Back from Fantasy Matters

Wow.

Just wow.

Lynne and I have had an amazing year of conventions and events, but the Fantasy Matters Conference was maybe the best.

We dropped Caitlin off at my mom’s apartment on Thursday night. I can’t explain how weird it was to spend the night in our house without her. No coughs, no calling for Lynne at 3 a.m. for a diaper change, and no gentle grinding sounds from her feeding pump. We’ve been in hotels without her, but never the house. It was a bit unsettling.

Friday morning we left at the crack of dawn in an NIU Prius Hybrid. My wife is now in love with this car. The drive was long and mostly uneventful. We’re starting to get used to this drive through rural Wisconsin. The biggest weirdness was the number of road-killed deer on the way.

We arrived in Minneapolis with time to spare. The hotel was off of the highway and couldn’t have been easier to find. We arrived just in time for a business lunch for Lynne with one of her Popular Culture Association colleagues, Randy. He’s a sweet, retired librarian from St. Olaf College and is an internationally recognized scholar of Dime Novels. He is also the editor of Dime Novel Round-Up, the peer-reviewed journal that publishes Lynne’s papers about cross-dressing girls. It was a lovely and productive lunch for my wife.

We then plunged into the conference. It took place in U of Minnesota’s Mondale Law School. It was a nice space, though the seating was a bit formal. There were almost no SF fans at the conference. Everybody was an academic or and author. It was a little strange since we ended up hanging out a lot with the authors. We spent time with some recently made friends like Pat Rothfuss and Jim Hines. We also met a slew of other authors like Jackie Kessler, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Drew Bowling, Bryan Thao Worra, Caitlin Kittredge, and David Anthony Durham. They were all smart, funny, and fascinating. We ended up having coffee with most of them on Friday, Lynne worked her charms, and I learned a lot about writing.

Friday night we went out for Indian food with our friends Jenni and Perrin. We had a great time swapping behind-the-scenes convention stories. We then made our first pilgrimage to Mall of America so that Jenni and Lynne could go to Lush. We met our other friends Christopher and Michael there. The boys talked much about Doctor Who while the girls looked at smelly soaps and shoes. We all ended up back at Christopher’s house where Alicia joined us to watch Time Crash, the Doctor Who Children in Need special.

Time Crash was very charming. It was definitely a love letter by Tennant, Moffat, and RTD to Davison and the 80’s. As I child of that time, I ate it up. There was also much squeeing from the ladies.

The next day was filled with a ton of programming. We went to many panels and readings. Jackie Kessler’s, David Anthony Durham’s Pat Rothfuss’s readings particularly blew us away. We then had another business lunch with authors Kelly McCullough and Naomi Kritzer. It was Indian again, and the meeting went very well.

That afternoon I mostly hung out with our friend Jody and a variety of authors. The afternoon also had Neil Gaiman’s keynote reading. He was amazing. He read the unpublished first chapter of The Graveyard Book. Neil described it as a retelling of The Jungle Book, but with a child in a graveyard. It was exceptionally good, and I’m looking forward to its publication. He then talked about why fantasy lit is important and signed some things.

Lynne had a meeting with Neil Gaiman where she was apparently as spazzy as everybody else around him. She had to wait a while, but apparently got talk to Steve Bissette, the comic book artist, while waiting. She then talked to Neil and even got a hug.

That night was the reception where we ate and drank with our peeps. It was bloody brilliant. I was outed as an aspiring writer, and Pat, Jim, Kelly, Drew, David, Caitlin, and Jackie did a fair amount of mentoring. I learned so much about the craft and business of SF writing that my head is ready to explode. I can’t tell them how much I appreciated it.

The next day Lynne gave her paper on Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls. It went very well. We also attended a reading by Jim Hines that blew our socks off. We are now anxiously awaiting the publication of his first princess book, The Stepsister Scheme.

We said our goodbyes, and then hit the road. It was slow going, and we saw a disturbing number of hunters returning with dead deer strapped onto their cars. It was about 9 ½ hours of driving before we returned home with the girl.

I hope that this conference happens again next year.