Wiscon Saturday

Time is going by at Con Speed...

My reading was at the Inn on the Park on Saturday morning. We had competition - the Farmer's Market, which felt more like a fair, occupied the whole of the Capitol Square and it was a bright sunny morning. Nevertheless, a small audience did make it over to the Vilas room.

I met Caroline Stevermer for the first time, reading a scene from her awesome new book, Magic Below Stairs. I read from my unpublished novel, The Twelve Impossible Tasks, in which Joel has to save his kidnapped young sister by performing the twelve labors of Hercules - in San Francisco; in this excerpt, the young protags were getting mixed up in marine mammal politics.  Catherine Schaff Stump read from her new book, Hulk Hercules, in which the middle-grade hero is transported to mythical Greece and finds himself fighting the hydra with his uncle... I really want to read this, particularly after the coincidence that both our works featured the Twelve Labors! Then Kater Cheek rounded it off with a very funny excerpt from her unpublished novel, Animal Magic, featuring flying tetras who can't breathe, and a demanding hamster.

A San Francisco friend who'd moved to Madison met me for lunch. We went to Himal Chuli, a nice authentic down-home Nepali restaurant. Her big news is that she just found out that one of her stories was included in the list of 100 best American stories of 2008, a selection by Salman Rushdie.

After lunch, I attended a panel on Young Adult literature, moderated by Sharyn November. The main points I recall are: (1) the YA wave may be cresting now, but even after it crashes there'll still be more YA published than before; (2) Since YA is a genre in itself, it allows authors to work across genre boundaries within the YA rubrics; (3) There's a great deal of cross-over between YA and adult marketing groups.

Later, I attended a great panel on witches moderated by Kater, who kept things moving at a great pace. The others on the panel were all practicing in some way, so it made for an interesting discussion as they address issues such as what their pet peeves were about the representations of witches in fiction.

Kater, Julie and I went out for dinner (at Dotty Dumpling's Dowry) and then came back and attended the Tiptree Auction.

It was my first Tiptree Auction, with Ellen Klages as auctioneer and it made me wish I'd attended many more. Ellen Klages is - Amazing. Astounding. Fantastic. All the kinds of superlatives that pulp mags used on their covers. The big item of the auction was a set of UK stamps of mythical beings, in their original presentation, signed by Neil Gaiman. It was quickly bid up to $400. It was a beautiful object. I bid on it too, but fell out at around the $150 mark.
 

I did score a lovely little handmade book, made by redcrowkater and based on a poem by our Clarionmate shweta_narayan  (who should have been here but couldn't because she was not well enough to travel). It included a link to a description of how she made it.

Though Ellen had expected to end it earlier, the auction ran to 11 p.m. I made a quick round of the parties after that, and stopped by to chat with people at the Tea salon. Walking down the hallway, ran into a number of people I knew. That's the kind of thing that makes Wiscon special - even though it's only my second Wiscon, I don't feel like a stranger. 

Later, I went to the "Tales of the Unanticipated" Party, and talked for a while with Eric Heideman, who invited me to submit during the next reading period (next year).

And so to bed, too tired to even to LiveJournal (this is being written the next day).