Glen Hirshberg's Blog - Posts Tagged "readercon-2014"
Epistles from Readercon 2014
Highlights of Readercon Day 2: too many to list, actually. Talking situations you don't want to be in in places you never want to leave on the teaching-ghost-story-writing panel with Michael Dirda and Gemma Files and Jack M. Haringa and Erik Amundsen. Getting to chat Holocaust ghost stories and digital piracy and Weird Wisconsin with Mary Rickert and Rebecca Brown and the delightful Craig D.B. Patton (thanks for driving all the way up just for this, Craig) at a "Kaffeeklatsch," Hearing Paul Tremblay read the least erotic thing I've ever heard about tongues. Watching Gemma deliver a Sumerian curse at the end of her reading, glance up, and offer the least reassuring grin this side of Paul Tremblay's. John Langan stopping smiling just long enough to close the Fearful Symmetries: An Anthology of Horror reading...fearfully. Meeting the lovely Chizine people (even if they didn't actually pay for dinner). Stopping by the t-shirt shop to get my Michael KellySimon StrantzasIan Rogers boy-band
top made for my Toronto readings next week (just wanted to see if you were paying attention, gents; would it be better if I said it was Michael Rowe's idea?). Michael Cisco hurling himself into a startlingly funny performance of a typically literate, challenging, beautiful new blizzard of language about (un)language. Delightful Thai dinner
(far, far from the hotel with and its carefully crafted mass starvation-diet experiment). My books selling out less than an hour after the dealer room opened (which, yeah, could be read one of two ways, but I'm choosing the upbeat one).
Lowlight: The return from the Thai restaurant to the hotel. In Paul Tremblay's trunk.
Photo of that, sadly, to follow...
top made for my Toronto readings next week (just wanted to see if you were paying attention, gents; would it be better if I said it was Michael Rowe's idea?). Michael Cisco hurling himself into a startlingly funny performance of a typically literate, challenging, beautiful new blizzard of language about (un)language. Delightful Thai dinner
(far, far from the hotel with and its carefully crafted mass starvation-diet experiment). My books selling out less than an hour after the dealer room opened (which, yeah, could be read one of two ways, but I'm choosing the upbeat one).
Lowlight: The return from the Thai restaurant to the hotel. In Paul Tremblay's trunk.
Photo of that, sadly, to follow...
Epistles from Readercon 2014
The writing life always, always finds a way to make it clear exactly where one stands (or, in this case, rates as far as rides back to the hotel in Paul Tremblay's car)...
Epistles from Readercon 2014: Heading Out
Having escaped Paul Tremblay's trunk when he was busy snapping illicit photos of the writers in the car that had pulled up alongside us,
I crept back to my room, scraped the bits of...no, I don't even want to know who else Paul Tremblay keeps in his trunk, or what happened to them...anyway, I changed, steeled myself, and reemerged for one last glorious day at Readercon: Peter Straub
waxing eloquent and magnanimous over a long, quiet breakfast conversation,
Mary Rickert delivering a deceptively gentle excerpt from The Memory Garden (and then passing out Forget-Me-Not seeds), John Langan surprising us all with a deft and disturbing action sequence from a new story. Then standing up, as the night's last reader, and letting Good Girls rip for the first time.
Getting a response from a readinged-out crowd that felt absurdly generous and tremendously reassuring. Then bad mousse
and great conversation with Langan, a light-hearted and laughing Ellen Datlow (full of good projects, as ever), Daryl Gregory (whose work I have recently discovered, and think is most decidedly worth YOUR discovering), and the charming Liza Trombi of Locus, before stumbling upstairs into the sauna--wait, that was someone's ROOM??--where maybe 80 writers, editors, conversationalists, friends, saw the CON out the way it came in: with clever chatter, whiskey way too strong for little hobbit Hirshbergs to touch, book recs, movie recs, genuine mutual admiration, and friendship. Sean Moreland, great last chat, looking forward to more next week. So good seeing everyone. More, please...
I crept back to my room, scraped the bits of...no, I don't even want to know who else Paul Tremblay keeps in his trunk, or what happened to them...anyway, I changed, steeled myself, and reemerged for one last glorious day at Readercon: Peter Straub
waxing eloquent and magnanimous over a long, quiet breakfast conversation,
Mary Rickert delivering a deceptively gentle excerpt from The Memory Garden (and then passing out Forget-Me-Not seeds), John Langan surprising us all with a deft and disturbing action sequence from a new story. Then standing up, as the night's last reader, and letting Good Girls rip for the first time.
Getting a response from a readinged-out crowd that felt absurdly generous and tremendously reassuring. Then bad mousse
and great conversation with Langan, a light-hearted and laughing Ellen Datlow (full of good projects, as ever), Daryl Gregory (whose work I have recently discovered, and think is most decidedly worth YOUR discovering), and the charming Liza Trombi of Locus, before stumbling upstairs into the sauna--wait, that was someone's ROOM??--where maybe 80 writers, editors, conversationalists, friends, saw the CON out the way it came in: with clever chatter, whiskey way too strong for little hobbit Hirshbergs to touch, book recs, movie recs, genuine mutual admiration, and friendship. Sean Moreland, great last chat, looking forward to more next week. So good seeing everyone. More, please...
