about The Future of English, I had to go for a walk to process it all. Well, I still haven't processed it all, but I processed some, and the old port is lovely. Next, Ada Palmer's reading (the first chapter of Too Like the Lightning, pleasant though inessential to me since I've read it three times) and a Q&A; then lunch with David who'd also been on the gardens walk. (Interesting people floating around seeking meal companions! Conventions are amazing!) Although dim sum, as I overheard Jo saying at some point in the weekend, doesn't really work with two: even in Montreal, twelve of the same dumpling was a tactical error.

(Names. 1: I am using the dreamwidth name of anyone whose dreamwidth name I know. 2: it feels odd to call writers I've met either by first name or full name, so I will be random about that. If I manage to break any principles of etiquette on this, please let me know).

And then a panel on John M. Ford. No notes, and I won't try to assign who said what. But this panel is the main reason I'm glad as well as sad that the second of the convention's LARPs was also cancelled. First, because from many angles at once it caused John M. Ford to jump to the top of my reading list as soon as I can find any of him. (None at the Strand. Does anyone have Boston bookshop-wisdom? But I think my local had The Dragon Waiting a month ago, with any luck I'll find it there when I get home). I'm trying not to let my hopes remain at 'he shall assume his place amongst thy favourite writers as was foretold in the beginning' level, because it's a rare reading experience which that would help, and also there's the second reason the panel was so good: people on it had known the man and cared about him, and I couldn't not be moved by it. The panel's existence would have been enough of a recommendation for me to read something of his eventually -- even though I didn't go to the Steerswoman panel, I now know that there's this interesting thing called the Steerswoman series -- but I am emotionally invested in John M. Ford's moral genius and subtlety. That could go either way, when I get to the books.

By moral genius, I mean it sounds like he was a genius in a social and caring way, but it also sounds like he was very good at writing shades of emotion, and aspects of lives that don't usually get written. He writes coming of middle age, he writes what a cyberpunk universe would mean to someone without the use of their legs (before there was cyberpunk) -- and he writes a teenage boy who is a feminist and a sadist and hasn't yet learned you can combine the two, which is a facet of my own adolescence I didn't know I hadn't seen in fiction.

(While I've been writing this entry I've been reading some of his poetry. 'Troy: the Movie.' Very sold).

After John M. Ford I may have hurtled up some stairs and back down them to re-engage my brain -- then there was Being a Gatekeeper, which didn't gel for me. Possibly it's having a one-time book reviewer father, but the overlap between 'didn't know that' and 'am interested in that' was narrow. What's stuck with me is the bit about review databases for the particular use of librarians in selecting library books.

Then came the You Write Funny panel, which was fun, and about which I remember Max Gladstone being in a transition period between different writing habits, nineweaving sitting down to write on a traffic island having stepped into an exuberant current of words while crossing the road, and -- fragments. And then, instead of going into the Steerswoman panel, I had a long conversation with some people in the hall outside, before going off to dinner with another person from the garden walk, Jean, and two other people who... do have names... darn. But one of them was the fantastique and gothic and zombies scholar. They all spoke French, I felt odd about being the one making them speak English. (I've never been anywhere as bilingual as Montreal).

(It's pleasant to be in a context where you mention The Haunting of Hill House in a discussion of horror books and everybody has heard of it. Which reminds me, one of the satisfactions of the Time Travel and Teens panel was that twice I thought of a book relevant to the discussion, and both times it was footnoted less than ten seconds later by someone else. The feeling that the room, in aggregate, has read what I have...)

I hurried away from dinner a little before the others had finished, having realised that the Sassafrass concert was already underway. The panels running beside it are the ones I'm saddest to have missed -- Cthulhu, series writing, what are short stories -- but I wasn't going to miss Sassafrass. I've been listening to bits and pieces of them for years, and seahearth and I spoke some of their songs for an assignment in our high school drama class. Sassafrass went strongly in my head with a years-old regret that it was never going to be practical to go to these overseas science fiction convention thingies, and then with the realisation that Jo Walton had created the perfect one and it was damn well possible whether or not it was practical.

The Norse songs were wonderful. I was tired enough to be mostly zoned out for the pastorals, but I zoned back in for 'Somebody Will'. The song hasn't mean so much to me on its own, but in that room it did.

Then I headed back up to my room to collapse into snooze for half an hour, only my clock informed me that the concert had gone over time by twenty minutes, so I snoozed for three seconds and then dashed downstairs to rushthatspeaks' reading, the first chapter of a novel I've been encountering their intriguing hints about for years, and which is itself more intriguing than the hints were. Strong sense that it is doing something complicated, pleasantly limited sense of what that might be,('Gently pastoral but what the hell is going on' may be headed toward being a subgenre), and a world and people I'm happy to have partially in my head in the meantime.

Immediately after that was nineweaving's reading, from the next Ben Johnson novella, only it may be escaping the bounds of novella and I'd be glad if it did. It is beautiful. (I've never yet had the sense of having finished reading a piece of fiction by nineweaving, I finish one and need to start it again, but in the last year that has shifted from being an offputting thing to a delightful thing).

I talked with nineweaving on the way downstairs to the party afterwards, which was the first conversation at Scintillation I'd had about writing with a writer who's important to me. And then with rushthatspeaks, which was the second. I'd been consciously deferring "Hello person I've never met I love your work" conversations on the basis of eek, but there was no eek component here, it was very nice. Chatted in a circle by the cake table (a good place to be), and ended up in a conversation with three of the people I'd eaten with earlier, and wandered upstairs very tired with a sense that everything was possible and everything was worthwhile.