Alien Life

This is why I think that humanoid aliens are so unlikely. Life on THIS planet is so weird and diverse. Sea urchins, according to e! Science News, can "see" with their whole body.

Friday Cat Blogging

I don't like having surgery. Can we be done now?



Jus chillin with my hummies.



Beethoven's 5th, why do you ask?



Wait, is that my tail?



But where does it go?

Doug's CONvergence schedule

My CONvergence 2011 schedule is posted on the con site here. For those desiring a quick, link-free summary:

Friday July 1:

11:00 AM - Noon
Signing w/ Rob Callahan (Rob and I, you know, sign books.)
locale: Autograph Table

10:00 - 11:00 PM
Panel: The Past Through Serenity (Civil War & Old West imagery in Firefly.)
locale: Edina

Saturday, July 2:

3:30 - 4:30 PM
Panel: Interesting Bad Guys (How to you make a good bad guy? Who/what are some of the best?)
locale: Bloomington

5:00 - 6:00 PM
Panel: SF Writing Groups: The 2011 Scene (Writing groups! In the Twin Cities! Woop! Woop!)
local: Krushenkos

10:00 -11:00 PM
Reading: Douglas Hulick (I, you know, read something. What, exactly, will be determined by who shows up.)
locale: Lit Lounge

Overall, I plan to be at the con most of Friday and Saturday. Sunday is up in the air; Thursday is right out.

The reading is going to be audience dependent, meaning I could either read from "Among Thieves", or the forth-coming "Sworn in Steel" based on who has or has not read the book.

Kelly's CONvergence Schedule

CONvergence starts tomorrow and I'll be there

Thursday June 30:

3:30 PM Interacting Maps with Literature:

Type: Panel → Literature
Venue: Bloomington
About: Mapping your literary worlds. Working with the world as we know it or creating something new. How important is it? Speaker/Artist(s) Info: Kelly McCullough, Daniel Wallace, Bob Alberti, Marguerite Krause, Matt Kuchta Tags Literature

5:00 PM Feynman Played the Bongos: When Science Meets Art

Type: Panel → Science & Technology
Venue: Atrium 7
About: How art can be used to make science and math interesting and how science and math can be used to create arts Speaker/Artist(s) Info: Kelly McCullough, Bug Girl, Stephen King, Amy Davis Roth Tags Science & Technology, Skeptic

Friday July 1

3:30 PM Ask a Writer

Type: Panel → Literature
Venue: Bloomington
About: Always wanted to know how a novel is born? How does a writer structure their day? Is it all glittering parties and intelligent company? Come ask a panel of working writers anything. Speaker/Artist(s) Info: Anya Bast, Kelly McCullough, Seanan McGuire, Michael Merriam, Dana Baird, David Wilbanks Tags Literature, Writing

Saturday July 2
12:30 PM Happy Writers and Fast Writers

Type: Panel → Literature
Venue: Bloomington
About: There are any number of writers who talk about the agony of writing, both in terms of how long it takes them and how miserable it makes them. But that's not the only side of the story. A lot of writers love what they do -- that's why they do it. Speaker/Artist(s) Info: Anya Bast, Kelly McCullough, Seanan McGuire, David Wilbanks, Michael Merriam, David Walbridge Tags Literature, Writing

Sunday July 3
2:00 PM Stuff I Wanted to do but Didn't: Pitches that Failed

Type: Panel → Hot Dish
Venue: Atrium 4
About: Working in the creative industries, you get used to disappointment. The great ideas that never saw the light of day. Speaker/Artist(s) Info: Brian Keene, Doug Texter, Kelly McCullough Tags Hot Dish, Guest of Honor

Red Alert!

Captain Kirk so didn't have to deal with this threat.

Home Grown Groovy

NewScientist suggests you grow your own orchestra.

Apparently, truth is stranger than fiction, as there is a Vienna-based orchestra that plays musical instruments made of veggies. They're currently working on hybrids of squash/gourds to produce guitar and trumpets.

