rushthatspeaks | je parle francais quand je le souviens

I spent the weekend in Montreal at Jo Walton's Farthing Launch Party. It was a very good party/small convention, but it was a rather confusing weekend, as it seems to have been running on several parallel tracks at once: on the intellectual/emotional level, it was a wonderful set of discussions and meetings up with friends I'd been wanting to meet offline for a long time and readings and so on, and on the physical level, it was the kind of weekend where Anything That Could Go Wrong Went and a pigeon shat down my cleavage in the park.

Which gave me whiplash, because I'd be mulling over something someone had said that changed my perspective on the Lord of the Rings while eating extremely rich and creamy European-ish ice cream and then my sandal strap would break and spill me into the street and I'd wind up sitting on the curb hyperventilating as a very-fast-moving sports car ran over the remains of my ice cream.

You get the idea.

In addition, I was re-reading A.S. Byatt's Possession, as Jo had asked me to read a bit of it for the panel of people-reading-aloud-cool-things (which I did, and I think it went pretty well). Possession is a bona fide Great Novel and consequently takes over large parts of the backbrain for the duration of reading it and some while afterwards, and so I was constantly relating things back to the Victorian era and great Romantic poetry, which I think I successfully kept out of my conversation because it really was mostly irrelevant, but which was nonetheless rather distracting.

I would certainly do the whole thing again, though, pigeons and all, as the chance to spend time with

papersky and

ckd and

redbird and

adrian_turtle (upon whom be blessings for making the weekend logistically survivable) and getting to finally meet

rysmiel and becoming acquainted with people like

dhole and Yves Menard was very, very much worth it.

I do intend to write up the panels, and What I Thought Of Montreal, and such like, but I am still exhausted and fighting off Con Ick, so we'll see what comes of that. In short: good con.