I was invited to Confluence after participating as a judge in the Parsec Science Fiction Society short story contest. This was my first visit to Pittsburgh; Confluence is an interesting, very literary convention. This year's author guest of honor was John Scalzi – who's been taunting the tauntable from his Buddha-like perch for about as long as I've been shucking and jiving. Scalzi was tremendous fun as always.
Met and Greeted
- Catherine Asaro – who also did some singing;
- S.C. Butler. He's quite Tall.
- Herb Kauderer, Radio Maven
- Bill Keith. Back in the Day, Gamelords worked with him on game projects.
- Bud Sparhawk. We had a great dinner together (see below).
Panels and Con Activities
- I did a panel with Scalzi and Keith on being a full-time writer. Bill Keith and I knew of each other when I was working with Gamelords in the early 1980s, doing game work. Bill was a hired gun, particularly on Traveller modules and background material; he remembered the Gamelords crew (and my name, to my surprise). Scalzi had many witty things to say, but we all agreed: full time writer is tough, and there's not a lot of money in it (in and of itself). But we all write because it's better than digging ditches.
- My last event at the con was a panel on "secret histories", which included John Alfred Taylor and Alan Katerinsky. Considering the schedule (2 pm Sunday – later than I'd wanted to leave, but I was there for the con, after all) it was extremely well attended. I was the Freemason on the panel, and chimed in appropriately.
Eating and Drinking
- Had a great lunch with friends at Primanti Brothers. They call themselves "Almost Famous" and feature what I am told is a traditional working-class-Pittsburgh sandwich, which includes fries and coleslaw in the sandwich – so that lunch pail carriers could eat the whole thing with one hand. It's more sports bar than lunch stand now, and has more than a dozen locations, including the local baseball and football venues. Still, it's a huge step up above fast food and has Yuengling on tap.
- Bud Sparhawk and I got away from the convention and had dinner in the "Strip District", which isn't what it sounds like (though I understand that in the worst of Pittsburgh's post-industrial wasteland history, it was. It's gone trendy now, and we wound up at Tonic Bar & Grill, where I had a piece of nouvelle-cuisine fish that was exquisite. (During dinner the Coldplay song "Yellow" came on, and all I could think of was Beaker. Oh well.)
Other Stuff
The highlight of the convention for me was the dinner with Bud; we talked about writing novels, which I do more than he does, and writing short stories, which he does more than I do. These are different skills, as we both know – I am not sure if he learned anything from me, but I learned something from him and wrote an 1800-word King & Country story when I got back to the hotel.
