World Fantasy 2010

This past weekend I attended World Fantasy Convention 2011 in Columbus, Ohio, which is not quite the Stygian Pit of Hell that my Ann Arbor-aligned friends and family had led me to believe… odd, that.

As so many others have said in their own blog reports, there is just way too much, too, too much to get into, too many people to name them all individually. I will, however, try to pick out the highlights.

Driving the last hour or two with Tobias Buckell was certainly a nice way to start the con. I’ve known Tobias for years, since he was introduced to me by Charlie Finlay at ConFusion back in… 2001? Something like that. Always good to see him again, of course, though unfortunately that was really the only time we got to sit and talk for the duration of the con.

One of the first people I saw at the con was Danielle Friedman who was almost embarrassingly (for me) glad to see me. She is always awesome, it seems.

And the funniest/strangest story of the con came up on Thursday night, when I had about an hour to talk to Darja Malcolm-Clarke who, it turns out, has been a sort of shadow-companion for the last fourteen years or so. Same university at the same time, same graduate school, lived in the same parts of two different towns. We even worked at the same pizza place at the same time for a couple of weeks. There are many other connections, but that’s what you get for now. Suffice to say it was an hour of “No way!” and “Of course you did” type interjections. One of the absolute highlights of the con.

The number of awesome people met otherwise is… almost unfathomable. I’d try to list everyone, but it’s just too unwieldy and I’d hate to miss someone (since I know they’ve just been dying waiting for this blog post to go up). Suffice to say, it seems like I was always hanging out with someone else that I wanted to meet, or never thought I’d meet, or didn’t realize I wanted to meet until just then. Many new friendships, I hope.

And the one moment I really was after at the con was meeting David Drake, which I accomplished at the Saturday night autograph session. (He took one look at me and said just, “Marines?”) I’ve been reading his books since high school and, since going to Iraq, found something of an even deeper appreciation for his fiction. At least in those few minutes as we chatted about war and writing and whatnot, he was an absolute gentleman, and I could not have hoped for a nicer, warmer interaction.

Of course, I was also grateful that I got to just sit at times and chill out with my friends: Merrie Haskell, Catherine Shaffer, Steve Buchheit, and Lawrence Kapture are truly awesome individuals, and if you’re wise, you’ll want to be friends with them, too.

So that’s that. A great weekend full of awesome people. I was glad to get home to my wife and kids, of course, as I had missed them all. And I can’t even begin to express appreciation to my wife for wrangling our three unruly (but awesome) kids for the whole weekend on her own. Hopefully, if I go to WFC again next year, I’ll be able to bring her with me and we can foist the kids off on some unsuspecting grandparent or something.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.