Readercon, BoingBoing, and Lives Passing

Readercon happened last weekend, and as always, it was a good time. The high points for me, this year, aside from seeing good friends and making some new ones, was a series of workshops that were held more or a less as a sideline to the main programming. Barry Longyear held one on writer's block, Ellen Klages ran one on using improv techniques to free up creativity (which kept us laughing for two hours), and finally Mary Robinette Kowal gave excellent advice on techniques for delivering effective readings (just in time for my own reading, which followed shortly afterward). The only downside of all this was spraining my foot, while participating a little too exuberantly in one of the improv skits.

Home again, and back to the salt mines. Lucky thing they serve frozen margaritas in salt mines! I got a request to write a contribution to a remembrance of the Apollo 11 Moon landing for tor.com, which I did, appearing soon. I got the fixed-up, wide-screen version of my Sunborn video put up on my own youtube channel (which I hope to expand with some excerpts from my educational, distance-learning TV series from back in 1995, just as soon as I have time to view and edit them). I sent off a note to boingboing.net about it, because as you probably know, they compile collections of all sorts of cool things. I headed off to bed—and the next morning got a congratulatory note from a friend about my video appearing on BoingBoing! The funny thing is, it was posted—with my accompanying words—a few hours before I sent it to them! Time zones, time zones... or is it something more sinister, something... well, I won't pursue those thoughts further.

The other thing that happened about the same time was reading of the deaths of writer Phyllis Gotlieb, and of Charles N. Brown, publisher of Locus. I didn’t really know either of them personally. But I had just seen Charlie Brown in passing at Readercon, and to read of his death the following day was quite a jolt. You can read about both of them at the Locus website, or, for that matter, on boingboing, where Cory Doctorow wrote touching tributes.

"You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience." —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin