khedron

Last time I travelled internationally I did not yet have a smartphone. I look back and am amazed it went as well as it did. (I know people travelled perfectly well before smartphones, and I guess some of those people were also full of blithe confidence and hadn't bothered to get any maps, so maybe amazed is too strong. Pleasantly surprised.) This trip was the full Google Maps experience, and one of the best fruit salads I've ever had was served to me when I was hot and sore-footed after a trip up The Mountain and typed 'fruit salad' into Google Maps with no particular hope.

(I would not go back again to find the same exact fruit salad. None of my nostalgic memories of Montreal food came through for me this time: the amazing custard buns had become normal, and perhaps the default NZ croissant has improved or perhaps I was simply less croissant-hungry. This trip has laid down an entirely new set of great food memories.)

My plan had been to reach Montreal days early, get over my jet lag, and then be fully alert for the convention. This did not work. I reached Montreal, proceeded to have three lovely days using magic travel energy dredged up out of my bone marrow, and hit the convention without having begun to be able to sleep more than five or six hours a night and with the travel energy used up. 'I should make time to go back to my Airbnb in the afternoon and nap,' I said to myself. There was so much good stuff to attend I didn't do this, and I regretted it. The convention was great, but also, as I wrote at the time, 'A great case study in social tasks and burning out of them.'

(The advanced next form of plan, if and when I go to Scintillation again, will involve arriving in North America weeks beforehand, doing all my travelling first, going to Scintillation, and then leaving before the weather gets hot. It will also involve having a location within five minutes' walk where I can nap.)

Oh, but one lovely part of the first three days was wandering the city, and sitting in a coffee shop near the Basilica, while a conversation about road trip stories took place on the Scintillation discord. The discord is a thriving online community. Usually I'm offset from it by between six and eight hours depending on daylight saving time; it was great to be participating in conversations on there in real time! I'd type up my notes on this conversation too, since it felt basically panel-sized, (what are the most interesting things about road trip stories? What best separates them from other types of travel narrative like quest and pilgrimage?) only it feels slightly less the done thing when it's reporting on semi-private conversation instead of semi-public panels.


( Panel notes for 'Writing the Future' )


After lunch was a panel on How To Write Middle, where I took such scrabbly notes it's not worth typing them up, but it is immediately followed by some quick notes about how I could turn a random dream I had into a story, so it did its job re. giving impetus to go write things. This is also the panel during which William Alexander described the parlor game 'Smoke,' which I co-opted for use in a Starting Writers meetup later that day, so that was very useful and I was able to briefly tell him it had been - he seemed pleased! (The rules of Smoke are that it's twenty questions, where one person is thinking of a character and the others have to ask them questions to guess what it is. Except none of the questions can be factual. They all have to be sideways, poetical type questions. The first one is 'What kind of smoke would the person you're thinking of be?')



( Panel notes for 'Not Saving the World: Stakes in Fantasy' )


Other things that happened on Saturday: nice lunch-stroll with ambyr. Frantic Fanfic session which was fun, although revealing of how much the website does for you: writing as much as you can in three minutes gets the added concern of shuffling paper! (I only realised partway through that the website would shuffle everyone's virtual papers up thoroughly, whereas we were passing papers in a circle and thus always writing in the same order. Not bad, but different. Next time I might shuffle in the middle of the table.)

Starting Writers meetup. I was organising this, and had been very blithe about it until day of, when I suddenly remembered to be stressed at organising a group of people. It went well enough, if I was doing it again I would do it totally differently. Following this, I joined rushthatspeaks for dinner and helped generate The Incident With The Soup That Could Not Be Opened, which was stressful for all concerned - it was good to see him, and sartorias and nineweaving, but I am glad I could catch up with all three of them at less stressed times when there was no unopenable takeaway soup.

Then there was a panel on Education for which I had little remaining energy, though I was introduced to a Scintillator who will be moving to Wellington soon (this will be very nice, the only downside was that the introduction foiled my original plan of lying down on the floor right in back and hearing the panel that way). And then there was Beowulf reading, and home. Pleasantly, my Airbnb, though at a not-ideal distance from the hotel, was also in the same general direction as Gretchen and her friend S were heading, so I could talk more with them on the way about linguistics and Beowulf and things. (She lent me the charming Bea Wolf.)

Until I turn thirty, in about a year's time, I will not buy any books for myself unless they are:

-audiobooks.
-by a personal friend.
-for a book club.
-by Gene Wolfe or Tanith Lee.

Other people may buy me books, and I may buy books for other people, but I am not allowed to cheat using either of these facts.



~
Free-writing #2
~

First pope blue, tall, scowling. Second pope smaller and cursed. Third pope rotated, screaming, then popped. At this point the equipment was recalibrated. Fourth pope knew nothing of sin; this pope was kept. Fifth pope explained all real politics as a cheese factory and seemed promising but was terminated when its growth became exponential. The committee is worried about the sixth pope as its termination process was interrupted; it is suspected that this pope was rescued and taken home by employee Angela Smythe and investigations into her disappearance and a series of murders around Crabtree Lake are ongoing. Equipment was reset to most conservative values. Seventh pope resembled a pope. Eighth pope specifically identical to Pope Benedict XVI. Greater deviation was introduced. Eighth pope blue, porridge-flavoured. Ninth pope entered radioactive fusion and damaged main test chamber. Experimental protocols mandated a shutdown for re-evaluation and the entire project was deemed a failure, with no return on investment and no product saleable to the client. During this time it is now known that a further twelve popes were generated by Dr Alvarez using a sophisticated procedure for zeroing all sensor readouts; the committee was informed of the problem when one of its members read the manifesto co-written by Alvarez in the morning news. It is the position of the committee that Alvarez had not been an extremist Collyridionite prior to his joining the Institute but had instead neglected exposure procedures clearly stated in the safety manual. Background checks performed by the Institute’s hiring department are vigorous and no atheist or extremist staff members can have been admitted to the papal generation chamber.

The committee can guarantee that all equipment related to the project has been rendered nonfunctional. The advance of the Alvarian Popes toward Rome continues, but the government of Italy has the complete co-operation of the Institute and effective countermeasures will have been deployed by this report’s time of issue. The identity of our client remains confidential at this time.