landingtree | Entries tagged with scintillation

Last time I travelled internationally I did not yet have a smartphone. I look back and am amazed it went as well as it did. (I know people travelled perfectly well before smartphones, and I guess some of those people were also full of blithe confidence and hadn't bothered to get any maps, so maybe amazed is too strong. Pleasantly surprised.) This trip was the full Google Maps experience, and one of the best fruit salads I've ever had was served to me when I was hot and sore-footed after a trip up The Mountain and typed 'fruit salad' into Google Maps with no particular hope.

(I would not go back again to find the same exact fruit salad. None of my nostalgic memories of Montreal food came through for me this time: the amazing custard buns had become normal, and perhaps the default NZ croissant has improved or perhaps I was simply less croissant-hungry. This trip has laid down an entirely new set of great food memories.)

My plan had been to reach Montreal days early, get over my jet lag, and then be fully alert for the convention. This did not work. I reached Montreal, proceeded to have three lovely days using magic travel energy dredged up out of my bone marrow, and hit the convention without having begun to be able to sleep more than five or six hours a night and with the travel energy used up. 'I should make time to go back to my Airbnb in the afternoon and nap,' I said to myself. There was so much good stuff to attend I didn't do this, and I regretted it. The convention was great, but also, as I wrote at the time, 'A great case study in social tasks and burning out of them.'

(The advanced next form of plan, if and when I go to Scintillation again, will involve arriving in North America weeks beforehand, doing all my travelling first, going to Scintillation, and then leaving before the weather gets hot. It will also involve having a location within five minutes' walk where I can nap.)

Oh, but one lovely part of the first three days was wandering the city, and sitting in a coffee shop near the Basilica, while a conversation about road trip stories took place on the Scintillation discord. The discord is a thriving online community. Usually I'm offset from it by between six and eight hours depending on daylight saving time; it was great to be participating in conversations on there in real time! I'd type up my notes on this conversation too, since it felt basically panel-sized, (what are the most interesting things about road trip stories? What best separates them from other types of travel narrative like quest and pilgrimage?) only it feels slightly less the done thing when it's reporting on semi-private conversation instead of semi-public panels.

( Panel notes for 'Writing the Future' )

After lunch was a panel on How To Write Middle, where I took such scrabbly notes it's not worth typing them up, but it is immediately followed by some quick notes about how I could turn a random dream I had into a story, so it did its job re. giving impetus to go write things. This is also the panel during which William Alexander described the parlor game 'Smoke,' which I co-opted for use in a Starting Writers meetup later that day, so that was very useful and I was able to briefly tell him it had been - he seemed pleased! (The rules of Smoke are that it's twenty questions, where one person is thinking of a character and the others have to ask them questions to guess what it is. Except none of the questions can be factual. They all have to be sideways, poetical type questions. The first one is 'What kind of smoke would the person you're thinking of be?')

( Panel notes for 'Not Saving the World: Stakes in Fantasy' )

Other things that happened on Saturday: nice lunch-stroll with

ambyr. Frantic Fanfic session which was fun, although revealing of how much the website does for you: writing as much as you can in three minutes gets the added concern of shuffling paper! (I only realised partway through that the website would shuffle everyone's virtual papers up thoroughly, whereas we were passing papers in a circle and thus always writing in the same order. Not bad, but different. Next time I might shuffle in the middle of the table.)

Starting Writers meetup. I was organising this, and had been very blithe about it until day of, when I suddenly remembered to be stressed at organising a group of people. It went well enough, if I was doing it again I would do it totally differently. Following this, I joined

rushthatspeaks for dinner and helped generate The Incident With The Soup That Could Not Be Opened, which was stressful for all concerned - it was good to see him, and

sartorias and

nineweaving, but I am glad I could catch up with all three of them at less stressed times when there was no unopenable takeaway soup.

Then there was a panel on Education for which I had little remaining energy, though I was introduced to a Scintillator who will be moving to Wellington soon (this will be very nice, the only downside was that the introduction foiled my original plan of lying down on the floor right in back and hearing the panel that way). And then there was Beowulf reading, and home. Pleasantly, my Airbnb, though at a not-ideal distance from the hotel, was also in the same general direction as Gretchen and her friend S were heading, so I could talk more with them on the way about linguistics and Beowulf and things. (She lent me the charming Bea Wolf.)

