Australia, LeakyCon, Etc.

Hello all. I apologize for having been so silent for the last … no, I can’t even look at the date of my last blog post. Nobody look. Let’s all just agree it’s been long enough.

I spent the past month in Australia, where my wife is from, and which is getting to be a kind of second home to me. This was the first time I’d brought all my kids with me, which resulted in some valuable life lessons, which I will now pass on to you:

1. If your toddler throws up on you during a snorkeling cruise, they will give you a free shirt

2. In any father’s life there will come a moment when he is asked to open a coconut. It is best to prepare in advance

I began this post on a cross-country flight to Portland for LeakyCon, which is a kind of Harry-Potter-centered but basically pan-fandom convention, and it had a whole part in it about how much I was looking forward to it. Now I’m on my way back, temporarily becalmed in Seattle, and I’m thinking about how deeply, deeply excellent it was. It was my third time, and I’m here to tell you, LeakyCon is a special thing. It is not like anything else.

There are not many conventions where you can watch Anthony Rapp in a money-blowing booth, Amber Benson wriggling through a play tunnel, and Maggie Stiefvater playing bagpipes, and that doesn’t even cover what happened at LeakyCon in the space of 90 minutes yesterday afternoon. (For example you could also have seen me face-plant into a ball pit.)

But more to the point, LeakyCon feels authentic to me in exactly the way that massive commercial events like Comic-Con don’t really, not anymore. (LeakyCon : Comic-con : : PAX : E3, roughly, if that means anything to you.) Basically if you have any interest in seeing a bunch of smart, funny, kind, weird, interesting people who love the same things you love and want to talk to you about them, there is no better place to be. I respectfully recommend that you go. It will give you hope for the future.

In lieu of actually updating my Events page—which I would do except that I have developed a nasty allergy to raw HTML—I’ll give you a short list of places you can see me this summer. After LeakyCon I’ll be at Readercon in Massachusetts in July, then at the Decatur Books Festival and Dragoncon in Atlanta at the end of August. Oh, and I’ll be at Tor.com’s 5th anniversary party at Housing Works on July 24th.

OK, that was even shorter than I thought it was going to be. But I’ve been turning things down in order to work on The Magician’s Land. It’s due at the end of the August, and that’s not a deadline I want to screw around with.