Worldcon Was Totally Awesome

Oh sweet internets, what the heading says! SO AWESOME, I’m not even kidding, my brain is totally BROKEN but it was so worth it. There were about a bajillion people there who were cooler and more famous and more interesting than me, but I had actual conversations with a lot of them and lunch with a few of them and if I start namedropping I’ll totally never stop, but the point, the major astonishing point, apart from the bit where I was barefoot at the Hugo Awards afterparty and talking to Kim Stanley Robinson and John Scalzi and China Mieville and Kate Elliott (OK, so maybe a bit of namedropping after all) is that I didn’t hideously embarass myself! Or at least, if I did, not in a way where I realised it immediately afterwards and had to go curl up in a foetal ball of angst! Ignorance is bliss! And there were Jedi just walking around, Jedi you could take photos with, and people giving away free books, and I got to get up and talk about cyberpunk and webcomics and videogames and urban fantasy and SF horror movies in front of people who actually wanted to listen!

And tomorrow I get to go back to photocopying and typing up invoices for educational maths products!

OK, so that last exclamation mark may have been a slight exaggeration. I’ll say one thing for having a day job, though: right now, it’s about the only thing keeping me from floating away on a smug cloud of residual geekitude.

Which is, no doubt, a very good thing indeed.

PS – Here is my Book Show blog summary of Worldcon. Yay coherence!

Worldcon Schedule

So! Because I am a crazy lady, but also because Worldcon is my first proper convention and I want to rock it, here is the list of what I’ll be doing over the next week, apart from not sleeping, freaking out, wearing pretty clothes and engaging in general geekery:

Friday, 3 September

12:00 – Joint reading. Other guests: China Mieville

4:00 – Panel: From print to pixels: paper comics to webcomics. Other guests: Phil Foglio, Kaja Foglio and Howard Tayler

5:00 – Panel: E.T. has a chainsaw: When science fiction and horror collide. Other guests: Bob Eggleton and Christian Sauvé

Saturday, 4 September

10:00 – Panel: Videogames as art. Other guests: K. A. Bedford and John Scalzi

1:00 – Joint signing. Other guests: Carrie Vaughn, Gail Carriger and Karen Healey

4:00 – Panel: Dark shadows – YA urban fantasy. Other guests: Chuck McKenzie, Sue Bursztynski, and Carrie Vaughn

Sunday, 5 September

3:oo – Panel: The (haunted) streets of our town – YA urban fantasy. Other guests: Karen Healey and Seanan McGuire

Monday, 6 September

12:00 – Panel: Cyberpunk anime – origins and influences. Other guests: Lars Adler and Juan Sanmiguel

2:00 – Debate: Zombie/Vampire smackdown. Other guests: Chuck Mckenzie, Narelle Harris, George R. R. Martin, Felicity Dowker and Scott Edelmann

3:00 – Panel: Fantasy fiction and the Bechdel test. Other guests: Ellen Kushner

I’ll also be attending the Nightmare Ball on Friday Night and the Hugo Awards on Sunday.

Overall status: WOO!

For more detail on the Worldcon program, you can look here and here.

I have also spent this past weekend attending and blogging about the Melbourne Writers’ Festival on behalf of the Book Show Blog. Beginning with Joss Whedon’s keynote appearence on Friday night, my thoughts on DBC Pierre, Why I Read, Jostien Gaarder, Peter Beinart, A Wordsmith’s Dream, Kim Stanley Robinson and The Thinking Person’s God-dess have all now been posted. The plan is to keep up the blogging throughout Worldcon, too, which is just another reason why, should you happen to encounter me any time prior to next Tuesday, I will most likely be in a wild, shiny state of meta-crazy. But in a good way!