(NOTE: My faithful PowerBook has been in the shop all week for a RAM upgrade and a bigger hard drive, and since that’s where my incredibly temperamental and precariously calibrated scanning software resides, I can’t typecast until I get it back. Poor thing doesn’t even know that Obama is president. It’s gonna be so happy.)
So for the past five years, I’ve been very casually writing a novel that’s set in the 1950s and is an homage to flying saucers, pulp sci-fi, and duck-and-cover paranoia.
So when she was in town to promote Balticon this summer, my favorite science fiction writer, Connie Willis, told the audience that she’s working on her next novel, which will be set in the 1950s and is an homage to flying saucers and duck-and-cover paranoia.
So yesterday at the Baltimore Writers’ Conference, Larry Doyle told the audience that his next novel will be set in a parallel universe in which everything is an homage to the 1950s and pulp sci-fi.
So should I:
1) Try to hurry up and finish my novel so that reviewers can say I’m just another hack who’s trying to hitch a ride on the bandwagon?
2) Let the novel come out in due course so that reviewers can say I’m just another hack who missed the bandwagon?
Go.
4:10: Wrapping up for the day. The last session has begun, and they took the coffee out of the room at lunch so there’s not much left to do. So, signing off!
2:25: Lunch was great, we had fun chatting with a couple of conference attendees. I was struck by how universal the experiences of writers are, no matter the age or background. Much nodding of heads and sympathy.
12:06: First chance to type all morning. Very busy! Lots of signups, one new membership, and Gary scored a big order of anthologies for the Towson bookstore! Can’t check e-mail for whatever reason. Nice crowd, lots of conversations. Larry Doyle was a funny keynoter.
More soon…
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Right now I am still bleary-eyed from staying up to absorb every last drop. Every moment of the advancing electoral map throughout the evening. Every sweeping shot of the cheering crowd in Grant Park. When President-Elect Obama (Lord, how I love the sound of that) stood at the podium and summoned history in service of the future, suddenly, somehow, he was not alone on that stage anymore.
We didn’t want to go to bed. And even after we finally did go, Mrs. Sotto Voce and I kept breaking out into spontaneous giggles for a long, long time.
There’s going to be a lot of talk about last night’s two speeches. While President-Elect Obama’s was one for the history books, I found Senator McCain’s farewell address to the troops to be every inch the gracious and classy exit that I had hoped the old lion would make.
But as Sen. McCain left the stage and disappeared behind history’s curtain, the music that accompanied him off sent a message — and a quite surprising one — all its own.
Music, you ask? What music?
(more…)
8:45 p.m.
Home, fed, hydrated, and flipping between White Nights (her) and Tron (me). My first experiment in live-blogging was a qualified success. Hard to do with the iPod because of the slow typing and the constant need to switch programs to reestablish the connection after sleep every time I have to put it down to talk to someone. A laptop would be ideal. Plus I can download photos (why oh why no camera on the touch?). Maybe next year the MWA website will have a blog and we can do this there. In the meantime, this concludes the little experiment on this writer’s messy workbench.
6:10 p.m.
First moment alone in the tent in over seven hours. Everyone else is over at the anthology reading, cheering them on. As they should be!
Mrs. Sotto Voce gets a hero award for printing out more flyers and running them over here — literally as the last flyer was given away.
Note: I edited this entry later to test ways of using Courier font to make non-typecast entries look more type-y. I’ll probably continue this in future entries…
3:26
Did I mention it was raining?
In between the torrential downpours (now accented with artillery-barrage quality thunder) we get a lot of traffic, and have even managed to keep up an average of one anthology sale per hour — a respectable average even in good weather!
1:10 p.m.
Rain. Lots and lots of rain today. We’re all stuck in the tent waiting for it to let up. Hopefully more to report later in the day.
Sitting here in my favorite chair in the den as the clock chimes ten; the cats have finally worn each other out from the evening’s wrestling. Reading a biography of an eccentric Englishman and savoring the cool breeze drifting through the window, and for some reason I find myself remembering a radio interview I heard many years ago while driving home one day in Santa Fe in my beloved canary-yellow ‘72 Volvo sedan.
The interviewee was a famous wealthy businessman — I can’t remember who it was — who had just written an autobiography. I remember that he was funny, self-deprecating, and possessed of many fine and funny anecdotes.
The interviewer wrapped up by asking him if he had any advice for young people.
“Yes I do,” he replied. “Develop your eccentricities early. If you wait until you’re older, people will think you’re just going crazy.”
I have never forgotten that advice.