I woke, walked briskly around a block, didn't find a breakfast place drawing me in and so bought bao again -- a queue -- and was late to the Joy of Reading session, where everyone had chosen five minutes of prose they liked and read it aloud. Wonderful idea! Very various, and everything was good. Upstairs then to 'Our real influences and why we lie',

( about which I jotted down only a few things. )

Down again to the Ursula Le Guin tribute reading session. The person up the front at the start said, "How many of you definitely want to read something?", and when no one's hand went up began to read the story 'Coming of Age in Karhide'. Badly, I thought. No sense of rhythm. I was very annoyed, and kicked myself for not having put my hand up, because the story was going to take up most of the hour. My mind drifted in annoyance over the initial bits, where setting and history are laid out. At some point, when the narrator has gone to a semi-monastic Fastness, I had begun sinking under the story. I kept on sinking. When somebody says to the narrator the ritual words, "In the act of creation, praise", a tingle ran over my skin (the way tingles will at emotional points in stories), and instead of vanishing in an instant kept on being there for what felt like about twenty seconds. This had never happened before. I was grinning and laughing and happy, and the rushed reading wasn't an irritant, it was a way to get the story quicker, which was nothing but a good thing...

Goodbye, Ursula Le Guin. This worked out to being a more powerful tribute than I could have chosen.

And it was lunch -- but no! it was Ada's secret unprogrammed reading, the one you could only attend if you'd read the first three Terra Ignota books, the beginning of the fourth. At least one person in the audience had read the third of them the night before, after the reading was announced, so they could go. Nothing of plot in the reading, but again, and as with 'Somebody Will', there was more emotional resonance than I'd looked for. The Terra Ignota books haven't always landed with me emotionally, because what she's doing in them is so intricate and so many things at once that I don't trust it to end right, and things I think are flaws might yet turn out not to be, while things I think aren't flaws might become ones. But she cares so much, and it comes through. I am going to carry some of that experience to the books next time I read them, a resonance in Utopia and the Great Conversation which I hadn't yet found on my own; and I'm glad.

And then upstairs to the panel on 'What we can learn from Shakespeare', which as I expected was my favourite panel and one I can use.

( Shakespeare notes )

And then at once the Linguistic Worldbuilding panel, which felt much less like a conversation that the last, more question and response. Unhelpfully, given that, my notes are disorderly, and my memory has largely faded away to what I made notes about.

( Linguistic Worldbuilding notes )

After that I had been sitting down listening to things for almost longer than I could deal with, so I wandered outside and went walking. I got back to the second half of 'Where are the books like Pandemic?' No notes at all. But I remember the panellists dividing up the qualities of the Pandemic boardgame (cooperative, no villain, extremely tense) and finding very few books that matched them all, but a lot of books that had one or another of those qualities; 'people versus nature' turned up a lot, but even those stories have a tendency to have villains in the form of the evil executive who decided not to take forest fire precautions or something. The idea was discussed that Pandemic only looks like a villain-free game because of its scale, and that in reality a pandemic like that would have its fair share of human error, foolishness, small-mindedness, people not understanding that something really big had just happened and so attempting to profit from it as though the status quo were just around the next corner. But there was so much more in this than I'm currently remembering!

And then the last panel of the convention, 'How to imagine the future.' About which the same, and I wish I'd made coherent notes here, because it was one of the most intense panels I went to, and the only fractious one.

( How to imagine the future )

The other two days had been days of meeting people and eating food with people and having fascinating conversations. This was a day of dashing about between (very good) panels and readings, and I landed out of it trying to resist sadness. "Oh. It's over." There was the house party to come; I didn't know how to get there, and feeling very tired just then, lay on my bed for half an hour longer than would plausibly let me arrive on time, inclined to remember that my usual response to even well-constructed house parties is to become a silent and mildly offputting satellite and eventually escape. But I said to myself, "You are not not going to this party, you came a long way to be in its hemisphere." I wandered downstairs, got metro directions from the reception desk, and was about to try putting them into practice when

rushthatspeaks and

nineweaving and Ruthanna Emrys came back from dinner, about to head on to the party, and I asked if their ride had a space, which it did. A gift.

And the party was good. I did my share of orbiting, because if I'm ever going to learn to mingle gracefully the day has not yet come, but so many good conversations, good food, bookshelves to gaze at; and stories told me. And room after room! As I was leaving with a group of uberers I discovered two rooms that I hadn't known the house had.

At the hotel, floor by floor, we left the lift. Goodnight, Scintillation. See you another morning, maybe.