Now if I wrote that in a book, would you believe it for a second? Or would my critique group look me in the eye and say, "No, that's just TOO damn silly"??

The Future is Closer Than You Think

Guardian reports that a top Russian astronomer says he expects humans to encounter extraterrestrial civilizations within the next two decades.

He seems to think they'll resemble humans, though, which I find highly unlikely. As the story Eleanor loves to recount about biologist J. B. S. Haldane's answer to the question, "What has your study of biology taught you about the creator." God is inordinately fond of beetles. Personally, I expect we'll find bugs and viruses and microbes. Bipeds?

Maybe. IF they have funny ridges on their foreheads like on New Gen.

The Sky is Falling! (Part 2)

Wired Science has snapshots of the asteroid that buzzed Earth this morning.

Monkey See, Monkey Buy

Advertising to monkeys. Seriously. And, according to this article from New Scientist, sex sells.

What, No Wyrdsmiths???!

Locus announces the Locus Award winners. Pretty good stuff, despite the notable lack of Wyrdsmiths among the winners/nominees. Congrats to them all!

Friday Cat Blogging

Black cat knows how to play the camo game, oh yeah!



I suppose you can take my pic, but only for my adoring fans…



Your chair shmore chair, bald monkey.



Shaved my forearm 'cause I'm thinkin 'bout gettin' a tattoo.

Sea Monkey Diary: Day 11

Yesterday was another milestone day for the sea monkeys: their first scheduled feeding, five days after being hatched.

My poor little camera isn't really up to the job, but on the sixth day after inception, despite a long stretch of sunless days and suboptimal water temps, I'm happy to report that the sea monkeys are thriving.

This big bruiser is going to grow up to be their king.

See all posts in Bill's sea monkey diary.

Now, For Something Completely Different

I give you faith-based comics ("comics" as in graphic novels, and "faith" as in evangelical Christian, kinda scary revelation types, no less).

Space, The Final Frontier

In more space related news, I saw via Facebook that the next mission for NASA is called "Mission Juno," as they're headed to Jupiter. Brief warning: the site has music and a video and is "interactive" (which could suck if you have slow interwebs.)

While We Wait for Cats...

...you should know that a house-sized object skimmed past Earth yesterday. It passed within the orbit of many communication satellites.

Good thing Chicken Little didn't hear about this.

---

Correction: The asteroid is ON ITS WAY, to arrive Monday. The sky IS falling!!!!

Journey to the Center of...

... Brazil?

Newser.com reports that a never before seen tribe of indigenous people were photographed in the rainforest near the border of Peru and Brazil. It is believed that these people have NEVER had contact with the outside world.

Wow. It's hard to imagine there are still places so remote that this can happen. Especially considering that I heard about them on Twitter.... :-)

From Page to You...

Happy birthday Alan Turing of the "Turing Test" for artificial intelligence. My cyberpunk fictional characters draw you a cake in ASCII and sing you a .wav!`

Neglected Cultures

I'm one of the respondents today on SF Signal's Mind Meld, which asks the question: "Which cultures are neglected in SF/F?"

I'll be curious to see if I'm the only one who bravely mentioned Race Fail....

I did, however, do my part to mention a couple of local authors including our very own Eleanor Arnason.

Vote for Best SF Books

Fly your freak flag... or at least contribute to NPR's list of best Science Fiction Novels.

Harry Potter is excluded, but you can list up to five books! Don't forget our founding foremother, Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. After all, the mundanes don't know about our awesome genre. Let's edumacate them!

Race and Cover Art

Mindy Klasky's blog got me to this interesting post about race, authorial intent and cover art by Greg Van Eekhout in regards to his newest book and the "whitewashing" claims/concerns of some of his fans.

“Filth. Nothing but obscenities.”

Harshest author on author insults of all time from Flavorwire. Have they been listening in at our critique sessions?

X-Men and Lady Gaga

I was looking for something else on SF Signals and came across this: "Magneto's Parody of Lady Gaga's 'Born This Way'".

