Westercon57

Westercon57 was held at the Wigwam Resort in Litchfield Park, Arizona.

I drove from Las Vegas down to Litchfield Park which is somewhere near Phoenix.

The convention was very relaxed — I think partly from the heat and partly because all the hotel rooms were casitas. I was lucky in that I had only a fifty yard walk (if that) from my casita to the main building where all the programming occurred.

I was quite happy to make the acquaintance of Dameon Willich and Darragh Metzger who are part of the Seattle Knights. We were on a panel together discussing horses and how far they really can travel in a day.

I also got to meet Jan Howard Finder, the famous Wombat, whom I’ve known for a very long time now. It was Jan who first introduced me to Lois McMaster Bujold’s marvelous Miles Vorkosign series.

I’d agreed to do a writer’s workshop at Westercon but hadn’t seen any submissions so I had thought that no one was interested. It turns out that there was a bit of a snafu and there were two interested parties at the convention. I was quite happy to give their works a good read and, bolstered by my recent experience with the Writers Blocks, hopefully gave them both good and useful comments.

The autographing session went well and I got to meet Diana Gabaldon who wrote Outlander.

I also bumped into Walter Hunt again and we discovered that we have the same literary agent (Donald Maass of the Donald Maass literary agency). Walter very kindly sent me a copy of the photo that was taken of himself, myself, David Brin, and Robert Silverberg at ConDor XI — which I’ve posted in my photos page.

I met, and succumbed once again, to the wares of Scott Merritt’s Pegasus Publishing which makes printed and embroidered t-shirts and polo shirts, including some licensed materials from David Weber’s “Honor Harrington” series and Lois McMaster Bujold’s “Vorkosign” series (my favorite is the so subtle “Sieglings: Vorbarr Sultana”).

I had a final panel discussing what comes after the X-prize and spent much of the time happily listening to Mitchell Burnside Clapp discuss the plans of Rocketplane.

All in all, it was a pleasant weekend.