CONduit: Itself and the Journey Home
Monday, June 14th, 2004 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rolanniWhen we last saw our Intrepid Authors, they were on their way to Dee's Diner with Elaine and Thuy, there to feed both body and soul.
In case you're ever in Salt Lake City, Dee's Diner is a cross between a really big Denny's and a neighborhood Baltimore diner. The waitresses are for the most part in the forty-and-above range, perennially harried, and tough enough for rock 'n roll. They take your order with a certain world-weary patience and deliver the food to the table with dispatch if not aplomb. The food is varied, plentiful and cheap. Just like going home, without the humidity.
After our soiree at Dee's on Thursday night, we walked back to the hotel, parted company with Thuy and Elaine – they to the hot tub, we to our room. Steve and I sat in the window overlooking the Daytona 500 Car Sale in the farther of the two parking lots, and talked for a bit, then turned in at not-very-much-short of 1 a.m. SLC time.
The con Officially Started Friday at noon. If you want to read all about it, look behind the curtain.
Friday morning was the CONduit Breakfast with the Guests from 8:30 to 10:30. The concept is much like a Friends of Liad breakfast, with the con's guests and those members who wish to sitting at a long table sharing, well, breakfast. I woke up with a headache and let Steve shower and go down while I slowly got myself together, and joined him, Lee Modesitt and Ken Rand. The restaurant had unfortunately forgotten the part about the long table, but we had a pleasant conversation among ourselves, and parted at our leisure, Lee to pursue his own nefarious schemes and we with Ken Rand to find a quiet corner to be interviewed in.
The interview went more or less well and will be appearing in a Talebones near you sometime next year (Talebones has recently cut back to two issues a year), after which we wandered the emerging con for a few minutes, then went upstairs for a quick cheese sandwich before our first panel.
With Lee's steady hand on the moderator's wheel, Julia West, Susan Kroupa, Steve and I kept the audience spellbound with our discussion of culture clashes in science fiction and fantasy. The consensus of the panel was that all fiction is about culture clashes, in that we are all, as individuals, a subculture of our own.
That settled, Steve fled across the hall to talk about SFWA with the able assistance of Brook West and Susan Kroupa while I went upstairs to feed a super Tylenol to my head.
After lunch, Steve reported to the Art Show to start his judging gig while I shopped the dealers room, then sat in a much-too-comfy chair in the lobby to people-watch. Sue Kroupa came by and we had a nice chat until it was time for her to go and for me to collect Steve and pull him off to dinner before we went to the ice cream social.
In between dinner and the social, we got our Big Adrenal Rush when Steve discovered that his camera was missing. We combed the con, alerted Security, Ops – and finally found it under the table in our first panel room. Phew!
CONduit's ice cream social doubles as a meet-the-fan-groups fair. We mooched about a bit, collected our ice cream (one scoop only, but the scoop is the size of New Jersey. This is, in my opinion, the Exactly Perfect amount of chocolate chip mint ice cream.), chatted with Mary Kay and fellow GoH Jordin Kare, and then it was time to choose the CONduit mascot.
This was fun. Six hardy folk in costume vied for the honor by presenting themselves on stage and saying – or in the case of one contestant, being too nervous to say – their piece. They were then handed bags and turned loose among the assembled thousands, who vote for their favorite by depositing pennies in the appropriate bag. The winner is determined by the weight of pennies collected.
After the merriment, we bounced upstairs to the Liaden Lounge Open House. Elaine, Debbie, Thuy and Angie (aka TeamNoSleep) had outdone themselves. The room was well decorated in lizards, there was food enough to feed an army, and at last lots of good company, including but not limited to Charliece Hilary, Kammi Davis, Mike and Pam Oberg, arrived to make it all worthwhile. CONduit doesn't have a party tradition, so the Lounge was comfortably full from the time it opened until we staggered off to bed, just after midnight, SLC time.
Saturday started early with breakfast at Dee's, then back to the con for a 10 a.m. writing panel/how-to session with Lee Modesitt and Dave Wolverton, then to an autograph session in the dealers room, and then to the Mike Show, another CONduit tradition. All the convention's special guests – Jordin Kare, Tracy and Laura Hickman, us, and Shannon Hale – were put on the spot by Mike Oberg, who fielded and translated questions from the audience. It was a good time, with some interesting questions – and answers – and Tracy Hickman received his award with good humor.
