Friday report

[adair]

Last Friday I was in Kansas City at ConQuest, buying things. I bought 2 fannish t-shirts, a very nice notebook made with visible sewn signatures and a corvid stamp on the cover, a cd by a regional group who wrote Firefly songs, and around 6 books. I did not recognize any of the authors - they were all local or regional and small press - but i felt I needed to support writers who came to the con. I suspect they will all go to B2P after I check them out. It was my group's first time to the con, so we were testing it out as a possibility. We may well go again; the hotel was great, Kansas City is not what I expected (if we go again we will go to the Jazz museum and take the trolley tour) and the con had its good parts. It used to be a book con, but as many have it has become more for gamers and cosplay. Readers are still there; I went to a good panel on economics in world-building, and what writers did or did not do well.

This week I put 4 more books in my Take to Books to Prisoners bag (that's 8 for May) and shortened 3 pairs of cotton pants for summer. I have 5 more to shorten. I am 5'1" and always need to shorten everything; I cannot count on petite being in a size I can wear; I am at the crossover point between standard and women's size and petite sizes are usually just a little small for me. I apparently bought summer pants in previous years and did not shorten them. I bought 4 pair this year, and I Will get them all hemmed to the proper length.

Comments

[tanaqui]

That con panel sounds really great -- I love reading stuff where you realize authors have thought properly about the nuts and bolts of how their world works. (And hate being jerked out a story by being brought face to face with questions like "why are they not all starving/who pays for all this stuff/where does it even come from and how does it get there?")

Well done on finding some more books to donate, and good luck with shortening the pants -- not being a standard size can be very annoying at times!

My accomplishment in the past few days was to shred some more old paperwork -- mostly just normal accumulation of incoming stuff like receipts and mail, but with a little bit of stuff weeded from the files.

[adair]

Yeah, the panel stayed on topic - sometimes a rare thing - and people brought up interesting bits. I suggested two authors who think things through, and manage to imply a good deal about the economy of their worlds without going into too much explanation - C.J. Cherryh and Elizabeth Bear. I got a couple of recommendations - Jacqueline Winspear has a series with Share in the titles and Nathan Lowell Trader's ales for Golden Age of the Solar Clipper. Also an H.G.Wells I had never heard of - Anticipations. I have not looked at any yet bet they on on my Seek Out list.

Shredding paper work is always good, and sorting it out for the shred pile even better. Onward.