MileHiCon 44

As promised, here is my schedule for MileHiCon 44.  The convention is taking place at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in the Denver Tech Center from Friday, October 19th through Sunday, October 21st.

Saturday

Online Alphabet Soup, Grand Mesa B-C, 11:00 AM
This promises to be a fun panel about SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, and various other attempts to control the Internet. I’ll be in the esteemed company of Andrew Burt (former SFWA vice president, notorious Critter Captain, founder of the world’s first ISP, and e-publisher of out-of-print works by Ben Bova, among others), Marie DesJardin (technical writer and author of For the Time Being), Arlen Feldman (software developer, computer book author, and recovering costumer), and Doris Beetem (a longtime fixture of MileHiCon and short story author.)

Playing with Participants, Atrium, Table 2, 2 PM
This is an opportunity to sit down for an hour or so and play a game of … something … with me.  Assuming I can find them in the sea of boxes that materialized after my recent move, I’m likely to bring along some of my old Magic: The Gathering decks or my Car Wars boxed edition.  Any takers?

Sunday

Falling Skies, Terra Nova, and Primeval, Mesa Verde A, 12 PM
Join me, Daniel Dvorkin (the writer, not the Chicagoan who hired a hitman to kill a rival businessman), Patrick Hester (from the Hugo nominated Functional Nerds podcast), Christopher M. Salas (Colorado Springs author and martial arts expert), and SFWA Grand Master Connie Willis (!!!) as we discuss the above television shows.  I followed Terra Nova all the way through its short run, and enjoyed it quite a bit, but I’m going to have to brush up on the other two a bit.

Poetry Fantastique, Wind River A, 3 PM
I have the honor of moderating the poetry panel this year, and with guests like Gail R. Barton (who read some wonderful poetry last year), Daniel Landes (Westword writer), Dr. Rob S. Rice (historian specializing in ancient and military history, poet, fiction writer, non-fiction writer, and steampunk fan), and anyone else who happens to show up (Owen Allen and Laura Deal, I’m looking your way), it should be a great hour of poetry. I may even get up the guts to read the steampunk rewrite of “The Windhover” that’s been rolling around in my brain.  (Imagine if Gerard Manley Hopkins had never entered the priesthood, and instead became an early Vorticist or Pre-Raphaelite.  Does your brain hurt yet?)

When I’m not on panels, I’ll probably be checking out other people’s panels, getting books signed, or wandering around with my lovely steampunk-bedecked wife.  I’m looking forward to it!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I took a business trip to Atlanta and got sick in the middle of it, then when I got back, we fell into an opportunity to move into a brick Tudor Revival house that we have loved for years. So, for the last week, we’ve been frantically moving stuff from the old mobile home to the new house, and now that everything’s moved, we begin the process of unboxing and evaluating how much of this stuff we actually need.  (Yeah, I know, it’s a bit backwards, but we didn’t have a lot of time to go through things before moving.)

As always, there are casualties in moving. For me, the biggest casualty has been my signed first-edition hardback of Contact, by Carl Sagan.  It was destroyed by water damage while in storage at the old house.  The book is was worth a fair amount of money, but the sentimental value of the book was much greater to me because it was given to me by a writing group friend a decade or so ago.  There were other signed hardbacks in the same box, by authors like Dan Simmons and Leslie Marmon Silko, and my beloved trade paperback of Silko’s Ceremony was ruined as well, but none of those books held the same emotional attachment for me that Contact did.  Ah, well.

I received my preliminary schedule for MileHiCon 44 today, and will post that later, but for now, I wanted to take the time to just write something on this long-neglected blog.