Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

home from the hills--specifically, from the Adirondack State Park, where Albacon was held this year.

I hadn't realized how much I'd missed the Adirondacks until I was back there for the first time since the 1970s, in fall foliage season, clear blue skies and a glory of bright greens and reds and yellows and oranges on the trees, white birch trunks reaching into the sky, and the starry sky and full moon luring me back out of bed to stare at them Saturday night. (The con was in a resort because the previous hotel was sold out from under it in July--the plan is to move into a regular hotel again next year.)

Albacon was, for me, mostly an excuse to hang out with papersky, rysmiel, and zorinth, which worked very well. kate_nepveu and orzelc were kind enough to give me crash space Sunday night, simplifying travel, giving me a chance to hang out with them her and Chad WINOLJ and meet their dog, and giving me more time with my aforementioned Canadian family. Much tea was drunk, and chocolate exchanged and consumed. We swam but didn't sauna, since the sauna turned out to be a tiny room tucked into the back of the single-sex changing rooms. I slept on the fold-out couch in the front of our two-room suite, so Zorinth wouldn't have to be under the ladybugs. I like ladybugs. (I garden.)

It was odd seeing assorted people from when I used to hang out with NYUSFS, and odder to have a person-I-hadn't-seen-in-years asking me about other people I hadn't seen in years. Also, at a room party, I met someone who turned out to be Anne-Laurie's brother (I'm not sure why this came up), who told me that yes, she and Stu are still living in the house on the Superfund site and still spending all their spare time at the dog show. An effort was made to lure gerisullivan over from Vermont, but she wasn't answering her cell phone.

I got a ride up with Kathryn Cramer; we left late afternoon because we had to wait for Peter to get home from school. We drove up on the Taconic, which is slower than the Thruway but much prettier, a worthy tradeoff this time of year. Zorinth was there waiting when we got to the hotel, and helped me get my stuff put away, then took me in to the ice cream social to find Papersky and Rysmiel; I had ice cream, then we went in search of someplace we could talk, because the space was about to be used for filking.

I spent some time talking to Jim Macdonald, who was also copyediting a manuscript for someone as a favor. Much amusing conversation, ranging from a question about something his goddaughter had told him to the story of writing a Tom Swift novel in two weeks.

Papersky was on a good panel on using history to write sf and fantasy--it would have been better without the American Civil War buff in the audience who would not shut up even when the panelists were talking, but she gets style points for responding to something he said about changes in "the civil war" with "Cromwell won anyway." Carl Alexander Frederick, the moderator of that panel, who moderated the panel on whether current science is too difficult for writers to keep up with or use, is a physicist who mentioned having written a program to play a fruit fly chromosome in C major. He also expressed surprise, later in the weekend, that we knew jonsinger: I had thought that all of Jon's friends expected other people to know him.

I was on one panel, Sunday at 1 p.m. (and got a free membership because of it--this isn't why I volunteered for programming, but it's a nice extra at the moment), titled "Is gender necessary?" with the loose idea of discussing what other groupings/classifications a culture might use instead. The other two panel members, Suford Lewis and Susan de Guardiola, were late, so Billie Aul volunteered to join me since the panel had been her idea, and then Rysmiel volunteered as well; this left us with five after Suford and Susan arrived. Billie did the basic sex/gender distinction intro, and then we talked about different aspects of gender, and other kinds of social classifications and the ways in which they can interact, disagree, or reinforce each other. The discussion rambled, not surprising given the vague topic we'd been handed, but did so fruitfully, I think. In the con suite afterwards, Rysmiel, Papersky, Meredith/stakebait, and I connected this to passing narratives, something Stakebait is working on a paper about.

[I left this comment in roadnotes's journal: We talked about this a bit at the gender panel at Albacon (which went well despite never cohering). Either Billie or Suford pointed out that if the narrator/lead character's gender is not given, people will assume it is that of the author, and vice versa, and if neither the author's gender nor the main character's is given, most readers will assume that it is the same as their own. (This made sense to me--I think the largest reason I tend to refer to Raphael Carter as "she" is that The Fortunate Fall has a female protagonist.) Suford also said that, in many cases, the moment you say "she" or "he" about a character, you've sketched in information that you don't need to give explicitly; a point I never got around to making in reply is that this is problematic if that information is not valid for your character.]

The oddest thing I brought home is probably a copy of Mike Ford's novel The Dragon Waiting, odd because I'd borrowed this book from Rysmiel in Montreal in August, and taken it up to Albacon so I could give it back. Then I spotted a hardcover of it on Kate and Chad's "spare books in need of a good home shelf". I asked, and Rysmiel, for whom this is a serious comfort book, preferred the hardcover, so I put the paperback back in my bag, and brought it home. There was someone at the con, badge name Z-, who has waist-length hair, one side of which he had bleached and dyed a brilliant blue; enough to make me regret not having purpled mine, despite a job interview tomorrow that makes it a good thing that my hair looks "normal".

I'm a bit short on sleep--I didn't sleep all that well either Saturday or Sunday night, but hope that being home with cattitude and Artemis will help. Being short on sleep, I've probably left something important out of this--if I remember, I'll post about it later.
[Edit: I've made a couple of fixes based on comments: strikeout for deletions, boldface for a significant addition.]