Live, from Portland

Portland in the fog has all the charm and beauty of Los Angeles of 2029 in Blade Runner, but without quaint charm of suffocating corporatism. Instead, it defaults to a decidedly more Stalinist aesthetic: gray and oppressive during the day, moody and hazy at night. It’s skyline is punctuated by the occasional train yard and industrial complex on the one hand, and the very occasional example of exquisitely gaudy hyper-modernist architecture on the other. Driving through on a drizzly night (and, in Portland, most nights are drizzly), I’m often taken by the fancy that Paris, France and the Southern Pacific Railway crept into Soviet Moscow on a cold winter’s night to birth their love child and stow it safely in the city’s forgotten historic sections, so that they wouldn’t be publicly shamed by the rest of Europe.

On the other hand, there is Powell’s. And The Montage. And the other things about Portland that keep me coming back for a visit every now and then even though the weather is appalling and the streets are paved with potholes and designed according to arcane 1950s theories of traffic control that bear as much resemblance to the patterns of human travel as does spontaneous human combustion to real-world thermodynamics.
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The Balticon Adventure pt 5: Pontification, Panels, and Parties

Well, I suppose I’ve put it off long enough. The summer since Balticon has been packed to the gills with activity. Lots of writing, lots of strategizing. I don’t think I’ve read as much in one summer in at least a decade, and I’ve written 150k words and still going—might even hit 350-400k for the year by year’s end, if I budget my time right.

But I can’t put it of any longer—needs must, and I have to move on from Balticon to the next grand adventure, so I endeavor to finish this story.

Saturday began with an argument. The clock wanted to convince me that it was almost time for my first panel. I told it that it was full of shit and really needed to get a life. It countered by telling me I now had one minute less than I used to, so I’d better get my ass moving.
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The Balticon Adventure pt 4

The Saga Of The Hat

At this point in the narrative, I’m forced to chose between one of two roads. I could go along the chronology, skipping the boring and blackmail-worthy parts along the way, or I could chose a theme and tell its story…or I could jump back and forth between each as my fancy strikes me.

Guess which one I’ve picked?

It wasn’t until my appearance on Litopia last December that I began to realize the Power of the Hat ™. First, there was the encounter I recounted last time with Kim the Comic Book Goddess (who insists she’d have recognized me without the hat, but I have my doubts). Then there was the fact that Scott Roche and Sidfawu accosted me based solely upon the Power of the Hat, and we wound up sitting in the bar for several hours on Friday night talking Down From Ten, writing, and what passes for politics in my demented corner of the universe.

But before all that boring stuff, you’ll want to hear The Good Parts.
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The Balticon Adventure pt 3

Scuba Gear

I normally travel with carry-on baggage only, but it’s not because by the end of a plane ride there’s nothing that gives me greater relief from coach seat-cramp syndrome and DVT than sitting down in another small seat in a moving vehicle. Nor is it that the prospect of walking around an unfamiliar building filled with carousels from deSade’s worst dreams fills me with nauseating dread.
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The Balticon Adventure pt 2

Air Trek

I’ve often suspected that “JetBlue” is so named because of the color your legs turn in coach. Turns out that, like so many other things in the universe, I was completely wrong. They had more leg room than I’ve experienced on any flight in years – so much that I didn’t even get bruises on my knees from the seat in front. All this for the cheapest available tickets? Luxury, I say!

They also had personal televisions mounted in the back of each seat, ostensibly piping in Sat TV for our viewing pleasure. It was a special kind of SatTV, though, one designed to be suitable for children. Attempting to watch the G-rated cut of Fight Club was probably the most surreal experience of the entire weekend (which, in any weekend that contains people like Tee Morris, is saying a lot).
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The Balticon Adventure pt 1

The Trek

As a die-hard Monopoly fan I found the notion of Balticon rather tawdry. Baltic Ave is one of the two smallest, cheapest properties on the board – of course, wielded well, that little dark purple property set can leverage the whole game. Any con named after Baltic must be a chintzy affair – or it’s named after the Baltic Sea, in which case I was unlikely to pack enough SCUBA equipment to properly enjoy the experience (ironically, SCUBA gear did turn out to be a terrible omission, but more on that in a later post).

On the other hand, there is BALTICON, which the podcastery part of my brain expected to be the grand land of golden microphones forcibly pried from the fingers of Rush Limbaugh and re-purposed for nobler ends, filled to bursting with legions of immortal vocal talents, new media devotees, boundless opportunity, and rampant hedonism.
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Balticon, Here I Come

I’m going to be at Balticon next week. Those of you attending will probably see enough of me to make you sick, but such is the cross you must bear for attending science fiction conventions.

For the truly masochistic among you, you can find me in the following places:

10pm Friday — Chesapeake

“The Good Parts” Live
Live version of Erotica Writer’s podcast
with Nobilis and the rest of The Good Parts crew

9am Sat — Derby
Master’s Session: Audio Excellence in Podcasting
Presented by professional audio engineers
with some other very talented fellows

1pm:00 Sat — Derby
Is There Room In the Fridge, Hon?
The use of women as characters instead of plot
Should be a spirited debate as we talk the techniques of treating our characters as something other than plot objects.

5:00pm Sat — Chesapeake
Live Metamor City show
This cast could get messy.

7:00pm Sat — Maryland Foyer
Anthony Stevens and J. Daniel Sawyer Autographing
In case you want to have your Podthology autographed
* Stevens, Anthony
* Sawyer, J. Daniel

9:00pm Sunday — Pimlico
J. Daniel Sawyer Reading
In which I subject you to some never-before-heard selections.

Hope to see you there!