Worlds Fantasy Con

We spent the past long weekend at the World Fantasy Convention, our usual destination this time of year, the annual gathering of the clans for fantasy writers, readers, and editors – and teachers and critics and other professionals.  (Some of the few people who were just fans rather stood out.  Costumes, you know.)

It started out deliberately small, unadvertised, in an attempt to keep it purely professional.  It's broadened over the years.  Some would say diluted.

It's where I used to touch base with Stephen King, but the size of it, and the publicity associated with it,  has kept him away for decades.  Peter Straub does normally show, and we've spent many a morning hour there chatting, before the night owls get up.  This year a foot injury sidelined him.

Still, we had good talking time with a pair of Wolfes, Gene and Gary, and also a lot of time talking art and space with Gregory Manchess, one of my favorite artists.

The consuite and convention bar were both too loud for my bad hearing, but we found a couple of nearby restaurants that were quiet enough for socializing.

(The consuite was okay during the day, and well stocked with coffee,cold cuts, cheeses, and cookies, as well as things that begin with other letters.)

The part of Saratoga Springs that held the convention center also had a few interesting small shops.  A good book store and a food shop with local specialties, where we ordered a box to be mailed home.  An interesting guitar shop where I would have dropped a small amount of money if I'd been alone, but Gay anchored my sanity and held on to my wallet.  I wanted a curious lightweight drone instrument that's part guitar, part ukelele, part banjo.  But I did manage to put a drone in Santa's ear about it, so maybe later.

On the flight home I read a charming book about Jack Gaughan, one of my favorite science fiction artists, and a boon companion/drinking buddy back in the seventies and eighties.  He lived an hour or so away from my parents' place in Tarrytown, New York, so we often got together when I came up to visit them.  Lots of pool-shooting and immoderate beer consumption.

(When I googled Jack I came up with what looks like a fourteen-year-old kid wailing the hell out of an acoustic guitar --


"Stevie Ray Vaughan Rude Mood Cover (Jack Gaughan)"

.  One of those pleasant random internet accidents.)

Jack taught me how to write.  That is, how to write legibly.  Six years of taking notes in college reduced my handwriting to an illegible scrawl.  I admired Jack's handwriting, and he told me that his had also been illegible, but he took the advice of Hannes Bok and retrained himself into an italic hand.  I did the same, with less dramatic success, but at least I became legible, after a year or so of practice.

Here's a random page (visible on LiveJournal):




Someone serious about lettering would produce a more clear page, but it would be less fast.  You have to pick the pen up and put it back down just right, over and over.  Mine is a more scrawly version of that.

A side effect is that it makes handwriting more fun; more satisfying.  A few of my students at MIT took it up, because they had the same problem, with nobody else being able to read their stuff unless they printed it out.

There are books about writing "the Italic Way," but I don't think I really followed one.  I just devised an alphabet and practiced it page after page, adapting it to my own hand.

Joe