We Will Remember it for you Wholesale

...except in real life (tm).

Memory Prosthesis is being developed, which seems to work in rats.

Sea Monkey Diary: Day 6

And just twenty-fou​r hours later, we have sea monkeys!

Viewed through a magnifying glass, the Magic Castle is fairly teeming with life; but with my rudimentary camera, I face some serious technical limitation​s in photographing the tiny critters until they really start growing.

Here's a detail view:

Sidewise Award Finalist

Our very own Eleanor Arnason is a finalist for a Sidewise Award for Alternate History for her short story "Mammoths of the Great Plains."

Other finalists in the short form are:

Barry B. Longyear, “Alter Kameraden,” Asimov’s, 4/10
Ken MacLeod, Sidewinders, The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories, edited by Ian Watson and Ian Whates, Robinson Publishing/Running Press
Alan Smale, “A Clash of Eagles,” Panverse Two, edited by Dario Ciriello, Panverse Publishing
William F. Wu, “Goin’ Down to Anglotown,” The Dragon and the Stars, edited by Derwin Mak and Eric Choi, DAW Books

"Mammoths of the Great Plains" is also a finalist for the 2011 Theodore Sturgeon Award. Others in Eleanor's catagory are:

"Under the Moons of Venus" by Damien Broderick (originally published in Subterranean Magazine, Spring)
"The Maiden Flight of McAuley's Bellerophon" by Elizabeth Hand (Stories: All-New Tales)
"The Sultan of the Clouds" by Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov's Science Fiction, September)
"Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain" by Yoon Ha Lee (Lightspeed, September)
"Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance" by Paul Park (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February)
"Dead Man's Run" by Robert Reed (F&SF, November/December)
"Troika" by Alastair Reynolds (Godlike Machines)
"A Letter from the Emperor" by Steve Rasnic Tem (Asimov's, January)
"The Night Train" by Lavie Tidhar (Strange Horizons, 14 June)
"The Things" by Peter Watts (Clarkesworld, January)

CONGRATS to Eleanor!!

Sea Monkey Diary: Day 5

The moment of truth: adding the sea monkey eggs and the "secret catalyst" (alternately described in the literature as the "magic powder") to the purified water. Skeptics might consider Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

The curiosity of the local megafauna has been aroused.

Running Writer

Best of luck to our own Sean Murphy, who is running in Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, MN! He's been training hard for this, and I know we are all rooting for him. Go, Sean (or the chicken will get you)!

Friday Cat Blogging Pre Hot Tub Edition

I want fisshies!



I want Meg to leave!



I made Meg leave!



Did not. I wanted to leave. Hey, is that my tail?



Toeses! You may kiss them if you wish, peasant.

Sea Monkey Diary: Day 4

Step 1: water purificati​on and temperature optimization.

The Magic Castle situated in its new habitat, with sophisticated temperatur​e-monitori​ng device.

Race in Marvel Comics

Racalicious has an interesting article about race and Marvel Comics. Actually, the article is more specifically a discussion of the cast of the new Avengers movie and how that reflects race reality. As is briefly pointed out, Brian Michael Bendis has made Luke Cage/Power Man a main character of the New Avengers, but I can most certainly agree that the Avengers have had much more of a diversity problem than, say, the X-Men.

Unicorns (Kinda)!

Newser Science wants you to know that the Arabian 'Unicorn' has made a comeback. Okay, great, but does it fart glitter???!

Sea Monkey Diary: Day 3

Summer science begins today. (Or maybe that should be "scientification.")

Let Me Serve As an Example

...of what not to do!

I need to get to work on my revisions, but first I have to rant about my own stupidity. I was looking at fiction markets for a friend, and I noticed that there were a few that will take reprints and I started thinking, "What do I have that I could consider sending in?" My mind went back to my very first published science fiction story, "Twelve Traditions" which appeared in the May issue of SF AGE (now defunct.) I have about two zillion paper copies of the magazine because, as I mentioned, it was my first EVA professionally published short story (technically I'd sold "Irish Dreams" to Dreams of Decadance, but at the time that mag was considered semi-pro.)

