Post Worldcon

Got home from Dublin yesterday.  We spent the first week touring the western coast of Ireland -- beautiful country full of neolithic ruins and more recent structures (from the middle ages up to 1950 in the case of one beehive hut) built exactly the same way.  Ditto the stone walls and perhaps the descendents of the sheep within them.  Another memorable site was a medieval monastery (again with beehives) that had survived up to the present because it was a cemetery for unbaptized babies buried at night by their fathers without priests on  pillows of stone -- this, according to the archeologist who escorted us.  It gave me a sense of a continuous landscape not available in this country or age but probably typical of Rathillien.  

Worldcon came the second week.  I think the organizers didn't expect so many people to show up, nearly 5,000.  The events were very crowded with long lines.  One could wait an hour and still not get in.  My events were well attended, though.  The panel on Epic Fantasy  (Is it Conservative?) went pretty well, although the other panalists tended to say what I meant to before me, at greater length, more eloquently.   Also, the moderatior tried to cut me off, but the audience wouldn't let him.  Everyone distanced his or her own work from conservatism.  No one wanted to discuss the pressure that the conservative tropes place on all of us, creatively and professionally.  Oh well.

The koffeeklatch raised some interesting questions, one of which I pass on here:  what loose ends do I need to tie up before the end of the series, granted that some of them will be left dangling?  I have my own list, of course, but it's been a long story and I may have missed something important.

Then I got home and there was a message waiting for me from my publisher.  The audio rights to the series have sold to Recorded Books, with God Stalk tentatively due out next month.  I'm very pleased.