Before I had even left for the con, the panel schedule was already messed up. The Balticon folks had mistakenly given me Scott Edelman‘s reading slot and emailed me panel assignments that were at variance with the pocket schedule on the website. Things further devolved from there when it was discovered that my picture appeared next to Scott’s bio in the program book; my buddy Tom Doyle had been given two reading slots; and the schedule for at least one entire room seemed to have come unstuck in time, leaving plenty of people with double bookings, missing panels, or both.

Late Sunday afternoon, I discovered that my panel on “The Future of Cities” — which had been listed at 3 pm in the email I received from programming — and which the pocket program listed at 5 pm 6 pm — was actually going to be held at 6 pm 7 pm. Plus it was going to be short a moderator, considering that he was double booked. At that point, I just decided I’d had enough and bagged the whole thing. I was sick anyways.

Some cons are just like that.

But hey, just because Balticon was chaotic and organizationally challenged in places doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun. I go to cons for very specific reasons: (1) to catch up with friends that I generally wouldn’t otherwise see; (2) to soak up SFnal ideas and pour a few into the mix myself; and (3) to promote myself and my books. But most of the people wandering the hallways at Balticon seemed to have a different agenda. They were more interested in filking or dressing up like slutty Jedi knights or playing obscure board games until four in the morning. Which is fine. Personally, I’d prefer to listen to panelists discuss the ways in which Maud’Dib deviates from the Joseph Campbell mythical hero track, but that’s just me.

Add to this the fact that the Baltimore Marriott Hunt Valley Inn is a terribly nice place, perfect for cons with its abundance of labyrinthine hallways and nooks for display tables. The dealer’s room was enticing and not too crowded, the bar was inviting, and the conference rooms got a little too hot (but then again, when have you been to a con where that wasn’t the case?).

Will I go back? Maybe not every year, but… sure, I’ll go back.

Some of the highlights of my Balticon experience:

• A very nice dinner with fellow authors Jeri Smith-Ready, Maria Snyder, and David J. Williams, among others, during which we discussed our favorite topics (publishing and book promotion).
• A hyperkinetic reading by David J. Williams for his just-published debut novel The Mirrored Heavens. Let’s just say that watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was kind of a letdown in comparison. Indy may have had a nuclear bomb blast, giant killer ants, motorcycle chases, and a swordfight atop Jeeps cruising at 80 mph, but David’s excerpt had some SERIOUS FRICKIN’ ACTION. David mentions on his blog that one of the audience members fell asleep and began snoring during the reading — which is true — but hey, I’m sure there was some deranged sap who slept through the bombing of Pearl Harbor too.
• A joint signing with comic book artist and fabulously friendly guy Mark Wheatley, during which much discussion was had about Marvel Comics film properties (Iron Man, of course, plus the upcoming Captain America, Thor, and Avengers flicks) and Hollywood in general. That’s the cover of Mark’s Frankenstein Mobster on the right.
• A long discussion with Nathan Lilly and Diane Weinstein about William Hope Hodgson’s classic 1912 science fiction/horror novel The Night Land, which then segued into a discussion about H.P. Lovecraft, which then segued into a long complaint by me about how nobody’s done the kind of authoritative chronological trade paperback treatment for Lovecraft like Del Rey has done for Robert E. Howard.
• Reading chapters 1, 9, and part of 10 from my upcoming novel MultiReal and hand-selling a number of copies of Infoquake in the hallways. Supposedly the readings will be available on the Balticon podcast at some point, at which point I’ll link there.
• A very stimulating panel on “How Long Will It Still Be Called the Internet?” The panel’s supposed moderator (whose name I never caught) walked in two minutes after the hour, informed me and fellow panelist Angela Render that he was double-booked, and promptly hightailed it out of there. Since neither Angela nor I had prepared any questions, the panel soon turned into a lively free-for-all with the audience about net neutrality, government censorship, the changing nature of web client technology, and the sad state of email. The discussion quickly went over my head, but in a good way.
• Counting the aforementioned Internet panel, writer and web programmer Angela Render moderated no less than three of my Webbish panels this weekend. I think she deserves a metal of some sort. (No, not a medal. I think we should name an atomic element after her.) No offense, Angela, you did a good job, but I’m sick of you.
• Sampling the wonders of шљивовица with my official fangirl Danita Fries and my future wife Suzanne Rosin. (No, she’s not really my future wife. Not in this dimension, at least.) (What, you don’t read Cyrillic? That’s “Slivovitz.” Otherwise known as “fermented plum juice,” “paint thinner mixed with battery acid,” or “good shit” to you and me.)

