Sunday seems to be mostly about saying goodbye to all of the wonderful people I was priveledged to hang out with. It’s kind of a sad day at a convention, watching everyone check out of the hotel and not quite knowing if you’ll have to wait a full year before you see them again. For some, yes. For others, hopefully not.
I was up before 8am once again and headed down to the restaurant. While sitting there waiting for my food to be delivered, I ran into Mary Rodgers, another writer and Codex member and we ended up having a very nice breakfast together, chatting about writing habits and other things that you can really only discuss with another writer in the context of a writer’s convention.
From that breakfast I dashed off to meet Barry Malzberg and company for the morning walk around the parking lot. This time Scott Edelman and Paul Di Filippo didn’t make it, but instead Liz Hand went with us. We did the usual three or four loops around the parking lot, listening to Barry expound his wisdom, and listening to Liz ask him interesting questions. It was, as always, absolutely delightful.
I attended only one panel today, a panel on managing literary legacies. Barry Malzberg and David Hartwell were on the panel, as well as others, and it was a fascinating discussion of how to go about protecting literary legacies when you (the writer) on no longer part of the living world.
After that panel I was wandering back to the lobby when I saw an unual (for Readercon) crowd of people. Walking toward it, I thought for a moment that I saw Neil Gaiman, but of course, he couldn’t possibly be at Readercon.
He was, and I managed to snap this photo of him talking with Chip Delany:
Just to the left of Neil is his wife, Amanda Palmer.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I picked up a couple of books this morning. One was Being Gardner Dozois and the other was a little book by Elizabeth Hand called, Illyria. Liz signed her book for me.
I spent the rest of the late morning saying goodbye to people and trying to get some pictures. Here are a few of them:
Above can see Barry Malzberg, myself, Paul Di Filippo, and Eric M. Van. Also this one:
That’s Scott Edelman and me.
I’d hoped to get pictures with Liz Hand and Mary Robinette Kowal as well, but that will have to wait until next year.
As always, Readercon did not disappoint. A big THANK YOU must go out to Rose Fox who organized the whole thing and who I finally got to meet only this morning. I can’t imagine the amount of work that must go into something like this and from what I can tell, it came off flawlessly. I am looking forward to attending next year and seeing all my friends there. That I can call them friends–well, that is more important to me than anythign else I’ve done in science fiction and I look forward to seeing all of them again.
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