Westercon Friday

So it's the first day of Westercon (for me at least). I rose late after spending last night struggling to get Open Office to build (for some reason, the RPM just isn't working right; it cores) and preparing a whole bunch of other people's stories for PalmDoc format (one of the few reasons I'll write perl instead of python).

I went to the panel on writing heroines and was underimpressed. It was supposed to be a look at Campbell's approach to heros and how heroines are different, but the panel didn't do a good job of explaining the Campbellian cycle to begin with and the conversation descended into a bit of a whine about how no society has ever "really" understood What Women Want.

Ran into johno, who gave me an LJ badge. Cool. Thanks, John!

Picked up Kouryou-chan from the childcare where we'd deposited her for the hour, then went over to Denny's. It was awful. The service was slow and the server brought both Kouryou-chan and I completely wrong meals, then blamed it on the line cooks, saying "Well, they put it in your spaces." Y'know, it's his job to check and make sure that we got what we ordered.

We went to the PlayDohnian combat, which is a strange car wreck of (1) make a monster out of PlayDoh, then (2) destroy said monster with some loonie variant of Warhammer rules. Kouryou-chan was too little to partake, so she just made monsters out of PlayDoh.

While wandering around, I was waiting for an elevator with three other people. We started discussing LJ, and then one of them said, "Now, who are you?" He looked at my badge and said, "Oh! You!" Then his daughter looked and said, "Oh, I've read some of your stuff." This got a very strange look from her father, but she was definitely of an age where she could decide such things for herself. Most amusing. Turned out she was a gamer and know Yamaarashi-chan through charlesks.

Afterward, I did one more panel, on "What kind of writer are you?" It was, sadly, rather disorganized again. I think I'm past listening to writers talk about themselves and want them to talk about their skills, their techniques, what a writer does to turn ideas into stories. I found that Omaha had put Kouryou-chan back into the childcare for another hour, so I went and picked up the kidlet and we took her to Milk and Cookies, in which parents are encouraged to bring their children to an hour-long reading session for kids too young to read themselves. It was wonderful. One little five-year-old could just start to read; I so want Kouryou-chan to be able to do that. Well, I've got two years.

Then we went to see Heather Alexander, who was in solo concert. It was such a joy to see her again live, and Kouryou-chan sat and sang along to both "Camberth March" and "Happenin' Frog" (which Heather than followed with "Happening Frog of Camberth," an absurd filk smashup of the previous two), and then she sang two more, including one final one about her first skydive.

I took Kouryou-chan home after that; she ate dinner, and then I drove Omaha and fallenpegasus, who had followed us home for dinner, back to the 'con so they could go to the dance. I had promised Kouryou-chan that I would take her to see fireworks after I dropped those two off, but she fell asleep on the way to the Des Moines show and I just drove home. I'll sign off now and go to sleep myself.