After a quick cheese sandwich, Steve went back to the art show to do some more judging, then we met again with Dave Wolverton, Shannon Hale, and Jim van Pelt to discuss the death and possible resurrection of the midlist.
We had an hour's breather, then betook ourselves to the GoH event, aka Interviewing the Characters. Lee Modesitt gave us a lovely introduction and then we invited the audience to ask what they would of our characters. Unfortunately, this didn't work quite as well as it has in the past, whether from auctorial exhaustion, altitude, sitting behind a table, or character attitude. We finally threw the floor open to general questions for the authors, and so the hour was passed.
Dinner at Dee's, where Steve made a big hit with our waitress, then back to the con so I could do my gig as masquerade judge.
The masquerade, in my uninformed opinion, was very good. Nice efforts in the novice and journeyman categories, and only one (beautifully conceived and executed) master entry. My fellow judges were a good-natured crew and awards were, um, awarded with dispatch.
Duty done, I collected Steve from a mini-hall-party outside the art show, and we wandered up to the Liaden Lounge to read the first three chapters of Crystal Soldier to a silent audience, chatted for a bit, settled on a time for the Friends of Liad breakfast next morning, then moved off to our room and collapsed into bed.
Sunday morning came 'way too early – even Steve looked surprised. For myself, I was so tired, I was shaking. Nonetheless, we got our acts into a semblance of together and went down to the lobby to collect our hardy fellow breakfasters: Elaine, Thuy, Debbie and Angie, and walked uphill to JB's restaurant. An IV of coffee and a helping of French toast kicked the brain into gear, and we all meandered down the hill again, pausing at the bus stop gift shop to see if they carried Salt Lake City playing cards. Alas, they did not, and we returned to the hotel in time to go back to the room to collect "This House" for our reading.
The ever-helpful Tamara Hawks was there before us, bearing coffee, bless her, and a guest of honor plaque. It's quite nice, etched with the Official CONduit 14 artwork, the dates and so on. We thanked her, posed for the photo op, read the story to an attentive audience, then skipped downstairs for the Magic in SF Panel, wherein Sharon terrified Lee Allred, but was otherwise perfectly well-behaved.
Did a lightning tour of the art show, to see how the rest of the judging came out, then proceeded to our last panel of the con, Giving Life to your Lesser Characters. Shannon Hale moderated, with Dave Wolverton and Lee Modesitt, who were very likely extremely tired of seeing us by this point. It was a lively panel, though I'm not sure we ever did resolve the "how" or "why" of some characters leaping spontaneously to life. After, local FoL Arlynn Horne, who we hadn't seen all weekend, whizzed by the table and dropped off The War Magician which she had kindly agreed to loan me – and then vanished into the crowd.
We did a last run through the dealers room, collecting CONduit 14 t-shirts on the way – thanks to Kammi's mom! – then hit the last half of the art auction, in which the members of TeamNoSleep were active participants. There were, to my mind, an unfortunate number of prints, and almost no original art at auction. Guess I'm spoiled. Or old-fashioned. Or both.
The ladies collected and stored their loot, then we walked out into the early evening to Buca de Beppo – a new dining experience for the two of us -- and did a kind of Italian Great Wall. Chicken Marsala, Veal Something, Spaghetti... Lots of everything and everything good, the conversation especially, and if we were all a little silly, well – we'd earned it.
After dinner, we walked – slowly – back to the hotel, bade TeamNoSleep a fond farewell and repaired to our room, where we packed -- inefficiently, but it got done – checked with Amtrak and ascertained that California Zephyr to Chicago was on time, and lay down for a couple hour nap.
We rose at 2 a.m., dragged the luggage downstairs, asked the desk to call us a cab, and were at the train station in plenty of time to check the non-essential baggage through. As it happens, the Zephyr was about 20 minutes late, but who's counting. We ascended to the first class compartment, where Pete the attendant had forethoughtfully made up our bunks, and hit them hard for another couple hours of sleep.
The trip home was uneventful, and we slept through most of it anyway. At Chicago, police officers with dogs were Very Much in Evidence during our four hour layover, and we were able to upgrade to a sleeping compartment on the Chicago to Albany leg, insuring thereby that the train would run on time, which it didn't, quite.
We drove home the calm way, instead of the interstate, and arrived home midnightish, to the barely concealed joy of the cats.