Do I have an electronic copy of that story anywhere?

Oh, sure, one of those little square disk-thingies probably has a version of it, but do I have one on any media I can ACTUALLY READ!!!????

No.

The ironic part of this? I should know better. My partner can laugh right into my face when she reads this. Shawn, if you don't know, is an electronic records specalist (among her many duties at the Minnesota Historical Society) and I've listened to her practice her talks about migration and all the things you need to do in order to keep your files readable in the future.

I should also note that my made-of-awesome archivist partner DOES, in point of fact, have CDs which we can still read on our tower computer that have back-ups of all my writing files from as far back as September 2001. Given that the short story I'm looking for was published in 1999, I had hope that I would have kept an electronic copy of it... but no. So all the blame falls squarely on my shoulder. In fact, I can very easily see me saying to myself, "Well, this is in print now. Why would I ever need another copy of it?"

I have a partial of it on my website, but not the whole thing. I think one of my weekend projects after I finish my revisions and do some more work on the NEW short story I've been plotting, is to sit down with the magazine and re-key the damn thing.

*sigh*

So, listen up, kids! Save your work. Then, when you get a new computer, transfer your old work. Some day you may be facing the same problem I am: you've got all those pen drives sitting in a dish, but the new interface in your brain only takes data crystals! The future is closer than you think!!!

Sea Monkey Diary: Day 2

I've been saving my nickels for this since Christmas.

High Art

In an effort to introduce high art and class to our blog, I offer you: Vincent Van Gogh's Vision of Mordor.

Sea Monkey Diary: Day 1

You'll never guess what I brought home from Newbury Comics today. Aside from this wicked awesome Newbury Comics bag, that is.

Silliness and Superheroes

In case you haven't seen this, SF Signals has a link to "How Thor Should Have Ended."

It's silly, but fun.

Gender in SF

Cheryl Morgan has an interesting post called "Checking the Gender" balance over at the SFWA site today. Among other things, she discusses the recent Guardian article that causes a small ripple in the community a while back.

What is SF?

An interesting discussion about the Nebula Award winning short story "Leviathan, Wherefor Art Thou" over at Barth Anderson's Facebook page.

Dinos!

A pair of dinosaurs discovered together up for auction -- an allosaur that had it's mouth clamped around the leg of a stegosaur. My birthday is in November, that's all I'm sayin'!

Friday Cat Blogging

Coconut says "I'm ready for my closeup Mr DeMille."



Bellicle cat wants to make sure you get her good side.



It's deeper than it looks…



"Too Nakma Noya, Solo!"



Cameras have STRING!



I can move water with my mind!

What If...?

I used to love when Marvel Comics would run the ocassional "What If..?" issue, well, Scientific America poses the question: "What if Earth Switched Places With Mars?"
---
*Via David Brin on Facebook, who adds, "But Musser assumes that Earth would freeze. It would -- but not forever! Volcanoes would supply CO2 till a greenhouse melted the seas. Simple calculation. If Mars were bigger, it'd have oceans now, under a dense gaia-greenhouse."

Short Story Contest (Minnesota)

I came across a notice in my local Romance Writers chapter that someone noticed that there's a contest for Minnesota Writers (with a $1,000 cash prize) on the theme of... wait for it... sex.

It would be cool for one of us speculative types to win it, wouldn't it? Yeah, I'm lookin' at _you_ out there!

Campbell Nominees

John W. Campbell award nominee's announced! Congratulations to them all. (And, look, Eleanor! Someone you recently read is on the list.)

Dinos!

A blog devoted to dinosaur art!

Interesting Bits..

... but not the sort Congress critters send over Twitter.

Here's an article about volcanos that have shaped the world from New Scientist.

And, for something completely different, our friend Jim C. Hines talking about his take on the Wall Street Journal YA kerfluffle.

