NASFIC Day 2 report
Aug. 4th, 2007 09:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterWell, it's Saturday night, and I'm feeling the pangs of post-con depression. Won't really be able to attend any of tomorrow's panels; by the time I get in, Sandy et famille will be ready to head out. Shame, as there were a couple of panels tomorrow I wouldn't have minded seeing, but when you mooch off someone for your transportation, you have to go when they do.
This morning, after a bagel, my cousin Rhonda dropped me off at the nearby Metrolink station, so I could take the St. Louis public-transit rail system over the river and catch a bus the rest of the way to Collinsville, then another bus down to the convention center. It was pretty neat, getting to ride over the river on a railroad bridge. I didn't have much trouble with the transfers, though was a bit annoyed that the Saturday bus route dropped me off a couple of blocks away from the convention center. Arrived about 9:30.
Managed to catch the last half hour of a panel on critical analysis in science fiction, then attended the panel on publishing short stories with Gordon Van Gelder, Rob Chilson, Beth Meacham, Cary Osborne, Donald Mead, Rachel Caine, and guest kibbitzer Gene Wolfe, who had stayed over from the previous panel. (He looks an awful lot like a Miyazaki character, particularly Lonebach from the Lupin III Albatross episode, or the engineer from Castle in the Sky.)
I was also privileged to be seated right next to John Dalmas. At one point I saw him take out an actual honest-to-god pocketwatch to check the time, and felt a great surge of warmth for the man. I was tempted to hit the dealer room and see if I could dig up a book to have him sign for me, but I'd gotten enough signed books already.
After that panel, I headed over to Peter S. Beagle's reading in the Holiday Inn, missing the first 10 minutes or so; he read the story about the Indian Rhinoceres, which he considered one of his personal favorite pieces of his own writing. After that we headed back over to the convention center for a "Fantasy Worlds of Peter S. Beagle" panel. Nobody was really sure what that was supposed to be about, so it ended up being another coffeeklatch of conversation and so forth.
At 1:00, it was back over to the Holiday Inn for the "Writer Beware!" panel, with Elizabeth Moon, Barbara Hodges, Michael Capobianco, Robin W. Bailey, Thomas Stratman, Charles Petit, and Joshua Bilmes. It was an interesting panel, about how to avoid scam artists who preyed upon the unwary, but by this time I was really getting annoyed at the convention for being split between two buildings a half a block of walking apart from each other. You'd think that in a metro area the size of Saint Louis they could have found a bigger single venue.
There wasn't anything I really wanted to do at 2:00, so after a brief conversation and photo with Elizabeth Moon, I wandered the dealer room. I found the Chinese Ghost Story trilogy on import DVD for $20, and I'd wanted those for a long time. (Well, I'd wanted the first two, anyway. The third I could have done without, but I'll just consider it a "freebie" for buying the first two for $10 each.) Lingered over the tarot decks at another dealer, but they didn't have any unicorn tarot decks with them, so I decided to give it a miss. I got the dealer's card so I could order it later. (Not that I'm inclined toward tarot fortunetelling, but I'd like to have a deck just to have it; anyway, I recall reading in a book called The Way to Play that there are games for such decks entirely apart from fortunetelling.)
At 3:00, I got my copy of The Fantasy Worlds of Peter S. Beagle autographed by the cover and interior design artist, Darrell K. Sweet. Then I looked in on a "And What Then?" panel, about the status of book series, with Elizabeth Moon and other people, but I'd already heard pretty much what Ms. Moon would have to say in another panel, so instead I hit the "Working with Puppets" panel with MST3K's Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, and Mark Dodson who was the voice of the Gremlins from the movies of the same name. A fan puppeteer had brought along the Tom Servo and Crow puppets he had made from plans he'd gotten on the Internet; the actors remarked on their verisimilitude to the ones they had used on the show and recounted stories of the old days.
