Yeah yeah, I know Eastercon Follycon was a month ago. It’s been a busy month, and I’m just now typing up my notes. I hope to get all of my follycon notes online, hopefully before I go to Worldcon in August.
You might remember that before I went to the convention, I read Captivate. So you can guess I went in there with plans. How could I show vulnerability and highlight what we shared? What would the people I met want to talk about? Their books, I thought, the success of old ones or the formation of upcoming ones. Tourism things like where they’d eaten out or the places they’d seen or were going to see. Panels they’d seen or people they’d met or plans for same.
These turned out to be good conversation starters, but what I’d add to the list now is “fields of expertise.” People like to talk about what they know about, and as an author, I want to listen. I accidentally stumbled into conversations about Bose-Einstein condensates, the Uncertainty Principle, and beach erosion, which stand out as some of the con’s most interesting and inspirational moments. Seriously, a book might come out of one of them.
So if I meet you at a con and want to know all about your job, that’s why. Anyway, on to the notebook!
Page one of my FollyCon Notebook contains the cream of my first conversation with Georgina Kamsika, Sarah Dodd, and Micaiah Huw Evans. They suggest you watch Books and Pieces and read The Ninefox Gambit, Ancillary Justice, and the Book of Phoenix.
Sarah is also looking for non-English-language speculative fiction short stories for Samovar, a project of Strange Horizons Magazine. So hit her up if you have written something and want to translate it into English.
Huw didn’t want to toot his own horn, but I did manage to extract from him that his work is available from Giganotosaurus: “Nine Instances of Rain.”
And Georgina has a book out soon: Goddess of the North.