Hal-Con Report – Day 1
The Hal-Con is our annual international convention in the greater Tokyo area with one foreign guest of honor (GoH) and usually his/her Japanese edition cover artist as the artist GoH.
The convention started in 2010 and is the staff’s training ground for another SF Worldcon in Japan.
Our guests so far have been Charles Stross in 2010, Robert Sawyer in 2011, Alastair Reynolds in 2012 and this year it was Joe Haldeman (and his wife Gay).
This year’s artist guest of honor was Naoyuki Katoh again. He was already our artist GoH in 2011, since he does the Japanese covers for Robert Sawyer as well as Joe Haldeman.
So, in 2011 was the first time that I met Katoh Sensei and then was so bold to ask him if he could do covers for my books as well and he agreed 
This year’s event started out with the usual opening ceremony and was soon followed by an initial GoH interview where staff members had gathered random questions for the two GoHs and threw them at them.
The highlight of this session was that someone from the audience asked what a Tauran from the “Forever War” actually looks like and since Haldeman san is quite an illustrator himself, Katoh Sensei teased him into – why don’t you paint a Tauran onto the whiteboard over there? – and that is what Haldeman san did to the great joy of the fans.
You can find pics of the Tauran and other impressions from Hal-Con on my Flickr account, and it became a continuous theme throughout the rest of the convention.
Joe also gave us some info concerning his writing process. He started out writing on a type writer, then used one of the first Apple computers for five years until he decided to write in long hand. Ever since, he writes with fountain pens into bound (empty) books and it takes him about 18 months to 2 years to finish a novel. Since he writes at such a slow pace, he usually does not much revision at all. What comes into the bound book via fountain pen is more or less the finished product. It was very interesting for me to learn about his writing style, since mine is so completely different – hack first draft into the computer as fast as possible (my record is five weeks) then let it rest for a while, and revise and revise and workshop and revise and revise.
I then had my first official action (apart from jumping in as simultaneous translator at the GoH interview panel) and interviewed Gay Haldeman, Joe’s wife. The two are an inseparable team. While Joe writes the books, Gay does most of the administration and correspondence and deals with the business side of writing, which is awesome for Joe of course, since he can thus focus on the creativity part. Both also teach at MIT during the fall, Joe teaches creative writing and Gay teaches English as a foreign language.
Joe and Gay are now married 48 years and Joe tested whether Gay likes SF before he proposed 
In the last panel of the day, Joe read from his short story Blood Sisters, which found its way into the Hal-Con book of this year and then answered more audience questions.
At the art show I was very astonished to learn that Katoh Sensei had thrown in a print of the Dome Child cover he made for me and the pic was up for auction. Wow! Thank you!
The day was concluded with the GoH party in the con hotel and its obligatory bingo session. It was a great first day of the convention.
And although the readings happened on the second day, I just uploaded the first reading from my novel “She Should Have Called Him Siegfried” to YouTube.
Stay tuned for next weekend’s report on the second convention day, where I had both my own panels on “Indie vs. Traditional Publishing” and “Time Management for Writers”.
