World Fantasy 2009: Calgary

So the flight to Calgary was at 7:55am on Thursday. Being the anal-retentive American traveler that I am, I decided to leave my apartment at 5am to make sure I had plenty of time to deal with airport BS. It’s a good thing I did, but not due to any airline problems, believe it or not. I went down to the car I had waiting at 5am, and the driver had been running his heat with the engine off, apparently. At 5:15, I was shaking my head as he blocked early traffic while getting a jump from another cabbie.

Met up with Jay at the airport, and got on the plane. Had a 2-seater row to myself. I wanted to sleep, but it wasn’t happening. Read a few chapters of The Name of the Wind, and then watched Hancock on the personal TV screen with in-demand movies built into the seat back (in coach, no less! Go Air Canada!).

Hancock was a little PG13, but not bad if you don’t take it too seriously. He literally shoves a guy’s head up another guy’s ass. You don’t see that every day. I took a few minutes afterward to chat with WFC Guest of Honor and Publisher of Tor Books Tom Doherty and his daughter, then I went back to my TV and watched Get Smart, which was actually really funny. Sadly, the plane started its descent and the TVs cut out when I still had 20 minutes to go. Argh! How would I ever find out if Maxwell Smart found a way to stop that nuke in LA?

Got to the convention and discovered that my publisher had sent 300 advance copies of The Warded Man to the convention to be randomly inserted in the registration gift bags. With about 550 attendees, that meant more than half of them got a free copy of the book, which is awesome. The gift bags were packed to the brim with books, and there was a swap table in the lobby in case there were books you didn’t want. That table got a lot of traffic, with some books piling high, but I never saw a copy of mine there for more than a moment, which means we had close to 100% retention and none went to waste, which is a great sign.

After checking in and warming ourselves at the bar, we did a little exploring. Calgary is an interesting town. In some ways it seems trendy and upscale and a city on the rise, particularly by the spire where the convention was. The main strip was beautiful, and the public transportation is free. That whole no sales tax thing is swell, too. The buildings and shops have a lot of character, and every restaurant we went to was fantastic. And damn if Canadians aren’t some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. New Yorkers with good hearts keep them hidden, so as not to appear weak and draw the wolves. Canadians wear their good hearts on their sleeves.

But you can’t swing a dead cat in Calgary without hitting a homeless person, and there were a lot of out of out of business shops, even on the main strip.  Plus, remember all those Mastercard commercials from the 1996 Olympics in Calgary telling you they don’t take Visa? Well it’s true. And guess what? My cash card is a Visa/Plus card, and there wasn’t a fucking ATM in the whole city that would take it. Feh.

There’s this scene in Superman III, when Superman is all screwy from the contaminated kryptonite and Lana Lang’s annoying kid yells, “Superman! You’re just in a slump! You can be great again!” That’s kinda how I felt about Calgary. I guess times are tough all over these days.

Back to WFC. World Fantasy is an industry-only convention. There are usually no fans at all, save those who are also working in the SF industry or hardcore book collectors. Most of the convention is really conducted at the bar, where folks network over an endless supply of alcohol. It’s the publishing industry, after all.

Went to bed reasonably early, but I didn’t sleep a wink. You see, I had to do my first public reading on Friday, and was a nervous wreck. I only had 30 minutes to read, and the test run I did of the chapter I had chosen took me 32 minutes, leaving -2 minutes to introduce myself and wait for stragglers before starting to read. I marked up a teacher’s copy of the book with a pencil to cut out some unnecessary parts in hopes of trimming the time down. Still, I had nightmares about it and would up just lying awake in bed for hours while Jay snored in the next bed over.

To protect against screwing up, and because it was Halloween, I put on some temporary ward tattoos. They looked awesome, but I lost a lot of arm hair taking them back off. Yowtch!