If you want to have your blood pressure spike and/or become (in)famous for calling in and ranting on NPR, the author of the aforementioned WSJ article will be on NPR's Midmorning show today.

Why Fiction Matters

DC Comics has announced that Barbara Gordon will no longer be Oracle. Jill Pantozzi has an awesome op ed piece about why this is a honking, huge shame.

As she writes, "For all their fictionality, we let characters become very important to us and Oracle was the most important to me. When I was told the news, I cried."

Next Best Thing to Being There

Send your name to Mars!

The Light at the End

There's been a lot of talk this morning about a Wall Street Journal article/review called "A Darkness Too Visible," in which the author talks about what she sees as a disturbing trend in young adult fiction -- Darkness! In particular, she singles out (and I paraphrase) the normalization of self-destructive behaviors and pathology. Jackie Kessler has an right-on, awesome response, in which she points out that, in many cases, things like cutting or bulimia *are* the reality of teenage life and not talking about it in fiction is the literary equivalent of plugging your ears and shouting "la, la, la."

I think that the WSJ missed the mark in another way, and, that is, they forget what fiction is FOR. I wasn't able to be on a panel at WisCON that I was really looking forward to which was called "How Science Fiction Saved My Life." Science fiction, I had planned to say, saved my life because, in a time before YouTube, it offered me a version of the "It Gets Better" movement. When I read "World Well Lost" by Theodore Sturgeon, I realized that gay people existed. Then, when I found Elizabeth A. Lynn, I discovered that gay people wrote books with happy endings for gay people.

In effect, that saved my life. Because one of the things that I believe fiction (particularly SF/F and speculative YA) does is that it offers up possibilities -- possible futures and possible SOLUTIONS.

I can see why the Wall Street Journal (which, as someone reminded me on Facebook, is the newspaper arm of Fox News) would be scared of the latest crop of young adult novels. I've read a bunch of the newer YA books and enjoyed them tremendously, but they're actually kind of radical. In at least two (three, if you count Harry Potter's fight against Voldemort's fascist regime) end in revolution. Scott Westerfeld's UGLIES series and the HUNGER GAMES trilogy show a dark, repressive future and our heroines find a way to go beyond, step outside, and rise up and take arms against the powers that be.

I haven't read all the books blasted in the WSJ article, but I know that satisfying fiction usually has an ending that offers a solution, or at least a way for things to be "okay" for the hero/ine. Young people are living in a much darker place than we were twenty, thirty or forty years ago. Their fiction is reflectively that much darker. But I suspect their endings are twice as bright. There is always hope.

Things get better.

Friday Cat Blogging II Catsitter's Revenge

You're not my real parents! I hate you! Go away!



You're not my real parents! I hate you! Go away!



You're not my real parents! I hate you! Go away!



Who are you? Will you pet my belly?

Friday Cat Blogging Special Saturday Edition.

Four cats in the sun. Bliss!



Do you think there will be cake? Waiting for Gateaux.



Solar-powered laser eyes at 70%.



I iz contpe…cotemp…Thinkin'!



Why yes, I am the walrus. Goo-goo-gatcho, etc.



Nobody is going anywhere. The suitcase stays where it is.

R.I.P. Joel Rosenburg

via Peg Kerr's LJ and his own website:

"On Wednesday afternoon, June 1, 2011, Joel had a respiratory depression that caused a heart attack, anoxic brain damage and major organ failure. Despite the very best efforts of the paramedics and the team at Hennepin County Medical Center, Joel was pronounced brain dead at around 5:37pm Thursday June 2nd, In accordance with his wishes, he shared the gift of life through organ and tissue donation.

He is survived by his daughters, Judith Eleanor and Rachel Hannah, and his wife, Felicia Herman. Today, June 3rd would have been his 32nd wedding anniversary."

I Must Be Reading the Wrong Books

Now romance novels are, according to this, as addictive as porn. Seriously, kids?

Sean's WisCon report

WisCon was great for me this year, though not long enough.

When is it ever long enough?

