Views from Medina Road

Among panels Thursday morning was one on "New Trends in SF" moderated by Ken Scholes, with Jim Minz, Sheila Williams, Charles Brown, and Gary Wolfe, who talked about the usual suspects -- dissolving genre boundaries, abundance of YA, rise of the small/independent presses -- and the general principle that most 'trends' have been around before, and whatever the next one is, it will be over by the time we notice it.

I went to lunch with several of the Locus reviewers -- Jonathan, Gary, Graham -- along with Charles and Liza, where we spent half the time discussing various ways to jazz up the Locus website, perhaps a -- well, perhaps I shouldn't say just yet, since it depends on various others getting things set up. (Some website changes are already in work, as discussed in previous posts; since it was buried in a comment, I'll repost this link to a still very-much-in-work modification of homepage graphics and drop-down menus. Comments welcome.) And the other half discussing magazine matters, in particular potential new reviewers.

I hung out more at the convention center, came back to my room for a mid-afternoon break, catching up on blinks, doing a quick workout in the hotel gym, then (deferring dinner since I'd had a largish late lunch) tracked down the Chesley Awards event at the convention center. I shouldn't have been surprised, since the Chesley nominees were released barely a week ago, that despite the program book the Chesley winners were *not* being announced at this event... Apparently the administrators simply didn't get things done in time for the winners to be voted by ASFA members in time to be announced at Worldcon. So it became a slide show presentation of nominees instead, a not uninteresting event, since many of the nominated cover paintings were quite striking when seen without the overlay of titles and other typography.

After that I finally made my way over to the Sheraton, the party hotel, and hung out at the SFWA suite for a while until it grew too hot in the room to be bearable. Then back to the Hyatt bar... Still haven't hit the main party floors at the Sheraton; will do that tonight.