At WorldCon, Day 2

I was wall-to-wall busy today. I had breakfast with my family and then went out for the "Strolling with the Stars" walk, which was a leisurely walk around the neighborhood with all kinds of people. We must have had about 100 people confusing the traffic during this time. I met Ellen Datlow in person for the first time after having been on a Twitter greeting group with her (I thank Charles Tan for placing me there). She just happened to be chatting with Kay Kenyon and Cory Doctorow, so I met them too. Also on the walk were Lawrence Schoen and Margaret McGaffey Fisk. Our stroll ended right around 10, whereupon I changed out of my walk-in-hot-weather clothes and into my air-conditioned-convention gear, and headed into the convention.



I met lots of people today. I reconnected with Wendy Shaffer who was in a past writing group, and met Traci Morganfield for the first time - she's been in my writing group for years now, but I had never met her in person. I also crossed paths with Aliette de Bodard and her husband. I saw Alistair Mayer, Paul Carlson, and Rick Lovett, and met Brad Torgerson - all of them Analog folk.



The panels have been varied and quite interesting. Stan Schmidt spoke about upcoming things at Analog, and there was a really great panel about how architecture and the construction of physical spaces influence our thinking. I'm going to have to post in more depth on that one in the future. There was a great panel, ostensibly about Linguistics, which ended up taking on the issue of variation in world languages. That one featured Stan Schmidt, Michael Capobianco, Peadar Ó Guilín, Lawrence Schoen, and David Peterson. It was fun hearing so many of them attempt difficult phonemes, and try to elicit strange sounds from audience members! I also attended a great worldbuilding panel featuring Greg Bear and others.



My own event for the day was a KaffeeKlatsch, which basically involved me sitting at a table with a cup of coffee and talking about myself with anybody who cared to come. This was lovely, and people came to speak with me! I saw familiar faces Gregg Castro and Margaret McGaffey Fisk, and Brad Torgerson actually came to pick my brain a bit on the topic of language. There were three others whom I had not previously met, and we had a good time (though I wish they'd served everyone coffee and not just me!).



By the end of the day (that being now) I was exhausted. So I'll sign out and tell you more as it happens!