A-Kon was interesting, fun, challenging, and huger than I’d expected, silly me.\u00a0\u00a0 I did not manage to get online even once, nor do any writing, so now I’m officially behind my own (sculpted for such occasions) schedule and must dive into work.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One five-day chunk of wiggle-room is gone.\u00a0 (Four of those and a month of wiggle-room is gone.)<\/p>\n
It wasn’t all A-Kon….I hadn’t really recovered to full energy from Balticon (less than a week between arriving home and taking off again…insufficient recovery time for me.)\u00a0\u00a0 And I find crowds and noise tiring even if I’m just slithering through the crowds from one place to another.\u00a0 Thus I was using every backup battery my brain has to stay awake and at least look alert during the times I was supposed to be out and about among people doing things, and trying to write or negotiate the hotel’s internet access was just Too Much.<\/p>\n
The funnest part of the whole thing was meeting Peter Beagle (yes, that Peter Beagle)\u00a0 on the last day.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Time for the fangirl squee.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I had had my Serious Shy going most of the time (the more highly I regard another writer, the less I can approach her\/him and introduce myself or even say “Hi.”)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And though I had the Serious Shy going, I hadn’t noticed how close his table was in the Artists Alley to the table where I was with friends promoting the new anthology Ladies of Trade Town<\/em>, edited by my friend Lee Martindale and published by her after the original publisher ran into cash-flow problems and was going to delay publication at least a year.\u00a0 As things thinned out the last day, and the solid crowd in front of Peter Beagle’s table opened up, I could see just how close I’d come before.<\/p>\n The launch of Ladies of Trade Town<\/em> went well, including the launch party at the top of the Sheraton’s building (well, almost top–38th floor, with a gorgeous view of the city from up there.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A-Kon treats its writer guests extremely well, from the invitations through the green room, to the details that matter so much when you’re dealing with that kind of crowd.\u00a0\u00a0 I had two “minders” who took it in turn to help me get to the right place at the right time and be sure I had what I needed.\u00a0\u00a0 And the green room food…!!!\u00a0 (And the green room knitting circle…or for that matter the knitting row at the tables: we had four in a row knitting once, and three fairly often.\u00a0\u00a0 I made a lot of progress on the turquoise\/purple\/green scarf, using up the end of the first ball of yarn on the train home, before I even reached Fort Worth.)<\/p>\n A few ideas popped out and were duly written down, but I couldn’t actually write–too tired, mostly.\u00a0 Now I’m home, slept all night, and at the stroke of nine will be back into the book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A-Kon was interesting, fun, challenging, and huger than I’d expected, silly me.\u00a0\u00a0 I did not manage to get online even once, nor do any writing, so now I’m officially behind my own (sculpted for such occasions) schedule and must dive into work.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 One five-day chunk of wiggle-room is gone.\u00a0 (Four of those and a month […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,5],"tags":[112,107],"class_list":["post-1234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1234"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1235,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234\/revisions\/1235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}