It’s taken me nearly a week to write about Can-Con 2017, but wow, once I got back from Ottawa late on Sunday night, I was wiped on Monday. I was utterly, utterly pooped and seriously considering a mid-day nap, even while I was working.

Even now I really don’t have the energy to go into everything that happened at Can-Con, but here are a few highlights:

  • Road tripping to and from Ottawa with Jen Albert of Podcastle, filk singer/author Kari Maaren, our friend Todd, and my husband. We learned lots of weird facts about Scandinavia, and also about fairy tales, because that’s how we roll.
  • Sitting on 2 panels, one of which was about activism and SF/F with Violette Malan and Su J. Sokol. It took us a shameful amount of time to get around to mentioning the impact of Octavia Butler, but eventually we came to our senses.
  • Attending the book launch for Ada Hoffman’s debut collection Monsters on My Mind. The funny thing about it all was that the publisher wasn’t able to deliver the books in time for the launch; in an effort to compensate for this, Hoffman bought door prizes to give out, but ultimately forgot them at home. This sounds awful when I describe it here, but when she was telling us all this at the party, the way she was spooling out the information, detail by detail, was great storytelling!

    The best part was that she still held the raffle for the door prize anyway, and I won a plush velociraptor that I’ll get via mail. PLUSH VELOCIRAPTOR. YES. All of this is a long-winded way of saying that Ada Hoffmann is very cool and I’m looking forward to interviewing her on the blog in 2018.

  • On Saturday evening, I asked stormhunter and TV personality Mark Robinson what would happen if a person jumped into a volcano – what exactly would kill them during the plunge? Robinson then proceeded to geek out for TWENTY FULL MINUTES about different types of volcanoes, sulfur dioxide emissions, hanging from the lip of a caldera, and more. I recommended that he read Pen Pal because it discusses the topic in some detail. So yeah. Geeking out about volcanoes is cool.
  • Even later on Saturday, I hung out with Julia Muldoon and Aurabeth Roy in their hotel room – and cajoled Charlotte Ashley into joining us – and we talked about makeup, and cats, and jobs, and books, and tea. Charlotte took a picture partway through that makes it look like I was giving a goddamned lecture about something, and well, yeah, I probably was.

So, yeah. It was a fun weekend. I’m looking forward to similar zaniness in 2018.