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!

Books, Awesome Things, Vegetables

Yesterday’s launch at Kinokuniya was, to put it simply, awesome.

There are a number of reasons for this.

1. I woke up, hopped online, and was confronted by two very shiny emails: a lovely missive from someone who’s read the book saying the kind of nice things which, did I have feathers, would cause me to preen them; and a note from my publisher alerting me very favourable review in the Sunday Age, which can hopefully be seen here. It says Solace & Grief is “a well-plotted novel…a little Scooby-Doo, a little bit Buffy, and a lot of fun for readers 15 and up.” Whee!

2. My parents went above and beyond in providing food, nibblies and service, and with the help of Helene, our Kinokuniya contact person, and her organisational magic, everything was laid out perfectly. A big thanks to the staff, who were friendly, interesting and wonderful. There’s a reason why Kinokuniya is such a fantastic store!

3. Once things got underway, Scott Westerfeld launched the book by saying a series of extremely flattering things about Solace and her friends, such that the sides of my mouth started to twitch from grinning too much. It was twelve kinds of awesome to meet Scott, not to mention Justine Larbalestier, and even though my base instinct was to lose all communictive skills in their presence, abandon myself to the squealing fangirl within and go all I’m Not Worthy a la Wayne’s World, I think I managed to actually act like a sensible adult and hold a conversation. I know, kids. I’m scared, too.

4. The people. Everyone who showed up was lovely – thank you all for coming, making yourselves known, and being generally shiny! Special mentions go to Kat from Book Thingo, who I now know in the flesh as well as via IM, and to the Capsicum Girls, who made me a gift of a yellow capsicum with a heart drawn on the stem to remember them by. (They also gave Scott a watermelon.) It took me a while to pin down why I was so wildly excited to receive a brightly coloured vegetable, but apart from the fact that all the Girls were cool and friendly and liked my Pwnies shirt, it struck me later that Ms Catalysta’s blog entry about giving Idina Menzel a pumpkin might have something to do with it. Yay for random produce!

5. After lots of signing, book-selling, photo-taking and talking with peeps both new and old, a few friends, Toby and I retired to the Edinburgh Castle pub for drinks. These went on for a while, and eventually culminated in a pizza dinner with friends-of-a-new-friend in Newtown that was both tasty and full of cool conversation. And then we walked back up King Street to  Elizabeth’s, where we bought the first Anita Blake novel and the volume one trade paperback of Angel: After The Fall, before stopping in at one of the two King Street bookshops to possess an ambient cat called Shakespeare, whom we patted, and then we caught a cab home and fell into well-earned, exhausted slumber.

So, that was Sunday. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who made it work! By way of reward, here is another happy-making review, courtesy of Sue Bursztynski. It made me smile: I hope it has the same effect on you.