The last time I was at Balticon was in either 1990 or 1991. I was a junior at Johns Hopkins University at the time, and a bunch of my friends and me decided that Balticon would be an easy place to score some alcohol. We were right. I remember playing piano in a hallway, and drinking, and doing some debaucherous things in a stairway, and drinking, and getting the hotel security guards sicced on me, and drinking. When I finally realized that all my friends had left hours ago, I managed to convince a young woman named Kibbux to drive me 30 miles back to my house in the snow. I swear her name was Kibbux. Her car was covered with ice, and all we had to scrape off the windows with was a fork. And that, my friends, is about as wild and crazy as David Louis Edelman has ever gotten.

I don’t plan to do anything remotely that edgy this weekend. Instead I’ll be on panels and giving a reading from MultiReal. Here’s my schedule, along with the descriptions from the pocket schedule and the room names in parentheses:

• Friday, 5 pm
  Publishing Labyrinth (Belmont)
  Learn the ins and outs of this business!
• Friday, 7 pm
  E-Publishing (Derby)
  Let experienced people talk about this hot new trend!
• Saturday, 12 noon:
  Building a Website for Fun and Profit (Belmont)
• Saturday, 1 pm:
  Autograph Session (Hotel Lobby)
• Saturday, 6 pm:
  How Much Longer Will It Still Be the Internet? (Salon D)
  Some countries plan to create “their own” (most likely restricted) internets because they’re uncomfortable with the present halcyon freedom “on line.” What’s the future of www?
• Sunday, 11 am:
  Reading from MultiReal (Pimlico)
• Sunday, 6 pm:
  Future of Cities (Salon D)
  Are large cities sustainable in our modern world? Can green building and alternate housing keep them during global warming or our next ice age? Could they become utopias?

No, I won’t be bringing a ton of promotional goodies with me. I’ve been sick and haven’t had time to prepare. Deal.

The highlights:

• Scott Edelman and I bumped into each other several times and shared a plane flight home. As you can see by the photo on the right, the meeting didn’t go so well. (You can see more of Scott’s photos from WFC 2007 on his Flickr photo set.)
• I had a long, rambling conversation with the inimitable Hal Duncan, beginning as a summary of his next work, continuing on to a discussion about the subtext of the Epic of Gilgamesh, moving on to Joseph Campbell and primitive mythology, and concluding with the psychology of the animal kingdom. Fookin’ great guy, that Hal Duncan.
• Matt Jarpe and I came up with the brilliant idea of Photoshopping authentic photos so they look like they’ve been badly Photoshopped. He’s going to try to track down a photo of him and George R.R. Martin taken the other night, and make it look like he’s Photoshopped himself into it. Personally, I think we may have started a whole new art form, and I can’t wait to get started myself. (Who knows — perhaps Robert Stanek got there ahead of us?)
• I finally met Patrick Nielsen Hayden, one of the editors at Tor! Patrick said that he didn’t recognize me without my hat, and that he reads my LiveJournal, and that he’s amused about how I boldface the important phrases in my blog posts, just like a Spider-Man comic book. (Eat yer heart out, PNH. ‘Nuff said!)
• My reading of chapter 2 from MultiReal went off swimmingly, despite my horribly sore throat and need to sip water every four seconds. Nick Sagan praised my “excellent word choices,” and Paul Cornell continued to call me his “favorite current SF writer” (which hopefully he also repeats when I’m not in the room).
• At the very classy party put on by UK publishers Orbit, I got a chance to meet the fabulous Scott Lynch (he of The Lies of Locke Lamora). I also had plenty of opportunity to act like a big shot and pretend like I know how to promote books online in conversations with Jon Armstrong (whose Grey came out from Night Shade this year), soon-to-be-published author Daryl Gregory, and also soon-to-be-published author David J. Williams.
• Guest of Honor Kim Newman, Paul Cornell, and I had a great time poring over the SFWriter.com newsletter and catching up on all the Robert Sawyer news fit for Robert Sawyer to print.

