There had to be some mis-communication somewhere; the signup sheet for the “Literary Bheer” with Justine and Scott had only 2 names on it, and one of them was mine. Was I really going to be lucky enough to sit around with a keg of beer and two of my favorite authors all to myself? [...]

Justine threw down the gauntlet for the “Golden Age of YASF” with this statement “The most exciting books being written in SF/F today are in the YA genre. Full stop.”

YA is cross-genre. YA is more experimental and risk-taking, because teenagers are more willing to experiment than their parents are. YA publishers are more willing to [...]

Is it possible for SF to be both dead and doing better than it ever has before? Apparently, yes. This panel broke new ground for the convention in that it contained a dissenting voice, in the form of Peter Halasz,1 who stated that what is left of SF is so different from what was originally [...]

Piracy of Fiction on the Internet was a large question mark on my calendar. On the one hand, I didn’t want to miss it, but it’s such a common topic online I wasn’t sure what else they could say about it in a fifty-minute panel.

Scalzi was moderating, with Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Paul Melko1 filling [...]

Some people are fascinated by the world around them. They care what kind of car you drive, where that blouse came from, how many carats that ring is. I can read LORD OF THE RINGS in about 6 hours because my eyes naturally glide by all that stuff about brooks and hollows and cloud formations. [...]

Does it still count as “Coffee with Toastmaster John Scalzi” if nobody drinks any? Scalzi himself is repulsed by the stuff, because any beverage you have to load with sugar and creamer just to gag down has to be evil. He guzzles Coke Zero instead, even at 10 AM.

It was an intimate gathering of about [...]

The goal of the panel topics seemed to be to shake things up, be controversial and have fun. Check, check, and check. The panelists themselves came up with some topics, which will likely become a tradition considering how great they were.

The first was “Originality is Overrated”,1 devoted to the concept that no one creates in [...]

Trying to recap the Opening Ceremonies would be a disservice to the Guests of Honor and the ToastMaster. Mr. Scalzi was very entertaining and a living example why you should never be introduced by someone who knows where the bodies are buried. He did tell a story on himself that involved being licked from the [...]

Here’s a guarantee for first-time Con-goers who show up five minutes before the first panel on Friday night without registering in advance: they won’t take plastic at the sign-in. Fortunately the ATM in the lobby hadn’t been run dry yet, and I made the opening panel “The Dynamic Duo – Revealed!” just as Scalzi said, [...]

Everything that follows is in some sense John Scalzi’s fault. From what I understand, many conversations in SF/F start with those words, but in this case it’s not a condemnation, it’s a thank you.

I stumbled across his post detailing his schedule for High Voltage ConFusion while I was deciding whether or not to subscribe to [...]