At 4:00 I attended the one-hour Q&A panel with Lani Tupu, Captain Krais and the voice of the Pilot from Farscape. There really wasn't all that much Farscape discussion in it, oddly enough. There was some, but more of the hour seemed to be devoted to Tupu's other work, such as the seminar/training film roleplaying that he did for corporate training sessions, and a lot of talk about how "the red camera" is changing the state of filmmaking. Tupu said he had not yet been contacted about reprising Pilot in the Farscape webisodes, and was waiting to hear from his agent.
At 5:00, I peeked in on the Baen slideshow panel, and was tempted, but there was an MST3K panel with Murphy and Corbett going on and I really wanted to hear what they had to say. The Baen panel was supposed to last 90 minutes, so I hoped I could catch the last half hour, but as it turned out later they apparently ended before the hour was up so I missed it.
The MST3K panel was amusing, though. Murphy and Corbett showed clips from their new "The Film Crew" projects, Killers from Space and The Wild Women of Wongo, and a clip of the first five minutes of Star Trek V accompanied by the rifftrax of it. They took some questions about the show and upcoming DVD releases and so on.
And after that, I realized with a bit of sadness that this was it. I'd attended all the panels I really would be attending. (We'll likely be heading home tomorrow before any of the panels that would interest me.) It was all over but the going home.
On my way out of the con, I stopped by the Black Gate fantasy magazine stand. They had a bunch of books they were selling, with an offer that for every dollar spent on an issue of their magazine, they would give a dollar's worth of book free. I grabbed their latest issue, and for the freebie got a hardcover called Paragaea, a lost-world fantasy in a Burroughsian vein. I read the first part of it on the bus and train back; it seems pretty good. While I was picking it out, I listened to Eric Flint talking with the stand's proprietors about publishing and the difficulty posed by trying to publish orphaned works.
The problem with getting home by bus was that the bus that would have taken me to the station where I would catch another bus had stopped running an hour earlier. I called a cab, but then cancelled it when I found that Archon's hotel shuttle was willing to take me downtown to the bus station. After about half an hour of waiting, I caught a bus that would link up with the Metrolink, and ended up being picked up by my cousin Rhonda at 9:05.
It's been a pretty decent con; I made some good contacts for my podcast. I'm sad it's (mostly) over. Now I just have to deal with getting my stuff packed and getting in to the con to get the ride home tomorrow.
With that in mind, it's time I showered and was in bed.
This morning, after a bagel, my cousin Rhonda dropped me off at the nearby Metrolink station, so I could take the St. Louis public-transit rail system over the river and catch a bus the rest of the way to Collinsville, then another bus down to the convention center. It was pretty neat, getting to ride over the river on a railroad bridge. I didn't have much trouble with the transfers, though was a bit annoyed that the Saturday bus route dropped me off a couple of blocks away from the convention center. Arrived about 9:30.
Managed to catch the last half hour of a panel on critical analysis in science fiction, then attended the panel on publishing short stories with Gordon Van Gelder, Rob Chilson, Beth Meacham, Cary Osborne, Donald Mead, Rachel Caine, and guest kibbitzer Gene Wolfe, who had stayed over from the previous panel. (He looks an awful lot like a Miyazaki character, particularly Lonebach from the Lupin III Albatross episode, or the engineer from Castle in the Sky.)
I was also privileged to be seated right next to John Dalmas. At one point I saw him take out an actual honest-to-god pocketwatch to check the time, and felt a great surge of warmth for the man. I was tempted to hit the dealer room and see if I could dig up a book to have him sign for me, but I'd gotten enough signed books already.
After that panel, I headed over to Peter S. Beagle's reading in the Holiday Inn, missing the first 10 minutes or so; he read the story about the Indian Rhinoceres, which he considered one of his personal favorite pieces of his own writing. After that we headed back over to the convention center for a "Fantasy Worlds of Peter S. Beagle" panel. Nobody was really sure what that was supposed to be about, so it ended up being another coffeeklatch of conversation and so forth.