This year, though, it was foreshortened for me because I had to work Saturday morning, so I didn't get down to Madison until about 7:00 pm on Saturday night, then unloaded and hit dinner with Doug. After wandering up and down State Street for a while, we settled on a little lounge named Paul's Club, which had great, classic American fare at a decent price, with wood paneling and black velvet paintings straight out of the Sixties. Definitely going back there. Crispy, beer-battered french fries FTW.

Then I changed and headed up to the party floor (UP? NOT DOWN? That was strange all weekend, and I was perpetually headed the wrong way. But the Fourth Floor is perfect, and also a repeat), where I finally got to see many of the folks I was looking forward to seeing--Ben and Steph Zvan, James Hall and Sarah Rouner, and Marguerite Reed, and Haddayr Copley-Woods, and... and... too many to name all y'all, so I'm just going to stick to those folks who I don't get to see very often, or who I got to meet. If we hung out at WisCon, though, it was awesome and I'm really glad we did!

I was introduced to Brad Beaulieu (though I didn't end up making it to his reading, which I heard was awesome), to Saladin Ahmed, (dude has a serious man crush on Jonathan Coulton, or they are long-lost doppelgangers from the neck up), and I'm looking forward to reading both of their books. And I pounced on Scott Lynch, who I've supposed to have met almost a dozen times, but we keep missing each other; he was good to chat with in the brief time we had to talk, and I'm hoping we get to see more of him in the near future.

I was up late (surprise) talking (surprise), and finally hit bed around 2:45 am. Six moderately restful hours later, I was awake--and not hung over. In fact, not only did I find it surprisingly easy not to drink, but I was thrilled by how easy it was to get going in the morning, even with the con late nights.

Sunday morning kicked off with coffee from Michaelangelo's and a quick search for four-leaf clover on the capitol lawn. I left the hotel lobby at 9:06 am, leaving Lynne and Michael Thomas to hold down the lobby. At 9:23 I came back with coffee and clover, to Michael's surprised comment "You found one already?"

"No," I replied. "I found two."



That's become a bit of a tradition for me, I'll admit, and one I like. It's part of who I am, finding four-leaf clover, and it is easy and instantly recognizable.

Anyway, at 10 am we had the "Being in a Writing Group" panel, where Naomi and I both represented the Wyrdsmiths. I want to note how much I love being on panels with my fellow Wyrdsmiths. There's a casual report that we all have from spending so many years talking together, and a shared set of stories and conversations that we can reference and tap into at a moment's notice. It was a really good panel, and my only scheduled panel of the con.

More on that later.

Then, after chatting in the second floor hallway with the regular cadre of folks, I headed out for my last long training run before the marathon in three (two and a half) weeks: 20 miles. I was going to run a loop around Lake Mendota. After getting lost on the roads a couple of times and getting directions from undergrads who clearly have never left their neighborhoods, I found my way to the eastern shores of the lake, where I got stuck in a nature preserve. The shared bike/walking path became a walking only path, followed by a hiking trail, following by patches of mud in an ever more dense forest, which disappeared into fallen trees and dense underbrush.

If you are quite a ways from home, at a science fiction and fantasy convention, and the forest tries to eat you, you back away slowly and go back the way you came.

After calculating that even if I could find my way out to the main roads and complete the circuit of the lake, I would have run six or seven extra miles in the process, and that would have been far too much for my training regimen--detrimentally so. Disappointed, I ran back to the hotel for a round trip of only 10.5 miles. But I found another four-leaf clover, so it wasn't a total loss.

After that, I flyered the hotel with Wyrdsmiths Party Posters, then met up with a bunch of folks headed to Brocach's for dinner. Lynne and Michael Thomas and I waited for an author who was getting their papers in to the NIU archives, which took significantly longer than we'd all expected. We didn't get to Brocach's until about 6:15pm, and I needed to be back by 7:00pm to get the party room set up.

No worries. Michael now says I am "a WHIRLWIND of eating." The food arrived along about 6:35, and by 6:47, Kelly and I were paid and headed back to tackle the party room.

