BEST OF MIDAMERICON 2 – Part 3
Like any good gathering of the clan, one of the great highlights of this WorldCon was spending time with long-time friends. Jim Kelly and John Kessel are both extraordinary writers-separately and as collaborators-whom I am proud to call my friends. They’ve had my back for 20+ years, since they were my instructors at Clarion. Over the years, I’ve brought them various conundrums as to the art, craft, and business of writing SF in long and short forms. They’ve always had sage advice and reassurance. This time was no different. Thanks, you guys!
For any of you who have not read their Hugo or Nebula winning work: Good grief, why not? No time like the present. Plus, dinosaurs!
BEST of MIDAMERICON 2–PART 2
Hey look–Stan Schmidt (former Analog editor and author), Trevor Quachri (current Analog editor), Alec Nevala-Lee (Analog author) and me at MidAmeriCon 2. Stan, Alec and I read stories from our stories in recent and forthcoming issues of Analog. Also participating but eluding the cameras was long-time Analog writer James Van Pelt. My thanks go to Trevor for moderating the panel and to my fellow writers for such entertaining readings.
I have to say that I was a bit dubious when I saw that those in charge of convention programming had organized several of the author readings by the various magazines in which their stories had been published. Well, I sure changed my mind in this case. The room was packed and people had some interesting questions.
BEST of MIDAMERICON 2–Part 1
MidAmeriCon 2 was an all-round terrific World Con for me this year. Rather than ramble about this and that, I’m doing a series of retrospectives on some personal highlights, in no particular order. One was connecting up with writer buddies Cath Schaff-Stump and Christopher Cornell, whom I met at Paradise Lost. They’ve been putting out a podcast, Unreliable Narrators, that’s ridiculously good. For example, they’ve brought on some very talented SF writers like Ann Leckie and Charlie Finlay, who now edits F & SF.
So I was thrilled when Christopher squeezed my MidAmeriCon 2 dinosaur panel into his hectic schedule and mentioned our panel on the podcast. The ebullient Frank Wu led the panelists in a discussion of cool new developments in paleontology plus our conjectures as to courtship and mating strategies for enormous critters that have a row of spikes running down their tails. That’s a subject I’ve tackled in Dino Mate, an Analog story that’s been reprinted by Digital Science Fiction.
ROSEMARY CLAIRE SMITH 