At 1:00, it was back over to the Holiday Inn for the "Writer Beware!" panel, with Elizabeth Moon, Barbara Hodges, Michael Capobianco, Robin W. Bailey, Thomas Stratman, Charles Petit, and Joshua Bilmes. It was an interesting panel, about how to avoid scam artists who preyed upon the unwary, but by this time I was really getting annoyed at the convention for being split between two buildings a half a block of walking apart from each other. You'd think that in a metro area the size of Saint Louis they could have found a bigger single venue.
There wasn't anything I really wanted to do at 2:00, so after a brief conversation and photo with Elizabeth Moon, I wandered the dealer room. I found the Chinese Ghost Story trilogy on import DVD for $20, and I'd wanted those for a long time. (Well, I'd wanted the first two, anyway. The third I could have done without, but I'll just consider it a "freebie" for buying the first two for $10 each.) Lingered over the tarot decks at another dealer, but they didn't have any unicorn tarot decks with them, so I decided to give it a miss. I got the dealer's card so I could order it later. (Not that I'm inclined toward tarot fortunetelling, but I'd like to have a deck just to have it; anyway, I recall reading in a book called The Way to Play that there are games for such decks entirely apart from fortunetelling.)
At 3:00, I got my copy of The Fantasy Worlds of Peter S. Beagle autographed by the cover and interior design artist, Darrell K. Sweet. Then I looked in on a "And What Then?" panel, about the status of book series, with Elizabeth Moon and other people, but I'd already heard pretty much what Ms. Moon would have to say in another panel, so instead I hit the "Working with Puppets" panel with MST3K's Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, and Mark Dodson who was the voice of the Gremlins from the movies of the same name. A fan puppeteer had brought along the Tom Servo and Crow puppets he had made from plans he'd gotten on the Internet; the actors remarked on their verisimilitude to the ones they had used on the show and recounted stories of the old days.
At 4:00 I attended the one-hour Q&A panel with Lani Tupu, Captain Krais and the voice of the Pilot from Farscape. There really wasn't all that much Farscape discussion in it, oddly enough. There was some, but more of the hour seemed to be devoted to Tupu's other work, such as the seminar/training film roleplaying that he did for corporate training sessions, and a lot of talk about how "the red camera" is changing the state of filmmaking. Tupu said he had not yet been contacted about reprising Pilot in the Farscape webisodes, and was waiting to hear from his agent.
At 5:00, I peeked in on the Baen slideshow panel, and was tempted, but there was an MST3K panel with Murphy and Corbett going on and I really wanted to hear what they had to say. The Baen panel was supposed to last 90 minutes, so I hoped I could catch the last half hour, but as it turned out later they apparently ended before the hour was up so I missed it.
The MST3K panel was amusing, though. Murphy and Corbett showed clips from their new "The Film Crew" projects, Killers from Space and The Wild Women of Wongo, and a clip of the first five minutes of Star Trek V accompanied by the rifftrax of it. They took some questions about the show and upcoming DVD releases and so on.
And after that, I realized with a bit of sadness that this was it. I'd attended all the panels I really would be attending. (We'll likely be heading home tomorrow before any of the panels that would interest me.) It was all over but the going home.
On my way out of the con, I stopped by the Black Gate fantasy magazine stand. They had a bunch of books they were selling, with an offer that for every dollar spent on an issue of their magazine, they would give a dollar's worth of book free. I grabbed their latest issue, and for the freebie got a hardcover called Paragaea, a lost-world fantasy in a Burroughsian vein. I read the first part of it on the bus and train back; it seems pretty good. While I was picking it out, I listened to Eric Flint talking with the stand's proprietors about publishing and the difficulty posed by trying to publish orphaned works.
The problem with getting home by bus was that the bus that would have taken me to the station where I would catch another bus had stopped running an hour earlier. I called a cab, but then cancelled it when I found that Archon's hotel shuttle was willing to take me downtown to the bus station. After about half an hour of waiting, I caught a bus that would link up with the Metrolink, and ended up being picked up by my cousin Rhonda at 9:05.
It's been a pretty decent con; I made some good contacts for my podcast. I'm sad it's (mostly) over. Now I just have to deal with getting my stuff packed and getting in to the con to get the ride home tomorrow.
With that in mind, it's time I showered and was in bed.