...and the rest is history.
Here ends the Con and Trip Report.
In case you're ever in Salt Lake City, Dee's Diner is a cross between a really big Denny's and a neighborhood Baltimore diner. The waitresses are for the most part in the forty-and-above range, perennially harried, and tough enough for rock 'n roll. They take your order with a certain world-weary patience and deliver the food to the table with dispatch if not aplomb. The food is varied, plentiful and cheap. Just like going home, without the humidity.
After our soiree at Dee's on Thursday night, we walked back to the hotel, parted company with Thuy and Elaine – they to the hot tub, we to our room. Steve and I sat in the window overlooking the Daytona 500 Car Sale in the farther of the two parking lots, and talked for a bit, then turned in at not-very-much-short of 1 a.m. SLC time.
The con Officially Started Friday at noon. If you want to read all about it, look behind the curtain.
Friday morning was the CONduit Breakfast with the Guests from 8:30 to 10:30. The concept is much like a Friends of Liad breakfast, with the con's guests and those members who wish to sitting at a long table sharing, well, breakfast. I woke up with a headache and let Steve shower and go down while I slowly got myself together, and joined him, Lee Modesitt and Ken Rand. The restaurant had unfortunately forgotten the part about the long table, but we had a pleasant conversation among ourselves, and parted at our leisure, Lee to pursue his own nefarious schemes and we with Ken Rand to find a quiet corner to be interviewed in.
The interview went more or less well and will be appearing in a Talebones near you sometime next year (Talebones has recently cut back to two issues a year), after which we wandered the emerging con for a few minutes, then went upstairs for a quick cheese sandwich before our first panel.
With Lee's steady hand on the moderator's wheel, Julia West, Susan Kroupa, Steve and I kept the audience spellbound with our discussion of culture clashes in science fiction and fantasy. The consensus of the panel was that all fiction is about culture clashes, in that we are all, as individuals, a subculture of our own.
That settled, Steve fled across the hall to talk about SFWA with the able assistance of Brook West and Susan Kroupa while I went upstairs to feed a super Tylenol to my head.
After lunch, Steve reported to the Art Show to start his judging gig while I shopped the dealers room, then sat in a much-too-comfy chair in the lobby to people-watch. Sue Kroupa came by and we had a nice chat until it was time for her to go and for me to collect Steve and pull him off to dinner before we went to the ice cream social.
In between dinner and the social, we got our Big Adrenal Rush when Steve discovered that his camera was missing. We combed the con, alerted Security, Ops – and finally found it under the table in our first panel room. Phew!
CONduit's ice cream social doubles as a meet-the-fan-groups fair. We mooched about a bit, collected our ice cream (one scoop only, but the scoop is the size of New Jersey. This is, in my opinion, the Exactly Perfect amount of chocolate chip mint ice cream.), chatted with Mary Kay and fellow GoH Jordin Kare, and then it was time to choose the CONduit mascot.
This was fun. Six hardy folk in costume vied for the honor by presenting themselves on stage and saying – or in the case of one contestant, being too nervous to say – their piece. They were then handed bags and turned loose among the assembled thousands, who vote for their favorite by depositing pennies in the appropriate bag. The winner is determined by the weight of pennies collected.
After the merriment, we bounced upstairs to the Liaden Lounge Open House. Elaine, Debbie, Thuy and Angie (aka TeamNoSleep) had outdone themselves. The room was well decorated in lizards, there was food enough to feed an army, and at last lots of good company, including but not limited to Charliece Hilary, Kammi Davis, Mike and Pam Oberg, arrived to make it all worthwhile. CONduit doesn't have a party tradition, so the Lounge was comfortably full from the time it opened until we staggered off to bed, just after midnight, SLC time.
Saturday started early with breakfast at Dee's, then back to the con for a 10 a.m. writing panel/how-to session with Lee Modesitt and Dave Wolverton, then to an autograph session in the dealers room, and then to the Mike Show, another CONduit tradition. All the convention's special guests – Jordin Kare, Tracy and Laura Hickman, us, and Shannon Hale – were put on the spot by Mike Oberg, who fielded and translated questions from the audience. It was a good time, with some interesting questions – and answers – and Tracy Hickman received his award with good humor.
After a quick cheese sandwich, Steve went back to the art show to do some more judging, then we met again with Dave Wolverton, Shannon Hale, and Jim van Pelt to discuss the death and possible resurrection of the midlist.
