A friend of mine and fellow sci-fi/fantasy enthusiast, John Price, made it down for the weekend to check out the Con and hit a few sessions with me.  The first one we went to was What Makes a Good Story? with Bill Willingham, Robert Silverberg and Nancy Kress among others on the panel.  The room was packed with budding writers to take in what turned out to be a the rather jocular panel’s take on what makes a good story.  The focus at one point drifted to discussing at what point in their respective careers they’d received advice or had a revelation in their writing that enabled them to take it to a new level.  The best anecdote was Robert Silverberg’s moment when, after years of literally putting a piece of paper in the typewriter and banging out a story from start to finish then selling it off for publication, meet Cyril Kornbluth who passed on the sage advise that a second draft would actually make his stories better.  Lo and behold they did!

Afterwards, John and I had the opportunity to talk with Bill Willingham in the hallway for a bit and get a couple pictures taken.  While the chat mainly revolved around his Fables series, one neat little piece of info that came to light was that early in is career, Willingham got his start doing illustrations for Dungeons & Dragons materials.  Artwork which quickly denounced as crap and would rather not talk about

John & Bill

Me & Bill

The second session we caught was The Importance of Anthologizing which Robert Sawyer moderated and Ellen Datlow, Kathryn Cramer, Candas Jane Dorsey and John Robert Colombo (editor of the first ever Canadian sci-fi anthology Other Canadas) as participants.  The panel discussed the role of anthologies in the genre and how they personally go about the process of envisioning, selling the concept and then pulling together an anthology for publishing.  There was also a great discussion on the cornerstone of Canadian anthologies, the Tesseracts series and how it was envisioned and set in motion by Judith Merril.

Back in the Dealers Room things had slowed down a bit from the torrid pace they were at on Friday, but we still did quite well selling a good number of books over the course of the day.  Our biggest client of the day was 3 time Hugo winning editor David Hartwell (who was a guest of honour and had his famous necktie collection on display in the adjacent room).  He was a pleasure to talk with and knew the book business through and through.  In fact, it turns out he owns a secondhand bookstore himself in Westport, NY!

To cap the day off, I took in the Masquerade competition in which over two dozen amateur and professional costumers dressed up to show off their designs and act out various short skits.  The show was a blast with a number of amazing costumes and hilarous skits amusing the crowd for a solid couple of hours.  Julie Czerneda and Sébastien Mineau were the Masters of Ceremony and played off each other quite well to create a light a humorous atmosphere.  There are some great photos of the Masquerade entrants in Flickr albums here and here.