The next day I realised that the con had had a con suite, which I glanced into once and then forgot about completely. Room after room! There was boardgaming going all the time, and I count sixteen programming items I chose not to go to that I'd have liked to. One of the unexpected things for me about Scintillation was how little we talked about books. We did talk about books, but eighty percent of the conversations I had were about something else, with no sense of lack in that. I'm so glad Worldcon is coming to Wellington, because I want to see what one of these things is like when it's actually large. Might it feel smaller? This one felt practically infinite.

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.

Splitting this up into several entries since it's taking a while to write:

I set off for the dim sum gathering at the start of Scintillation by tree-lined backroads I hadn't explored before, in the sun, with a new piece of street art on every second corner. In the last two days I'd occasionally thought, "Why did I come here?" but now all my nervousness was burnt up into joy.

I'd allowed myself plenty of time to get to dim sum, assuming I knew where it was. I didn't. The mall I went into was worth seeing on its own -- a fountain of luminous orange water shooting up what my yarning memory claims was two floors, with a sort of sculptured thunderhead over the top of it -- but since it wasn't the mall the dim sum was at, and I emerged from it two streets over from where I'd gone in, I was twenty minutes late. I failed to clearly communicate with the person at the restaurant door, and sat down in a fluster at a large table which seemed likely to be one of the convention's, between two people already talking with each other, one of whom turned out to be

nineweaving. There was a lot of very tasty food. Some of it was close by and a subset of that I knew how to eat with chopsticks. Still flustered, I made wooden small talk in a voice too soft to be easily heard, and lurked. This made me receding-introvert sad, as it will, but the crowd was so cheerful, and

nineweaving and Jo Walton seemed so generally welcoming, that it was a sadness shot through with light. Nevertheless, by the time we'd made our way to the hotel lobby and I looked at the gathering crowd I sat down and read a book for a while. Another nice quality of Scintillation is that there seemed next to no chance anyone would mind this.

(Oh yes, I'd barely slept the night before, because my otherwise-lovely host watched tv in the lounge past midnight).

Then there was an hour or so -- I checked in, and luxuriated briefly in the contrast between my Airbnb room and my hotel room -- before the walk to the gardens. The original guide was for some reason not there, and the replacement seemed cheerful in his slight uncertainty as to what was going on. I found this relaxing. A smallish group of people accumulated by the koi pond, and we set off to discover how the metro's ticketing worked. Zippy train! Walking up from the station we had a view of an Olympic stadium which looks more impressive than any building I've ever seen in a New Zealand city, and doesn't work. We circled the greenhouses for a while, and then dispersed into the lantern gardens when they opened. I walked tiredly and happily through the twilight among glowing fishing people and giant koi.

Back to the hotel In full dark. I thanked miscellaneous gods the LARP I'd signed up to at 8 had been cancelled, even though I was disappointed when that happened. I wouldn't have had the brain just then. Instead, went to the second half of the Time Travel and Teens panel, which was fun and which I remember … let me see … almost nothing from. Drat. But Kari Maaren was on it, and the book I'd been reading in the lobby was her Weave a Circle Round, which I finished over the course of the convention and like very much. So that was nice. And afterward I bought my one permitted book from the book table, Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary.*

Then I wandered down to the reading room, where singing was programmed. There was no singing, one of the most musical people not having arrived yet, but there was a fascinating conversation about linguistics and disaster response services in progress (unless I'm conflating conversations? There were so many). And then two people I hadn't met, Esti and Jacob, were heading off to find dinner, so I joined them, thus getting further evidence for two major features of Scintillation's wonderfulness: all the food was good, and all the people were fascinating. I could probably have eaten badly if I'd really tried, Montreal must have McDonalds somewhere; finding boring people to talk with would have been harder. At the point in any given talk with strangers where one might expect to be having to hunt for another thing to say, someone would start discoursing on the history of their great study and passion, whelk genetics. Well, it was never actually whelk genetics. But it was epidemiology, tiny car racing, linguistics several times, the French fantastique tradition, anthropology of zombie belief, the Quebecois voting system from a structural engineering point of view... Such cool things! Such excitement about such cool things!

After dinner, back at the hotel, singing was actually happening, and I sat listening, gathering songs to look up later, (I started us singing Ripple, too, but it turns out my family version of that has mutated sufficiently that it's no good for trying to sing along with the Grateful Dead), and then wandered off to the bar, where epidemiology was being discussed... And then it was approaching midnight. Happily to sleep.

*_{Since the convention I have been in New York. My one permitted book policy did not survive impact with the Strand.}