We had an hour's breather, then betook ourselves to the GoH event, aka Interviewing the Characters. Lee Modesitt gave us a lovely introduction and then we invited the audience to ask what they would of our characters. Unfortunately, this didn't work quite as well as it has in the past, whether from auctorial exhaustion, altitude, sitting behind a table, or character attitude. We finally threw the floor open to general questions for the authors, and so the hour was passed.
Dinner at Dee's, where Steve made a big hit with our waitress, then back to the con so I could do my gig as masquerade judge.
The masquerade, in my uninformed opinion, was very good. Nice efforts in the novice and journeyman categories, and only one (beautifully conceived and executed) master entry. My fellow judges were a good-natured crew and awards were, um, awarded with dispatch.
Duty done, I collected Steve from a mini-hall-party outside the art show, and we wandered up to the Liaden Lounge to read the first three chapters of Crystal Soldier to a silent audience, chatted for a bit, settled on a time for the Friends of Liad breakfast next morning, then moved off to our room and collapsed into bed.
Sunday morning came 'way too early – even Steve looked surprised. For myself, I was so tired, I was shaking. Nonetheless, we got our acts into a semblance of together and went down to the lobby to collect our hardy fellow breakfasters: Elaine, Thuy, Debbie and Angie, and walked uphill to JB's restaurant. An IV of coffee and a helping of French toast kicked the brain into gear, and we all meandered down the hill again, pausing at the bus stop gift shop to see if they carried Salt Lake City playing cards. Alas, they did not, and we returned to the hotel in time to go back to the room to collect "This House" for our reading.
The ever-helpful Tamara Hawks was there before us, bearing coffee, bless her, and a guest of honor plaque. It's quite nice, etched with the Official CONduit 14 artwork, the dates and so on. We thanked her, posed for the photo op, read the story to an attentive audience, then skipped downstairs for the Magic in SF Panel, wherein Sharon terrified Lee Allred, but was otherwise perfectly well-behaved.
Did a lightning tour of the art show, to see how the rest of the judging came out, then proceeded to our last panel of the con, Giving Life to your Lesser Characters. Shannon Hale moderated, with Dave Wolverton and Lee Modesitt, who were very likely extremely tired of seeing us by this point. It was a lively panel, though I'm not sure we ever did resolve the "how" or "why" of some characters leaping spontaneously to life. After, local FoL Arlynn Horne, who we hadn't seen all weekend, whizzed by the table and dropped off The War Magician which she had kindly agreed to loan me – and then vanished into the crowd.
We did a last run through the dealers room, collecting CONduit 14 t-shirts on the way – thanks to Kammi's mom! – then hit the last half of the art auction, in which the members of TeamNoSleep were active participants. There were, to my mind, an unfortunate number of prints, and almost no original art at auction. Guess I'm spoiled. Or old-fashioned. Or both.
The ladies collected and stored their loot, then we walked out into the early evening to Buca de Beppo – a new dining experience for the two of us -- and did a kind of Italian Great Wall. Chicken Marsala, Veal Something, Spaghetti... Lots of everything and everything good, the conversation especially, and if we were all a little silly, well – we'd earned it.
After dinner, we walked – slowly – back to the hotel, bade TeamNoSleep a fond farewell and repaired to our room, where we packed -- inefficiently, but it got done – checked with Amtrak and ascertained that California Zephyr to Chicago was on time, and lay down for a couple hour nap.
We rose at 2 a.m., dragged the luggage downstairs, asked the desk to call us a cab, and were at the train station in plenty of time to check the non-essential baggage through. As it happens, the Zephyr was about 20 minutes late, but who's counting. We ascended to the first class compartment, where Pete the attendant had forethoughtfully made up our bunks, and hit them hard for another couple hours of sleep.
The trip home was uneventful, and we slept through most of it anyway. At Chicago, police officers with dogs were Very Much in Evidence during our four hour layover, and we were able to upgrade to a sleeping compartment on the Chicago to Albany leg, insuring thereby that the train would run on time, which it didn't, quite.
We drove home the calm way, instead of the interstate, and arrived home midnightish, to the barely concealed joy of the cats.
...and the rest is history.
Here ends the Con and Trip Report.
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Date: 2004-06-14 12:55 pm (UTC)