• Speaking of whom, damn it, Robert Sawyer does appear to be a genuinely nice guy, as I discovered chatting with him at the Tor party. Not only is he very friendly, but he was very generous with his time and advice as well.
• Hung out here and there with my copy editor Deanna Hoak and F&SF Slush God John Joseph Adams (see pic to the right).
• Award winning artist John Picacio gave me lots of sage career advice, and related the story of how he brought Graham Joyce home with him from a World Fantasy Con. (Not for those reasons, you sickos.)
• I had dinner with “the Brits,” including Solaris honchos George Mann and Marc Gascoigne, novelist and telly writer Paul Cornell, and Waterstone’s buyer Michael Rowley. As the only American at the table, they obliged me by talking only about cricket, the BBC, fish ‘n chips, and various types of cloudy and rainy weather. (Michael Rowley also set the record straight by telling me that socialized medicine works just great in the UK, thank you very much, although dentistry is a separate issue and quite problematic. So fuck you, Sean Hannity.)
• Jay Lake signed my copy of his Night Shade novel Trial of Flowers, though exactly what he signed I have no clue.
• I had a good time attending the Shimmer Pirate Issue group reading. Stand-out reading honors went to Marissa Lingen for her story “Pirates, by Adeline Thromb Age 8,” which had everyone in the room spitting out their pirate grog in laughter.
• Have I mentioned Jess Nevins and the 1939 British pulp story about the six-gun gorilla? Okay, I have now. Jess, it turns out, is a terrific guy and one of the coolest people I met all weekend. He also knows more about the old pulps than just about any person alive.

Someone asked me the other day why exactly I write these detailed posts of my con experiences where I name-drop everybody I met. It’s simple. I write them mostly for me, so that I can remember later the names of people I met. Of course, I also hope that they’re entertaining for you, whoever you are reading my blog.

So there’s Penguicon in a nutshell, from my perspective: one part serious business, two parts goofy SFnal fun.

The programming seemed slanted towards the science fiction side of things, with relatively little in the way of crossover. There were panels on Explaining PostgreSQL and panels on Pirates, Ninja, Jedi, and Dwarves, but not a huge amount of mashup between the two. Luckily most of the SF authors on hand were technogeeks themselves (e.g. Charles Stross and Karl Schroeder) or at least pseudo-technogeeks (e.g. me).

But the folks wandering the halls seemed to lean heavily towards the SF fanboy (and fangirl) sphere. You had the Chubby Guy Who Dresses Like a Character from Tron (pictured to the right), the Chubby Guy Who Dresses Like Zorro, the Chubby Guy Who Filks Like a Zen Master, the Not-at-All-Chubby Guy Who Dresses Like a Jedi, and the Attack of the Thousand Chubby Women Showing Enormous (And Occasionally Inappropriate) Amounts of Cleavage. As for the technogeeks, occasionally you’d see some scrawny, bespectacled soul with a Linux advocacy t-shirt huddled over his laptop in the corner.

Of the half-dozen cons I’ve been to in this past year, Penguicon certainly seemed to be one of the most organized. The ops booth was clearly marked and continuously staffed, and the programming went off pretty much where and when the program book said it would. If there were glitches — and Programming Wrangler Matt Arnold assured me there were some of those — they were largely invisible to me. It definitely helped that the Troy Hilton was very accommodating. Penguicon seems to have taken up pretty much the whole place, and a number of rooms at overflow hotels as well. Which means that just about all of the programming took place in one long, curving hallway, with the room parties and the con suites one quick flight of stairs away. The only obvious snafu I could see was the fact that there were loud anime movies screening right next door to quiet discussions about Technological Singularities, and the panelists would have to speak up to be heard.

Among the folks I got to spend a lot of time with were John Scalzi and his wife Krissy, the former of whom is about to embark on a 492-city tour for his new novel The Last Colony; Tobias Buckell and his wife Emily, the former of whom is on Locus’s shortlist for Best First Novel; and Nick Sagan, screenwriter, SF trilogy novelist, and just fabulously and terrifically nice guy.

