With an hour to kill at LAX on my way home from LOSCon, I thought I’d take a few minutes to reflect on the experience. It was generally good: my travel arrangements went well (at least so far) and the accommodations were satisfactory. And in spite of a family member coming down with a cold before I left, I did not become symptomatic during the convention. We’ll have to wait to see whether I managed to dodge the bullet again after I get home.

I had a light schedule this time, with three panels in total, one for each day of the convention.

I was a participant for the first: Biology in Science Fiction and Real Space moderated by Jane Shevtsov. She did a presentation just before the panel which gave me an opportunity to learn more about her. She hadn’t contacted us beforehand, so we didn’t have any sense for how the panel would be organized. But it went reasonably well and I was able to think fast enough on my feet to feel like I made reasonable contributions.

I was the moderator for my second panel: Poetry and Songs in Speculative Fiction. This was a panel I had proposed. I had noticed the one of the participants was on my previous panel, so I made a point of introducing myself. The other two were on another a poetry panel the previous day, so I attended that one to hear them speak and, again, to introduce myself.

There were a couple of disappointing outcomes. The venue was half of a room separated with a divider and the session on the other side was extremely noisy. The con staff made some attempt to ameliorate the noise, but it was still pretty bad. The attendance was also quite poor. The poetry panel on the previous day had also been poorly attended, so I wasn’t surprised. But it was still disappointing.

I had forwarded to them a set of questions the previous week:

Please introduce yourself and, since we mentioned Tolkien in the panel description, was there a poem (among the ~60 or so) in the Hobbit or Trilogy (or elsewhere) that particularly resonated with you and why?

Poetry and meter were probably memory aids for stories in an oral tradition that carried over to the earliest written stories, cough, Gilgamesh. What other reasons do authors use poetry?

Songs present unique difficulties to represent on the printed page. What are some of the challenges to using poetry and songs in fiction? What are some ways it can fail or miss the mark?

Do you write poetry and songs yourself to include in your fiction? would you like to share some?

Movies provide a more natural medium for including music and song. How do their uses differ from printed fiction.

If we haven’t mentioned KPop Demon Hunters yet, what were particularly effective — even revolutionary — uses of song in that movie?

What are other authors and stories that use poetry and song particularly effectively?

They each brought interesting and unique perspectives on the questions. I was surprised that one of the participants had never read The Hobbit or Trilogy. And two of them had not seen KPop Demon Hunters. I was really surprised by that. But we had a good discussion about the topic and I learned a lot.

The last panel I served on was Developing a Creative Habit. This was a great panel. By this point, I had seen all of the participants and so I had a pretty good sense for how the panel would go. My main objective was to present myself as the anti-habit. Although I’m pretty settled in terms of my daily schedule, I’ve learned from long experience that my productivity is extremely variable. I used to stress about it and wanted to encourage others to not worry about it. I described my approach which is to have multiple projects and just write whatever I want whenever I feel like it — or not. This earned the comment, “You, sir, are a weirdo” by M. Todd Gallowglas, which I warmly accepted in the spirit in which it was intended. I also managed to mention Structured Procrastination and Philip’s essay about being routinely creative. And a lot more.

I balanced the rest of my time between other panels and working at my publisher’s table in the Dealer Room. Sales were rather poor — and not just with us. All of the other dealers seemed pretty disappointed by sales.

I was excited to finally get to put my hands on some copies of my long-delayed book A Familiar Problem. It didn’t arrive until Saturday evening, so I could only try to sell them on Sunday. By the time the Dealer Room closed, I hadn’t sold one. That’s how it goes sometimes.

I had several hours between when we finished load out and time for my flight. I decided to leave the hotel and spend most of the time in the airport. I’m kind of glad I did because the traffic to get the one mile to the airport from the hotel was miserable and it took almost an hour. Then, going through security, they had to call over some specialist to check the personal oxygen concentrator I need to fly. That took another half hour. But I got through fine and had more than an hour to spare.

And I’ve finished this post at 10pm with just a few minutes before boarding. Ojalá, I will be back home tomorrow before noon.