Of course, I needn’t have worried. I’ve always been a good public reader, having cut my teeth doing readings in Church back in my altar boy days, before I reached the age of reason. I didn’t stumble at all once I got started. The readings aren’t well-attended at WFC in any event (everyone is at the bar), so there were only about 10 people in the room, half of whom I knew. The ones I didn’t seemed to like my excerpt, though.

Eddie Schneider, representing JABberwocky Literary Agency, took the attending JABberwockians (JABberwocks? JABberwockonians?) out to dinner on friday at a great carnivore haven called Buzzards. Bill Swears ordered prairie oysters and offered me some, but I didn’t have the balls to try them. I thought I did well just managing not to puke on his shoe as he wolfed down that testilicious app. Here’s the lot of us malcontents:

After dinner, I went to check out this author signing thing, which no one told me I should attend. Apparently every attending author was invited to go into this giant ballroom filled with tables. There were tent cards for everyone, and you could sit down and sign books. Of course, but the time I poked my head in, the event was half over. I ran to fetch my tent card, and was accosted by the photographer from Locus magazine who said I was “on the list” and needed to pose for a photo. I did, and then ran back to the room and put up my flag.

Within 5 minutes, I had people coming to me to get their advance books signed. 10 minutes after that, the event was effectively over. I had missed the vast majority of autograph seekers. Fuck. I am still kicking myself over that. Things like this piss me off about conventions. They couldn’t have mentioned it somewhere in the many e-mails they sent, or in the advance programs that went out to convention presenters? The authors who have been coming for years knew, but the new guy was left looking like a chump. Bah.

One nice thing happened after the signing, though. I went into the lobby and saw a woman reading my book. She was about halfway through, and I went up to her and asked if she was liking it. We had a long chat before I mentioned that I wrote it. She was really enjoying it, and it was great to hear it personally from someone who had no idea I was the author. That made my night and went a long way to improve my mood after the signing fiasco.

Here’s me and Sam Butler at the signing table. There’s a lot of rum in that coke in front of me:

Attended some panels Saturday. There was an awful one filled with lots of 5-dollar words and very little substance called “The Language of Fantasy” which made me want to beat my own skull open with a hammer, followed by a great one on killing significant characters with George RR Martin, Tad Williams, and Steven Erikson. There was another great one after that about making art in the 21st century with WFC Artis Guest of Honor Todd Lockwood.

Saturday night was my one panel. I knew I should be nervous about it, but I wasn’t really. The topic was “Vampire Elves and Other Lines That Should Never Be Crossed.” It was at 8pm on Saturday, and I figured most everyone would be out to dinner and miss it anyway. There would be what, ten people there, tops?

Secure in this, I went out to dinner with my editor Liz Scheier and Jay. Despite her enmity towards red meat, Liz picked a fantastic steakhouse called Salt Lick, which was fantastic. The three of us put away two bottles of wine.

So I go to the panel, warm and fuzzy and ready to goof off about a dumb topic in an empty room, and instead walk into a packed room of about 150 people and end up having a really serious discussion with 4 extremely intelligent and funny authors who shared the panel (Jay Lake, Minister Faust, Louise Marley, and Matt Hughes). We had a pretty wide representation of age and experience, and everyone took the topic seriously. After about half an hour, we were done with vampire elves and opened the room to questions. There were some great ones, and suddenly we were talking about George Orwell and the balance an author must strike in their writing to show their world view without being preachy or writing propaganda. Laughter and learning all around. It was a fantastic experience.

Sunday we went to the banquet, but had to skip out early to catch a plane to San Francisco, and then a red-eye back to NYC. It would have been just as awful as it sounds, but the San Francisco airport is awesome. They had this huge display of comic books and space-related toys and memorabilia from the 50’s and 60’s that was Out of This World. Here’s me and Jay doing the robot like dorks:

Here’s me casually strolling by the wall of comic cover posters like it’s not fricken’ awesome:

It was a great end to a SF con. I also got to catch the end of Get Smart on the plane out of Calgary. Whew!

Posted on November 9, 2008 at 11:59 pm by PeatB
Filed under Events, World Traveler, Writing
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