I got to listen to Charles Stross discuss everything from politics to sociology to airships on Venus. Karl Schroeder earned my eternal enmity by dashing just about everything I know about neurology to pieces within the first sentence of his “Brain as Computer” panel, but damn if he didn’t turn out to be a very nice guy anyway. I also got a chance to share a panel on Techno Thrillers vs. Near Future SF with Elizabeth Bear, and was so engrossed in our 2 1/2 hour-long conversation at the airport (with Nick Sagan and 3D printing guru Sebastien Bailard) that I very nearly followed Bear on to the wrong plane.

I also met a nice and ambitious Lulu-published author named David Crampton (author of The Remembrance); shared some book marketing chat with him and Sarah Shetterly; gabbed about writing, critiquing, and publishing in Anne Zanoni and Michael “Freon” Andaluz‘s writing workshop (also present: Baen novelist extraordinaire Michael Z. Williamson); got to congratulate Sarah Monette on her Campbell Award nomination; gave away 50 promotional Infoquake CDs; and to top things off, got taken out to breakfast by Penguicon organizers John Guest and Matt Arnold.

And best of all, I got through most of the weekend without having to explain my ambivalent feelings about open source software and the fact that I run Windows Vista on my desktop.

By this standard, Capclave 2006 might be your kooky uncle who’s continually rushing around in a frenzy of activity. He’s a blast to hang out with, he’s smart as hell, and he can teach you a thing or two about Standing Up to The Man. But when he drops you back home at the end of the day, you can’t help thinking to yourself, “How can anyone live like that?”

It’s now evening on Sunday October 22, Capclave has officially come to a close, and any minute now I expect them to finally lock down a schedule for the weekend. Because there certainly wasn’t a definitive one available on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Events were constantly changing rooms, panels were added and subtracted, new people were appearing left and right, and the hallways were full of quickly taped-up signs of schedule changes. Programming manager Elaine Brennan could be seen rushing to and fro throughout the whole weekend, bravely and nobly jousting against the confusion.

Add to that the fact that the Hilton Silver Spring is not a well designed hotel, to put it charitably. There are two separate banks of elevators that go to different floors. The lobby is minuscule, and the bar is almost impossible to find. The hallways are narrow, the meeting spaces are strangely configured, and when you open some doors they block off the little gold plates with the room names on them. I got the impression from various overheard comments that the hotel kept fucking around with the Capclave people and altering the particulars of their agreement. (The Hilton in ominous, James Earl Jones basso profundo: “Perhaps you think you’re being treated… unfairly?”)

One could easily imagine taking this chaos in stride at a con where everyone was wearing Spock ears or gladiator costumes. But the Capclave programming was fairly high-minded, with panels on The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence, Global Warming, and Sling-Shot Endings in Fiction.

But for me, the programming side of things turned out to be a bit of a wash.

I received my panel assignments via e-mail on Thursday. I wasn’t listed in the program booklet for any of the three panels I’d been assigned to, and one of the panels I was supposed to appear on wasn’t listed in the booklet either. My reading (like everyone’s) was in a small room on the 12th floor that wasn’t listed in the program booklet. I had no idea I was scheduled to do a signing until I happened to wander past a table in the dealer’s room and see my name on it. When I arrived at one of my panels, my co-panelist apparently had no idea I was supposed to be there and had already begun a prepared 40-minute Powerpoint presentation, with handouts. Another of my panels was canceled because the hotel yanked away a block of rooms at the last minute.

Other than that? I had a great time. Programming is nice and all, but really I go to these conventions to shake hands, pass out Infoquake-related freebies, and attend the parties. The Saturday night formal, in particular, was a schmoozefest of the highest order.

So here are some of the people-related highlights of my Capclave experience:

• Matt Jarpe and I shared a few beers. Matt’s first novel, Radio Freefall, is coming out next summer from Tor, and what I’ve read so far (about a third of the book) is quite unique and engaging. (Full disclosure here: Matt has hired me to design and program the website for the book. More on both soon, hopefully.) Matt’s formidable powers of observation were in full evidence at the formal when he noted that only at a science fiction convention would everyone make a mad rush for the cake table instead of the bar when the doors opened.
• I had a few nice conversations with Jim Freund, who instantly became my best friend when he started encouraging me to appear on his New York SF radio show Hour of the Wolf, which reaches some 75,000 New Yorkers every weekend. If this does happen, I’ll certainly post the details here.
• I sat in on a very entertaining reading by Mindy Klasky, whose new novel Girl’s Guide to Witchcraft might be called Bridget Jones’ Diary as told to Aleister Crowley. I thought I was making a big push for Infoquake… but Mindy came prepared with Girl’s Guide books, pencils, postcards, brochures, and a hand-sewn quilt she was giving away on her website. It didn’t hurt that Mindy’s got a very theatric reading style, and the book sounds like a hoot as well.
• Legendary Tor editor David Hartwell and I chatted about his new The Space Opera Renaissance anthology, Matt Jarpe’s book (which David is editing), and book club editions, among other things.
• I got to have a brief chat with Michael Swanwick at his autographing session (thanks, Cat Rambo, for providing the excuse for an introduction!). True to his maverick reputation, Mr. Swanwick was sitting Indian style on top of the table the entire time.
• I spent some quality time gossiping about cons at a greasy Irish pub with the lovely Suzanne Rosin, who’s on the committee for the upcoming PhilCon in November. Suzanne later showcased the upper two-thirds of her breasts in a very tight corset that evening, for which I and every heterosexual male at Capclave thank her heartily.
• Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) Eastern Regional Director Diane Turnshek and I discussed book promotion, SFWA, the Infoquake Gimmicky Promotional Giveaway, and other sundry things. I also got to spend some time schmoozing with past SFWA president Michael Capobianco, who looked much too serene and distinguished in his tuxedo to be in the same crowd as the rest of us.
• For the third con in a row, I saw and failed to introduce myself to Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden (whom somebody referred to as “our Scott and Zelda”). One o’ these days.
• I attended two very engrossing readings by James Morrow and con guest of honor Kim Stanley Robinson. I can’t remember the name of the work in progress Jim Morrow read from, but it seemed to be a very astute social satire involving clones, philosophers, lesbian Marxist revolutionaries, and a replica of the Titanic.
• My Washington, DC-area contacts in the science fiction field have been woefully lacking, and so I was very glad to meet Thomas Doyle, Bob Angell, and a few various people associated with the Washington Science Fiction Association (WSFA) whose names were quickly metabolized out of my system along with the too-many-Heinekens I drank that night.

And now, alas, con weekend is over, and back to reality for me.

• Bumping into John Scalzi at Dulles Airport (he recognized me long before I recognized him), and getting to share two taxicabs and innumerable schmoozing sessions. John is a true class act, who had much wisdom about the industry to dispense and must have introduced me to two dozen different people.
• Meeting my copy editor, the sleek, smart, and sexy Deanna Hoak, in person for the first time and getting to sing happy birthday to her.
• Gabbing with China Mieville for all of three minutes, during which I was privileged to hear his imitation of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons.
• Having my mind blown by a reading of China‘s upcoming, as-yet-untitled work (think Perdido Street Station meets Hyperion).
• Attending a truly remarkable reading by Jeffrey Ford (author of The Emperor of Ice Cream), who may look a little bit like Comic Book Guy but reads like James Gandolfini if James Gandolfini was a little more, you know, intense.
• Listening to the radiant Mary Robinette Kowal discuss how puppetry suffers from a similar lack of respect as science fiction (and snagging a copy of Shimmer, a magazine for which she is the art director).
• Discussing comic books, book promotion, Star Wars, why Hollywood needs to hire me to write a Dr. Strange screenplay, and many other topics both large and small with Slush God John Joseph Adams.
• Watching a peculiar onstage performance by legend Thomas Disch, who alternately broke into tears, berated his fellow panel-mates about acoustics, and attempted to drown out convention guest of honor James Morrow.
• Listening to Slush Master and all-around funny, interesting guy Douglas Cohen perform some of his phat rhymes.
• Attending the late-night “stealth reading” for the Twenty Epics anthology (stand-out performance by Christopher Barzac).
• Getting to rub elbows however briefly with other SF folk such as R. Scott Bakker, Alan DeNiro, David Barr Kirtley, Paul Di Filippo, Matthew Kressel, Jim Freund, Yves Meynard, Scott Edelman (no relation), Adam Golaski, and a number of others who didn’t have their names listed on the ReaderCon guest list and who therefore will have to go anonymous for now.