Congenial

Had a lovely time at Vericon--which like my beloved Small Beer Press, should be "tiny, but celebrated."

To begin with, I had ashnistrike and S staying in the library, so there were civilized breakfast conversations (and fabulous brioche*) at Hi-Rise.

The Friday night panel on worldbuilding turned out to be just the excellent N. K. Jemisin and me (sadly, shadesong could not be there), so we set out to build a world with the audience.  Tremendous fun!  All together, we came up with a world divided between caffeine-non-responders and hypersensitives.  The Serenes are our priestly soldier caste, whose rites (something like a tea ceremony) were made to display their sublime detachment from the ecstasies of earth; they control resources and production.  Their working class, the Jitters, crave the product that they grow and are denied.  Their cult is ecstatic, and their saints die in prophetic frenzies.  All very silly and simplistic; but we did get to talk about the basics--economics, sociology, religion, ecology--and to sketch three or four possible plots that might arise from these circumstances.  I liked the coffee bears, which Serenes must slay with jade knives, single-handed, as a rite of passage:  I said they must be cappuccino-colored, with cream swirls.

Saturday morning's panel on Feminism in Speculative Fiction was headlong, fierce, earthy, and hilarious.  Once or twice a chariot wheel went over the edge, but we never plunged down the precipice.  ( papersky drives well.)  What was coolest, I thought, was the generational aspect:  we had come to feminism from the sixties--maybe fifties, if you count our childhoods--onward, and with stories of our mothers and grandmothers, with the responses of the largely young audience--first wave, second, third, and fourth--there was a tremendous oceanic sense of onsurge and recoil (with attendant rocks and whirlpools), and resurgence.  Exhilarating.

There were no books in stock for my signing (an oversight and apologies); far better, three young women came up to me with well-read copies (two Cloud & Ashes, one Moonwise)--and one gave me a translation of a Russian poem that she had done and illustrated.  It made her think of Cloud.  O my.

A small personal satisfaction:  three of my prints sold in the silent auction.

And I gave my best reading yet of "Cry Murder!"  All the panels were in a Victorian classroom--a toy amphitheatre with lovely acoustics**--truly a performance space.  So I hammed it to the hilt.  And to what an audience!  Of scholars, poets, students: listening and applauding.  (I got a laugh at the line, "O rare Tisiphone!"  How cool is that?)  The queer thing was that my Oxfordian was there (it's her beloved con as well, her alma mater).  Heaven knows what she thought or felt.  I was not kind to the god of her idolatry.  But she sat and took notes, and asked only when the book would come out.  If challenged, I would have said that many others have written speculative fiction about Oxford; only mine is not billed as biography.   I suspect there will be a campaign against it.

Most glorious of all:  Sassafrass came and sang in my living room last night, from the creation in ice and fire to the shadow of Ragnarök, the coming wolf.  In my house (which yet stands) were Loki and Odin, Baldur and Hella, Frigga, Snorri, and the Seeress.  Ragged at times--with only four singers, they were taking parts they'd never done--they gave some of the starkest, most austerely passionate readings of the songs I've heard.  It was like going into the roofbeams with a flickering torch, and seeing how the structure holds.  And Thrud, as architect-composer, sang for us their leitmotifs.  The four singing were Thrud, rushthatspeaks , gaudior , and tilivenn .  We five that were listening were me, papersky , rysmiel , and R, with Thrud's dad.  Nine weaving.

Nine



*Even their butter pats are artisanal.

**And Inquisitional seats.