Home again
Utterly exhausted, extremely sleepy.
Great to see and meet lots of folks at TorCon. I think at least 17 of our fiction authors were there, plus a bunch of our other contributors (but I unfortunately don't recognize as many of those names without checking so it's harder for me to count). The tea party was a rousing success; I think we had over 50 people in the junior suite for a while, plus maybe 15 sitting on the floor in the hall outside, and I'm guessing at least a hundred people must have come through over the course of the two and a half hours. I credit the cosponsorship with Ideomancer for bringing in a lot of people; also the handing out of many quarter-sheet-size flyers to many people, which made it easier for them to remember when and where the party was.
I kept finding myself in elevators with Big-Name Authors who didn't know me (and who I therefore didn't bother to try to talk with, 'cause I have nothing interesting to say to them and I imagine they get enough random fans greeting them; also because it gets a little embarrassing to keep introducing yourself after a while, which is why I really wish I were better at associating names with faces myself, and is why I apologize in advance to those of you whom I met but whom I won't remember next time, which unfortunately I know is going to happen despite my best intentions). I was in an elevator with four Hugo awards this morning, though three of them belonged to Locus people so really it was only two award categories. (And, unrelatedly, I finally subscribed to Locus; I'm still not entirely sure that most of the news in it is at all relevant to me, but now that they're occasionally reviewing our fiction (and quite positively, I might add, at least in some cases, though I failed to snag the last available copy of the issue with the extremely positive review of Bill Kte'pi's "Start With Color"), I feel even more than I did before that it would be a good idea for me to read it regularly, just to keep up with the field. To read Locus, I mean, not our fiction. You know what I mean. Never mind. Also, it's kinda cool to get photos of various sf people; I already have faces associated with names in many cases, but there are still plenty I've never seen.)
Okay, I was gonna keep this short so I could go sleep, so I'll just add one more note, in keeping with the standing-near-well-known-people thing: in the Toronto airport, I was standing in line (two people back) from someone who looked an awful lot like Reese Witherspoon. The fact that she was standing in a regular line at a regular airport, carrying luggage with a male name on the tag, and not surrounded by either fans or entourage, suggests to me that it probably wasn't her, but it sure did look like her.
Will try to post something more substantive and less shallow and more coherent (plus some funny quotes from panels, and maybe even some photos, though Mary Anne may well beat me to that) sometime in next couple days, probably after I get a little more caught up on all the magazine stuff I've failed to do in the past week and a half of mostly traveling.