Aside from cleaning up the previous night's party, everything went smoothly. We both did room layout and furniture, then I handled the food prep while he (and then Doug as well) set up the coolers for beer and non-alcoholic drinks. Wyrdsmiths always has a great beer selection, though I think Naomi hit it out of the park with something like sixteen different selections of great beers--there were comments on that all night. Meanwhile, I didn't want people to enjoy the food. I wanted to flatten their expectations: we had stuffed grape leaves, pita points with both garlic hummus and roasted red pepper hummus, pita chips, four different kinds of olives, baklava, and a cut fruit tray with seven kinds of fruit.



It was awesome. People were surprised and delighted and TALKED ABOUT IT ALL NIGHT. Between us and the Whedonistas Party (which rocked, and which thrown by the dynamic duo themselves, Michael and Lynne, and which had a raffle that hundreds of people entered but I WON-woot!), there was a steady stream of people eating our food and beer, getting their mixed drinks, and then swinging downstairs for a turn at the GenderFloomp dance party, before cycling the whole thing again.

I got comments on my "The Writer's Dillemma" t-shirt, which was fun, since I'd designed it to wear to cons.

Doug and I finally shut it down between 2:30 and 2:45am, though people were still poking their heads in even as we were closing up the trash bags.

Of course, I ended up staying up later (surprise) talking (surprise), and didn't hit bed until about 3:45. But aren't those conversations what we're all there for? Those connections that keep the sense of a wider writing community alive and flourishing in our minds in the times we spend away from each other?

Five hours of sleep later, I was up and off to Michaelangelo's for more coffee. Doug informed me that there was no way with serious allergies and five hours of sleep that he was going to make his 9:00am panel on "Being a Resilient Writer." Yes, we made the necessary jokes. I went to inform the other Wyrdsmiths on the panel, Eleanor and Kelly, who suggested that I could be a ringer fro the audience. Five minutes later, when I entered the conference room where the panel was being held (and which was hellafulla people, damn!), Kelly pointed to a chair up on the panel. And to Doug's name placard, which now read "NOT/Douglas Hulick/SEAN M. MURPHY".

And thus I was on a second panel for WisCon. With no coffee in me, five hours of sleep, and 35 seconds of foreknowledge.

It was a ridiculously good panel. The audience was great. Eleanor shared a ton from her wealth of experience. The Wyrdsmiths rocked the show, being three fourths of the panel. People asked good questions, and we did our best to respond. It was the kind of panel you look back at and think about the good ole' days.

After tha, I hung with Doug and Kelly at the sign out, then Doug and I cleared the room and packed up the cars. After a round or two of goodbyes in the hallway, I hit the road back to the Twin Cities.

I'm already plotting what food we'll have next year. Gotta top this year, right?

Bits (or Two Bits, At Least)

According to its editoral, Clarkesworld Magazine is now available for subscription on Amazon.com for the Kindle. The editoral is an interesting discussion about the on-line magazine business model.

Also, you don't have time to READ science fiction? How about listening to it? Lightspeed Magazine has a podcast.

To Blog or Not To Blog

Have blogs given way to social media?

I know that if you want to catch up on the latest things that are going on with the majority of the Wyrdsmiths, you'd have a much better time of it following any one of us on Facebook or Twitter than checking here on a regular basis. I'm probably the only notable exception. I actually prefer the long-form, that is to say, the blog, over the sound byte-ness of Twitter, especially. (I actually prefer Facebook to Twitter or foursquare or "whatever the kids are into these days", but that might just be because I'm old.)

I used to look forward to everyone's detailed con report after the weekend, but now I'm expected to catch a play-by-play in 140 characters or less as it happens.

I'm so old school I still work pretty hard to keep up on a nearly-daily basis on my livejournal. I don't know that most of us bother any more. So my question is: do people (besides me) blog any more? Do people still find it useful? Your lack of response will speak volumes, no doubt.