Well, I meant for this to go up like the first two did, but it turns out that the seeming innocuousness of an event called an Ice Cream Social is a filthy, filthy lie. As me and my resulting delightful hangover can attest.
Well, people kept buying me drinks! What was I supposed to do? I don’t want to be rude, now do I?
Yeah, well. And the moral of the story is, I can blog at 1:30 and 2:30 and even 3:30 AM, but 4:30 AM is Right Out. I’d say “sorry,” but, well, I’m not.
Anyway, let’s back up to Saturday morning. I surprised myself by waking up in time to make it to the 10:00 AM panel “In The Beginning,” which was about the things that happened or were introduced in the early books that had since seemed to fall to the wayside or been changed. There was some really great discussion despite Jason’s presence. (ooooh…) No, seriously, the moderators all did well, and Maria only had to RAFO someone once or twice.
I think the example we spent the most time discussing was Moiraine’s “turning into a giant and stepping over the wall of Baerlon” trick she pulled in TEOTW. For what it’s worth, I agree with whoever compared it to sleight of hand; I think she made the illusion look like it was stepping over the wall and just slipped through the gate while everyone was distracted by the sight. However, Thom DeSimone was correct in pointing out that that still makes it a little hinky, since (as far as I am aware) every other time we’ve seen someone use the Mask of Mirrors to disguise/change themselves, they’ve never had the illusion separate from the person it’s supposed to be surrounding. Doesn’t mean it can’t be done, but if so it’s a little odd that no other Aes Sedai ever has, because that seems like it would be useful.
Anyway. One of the fun things they were doing at the con was holding Kaffeklatch hours with various members of Team Jordan, as well as the con’s guest of honor David B. Coe, and I sat in on David’s, as did Harriet. And it was a lot of fun; we talked about methods of research for writing historical fantasy, which is something David knows a little about seeing as he has a Ph.D. in history, and the fun he’d had researching pre-Revolution-era Boston for the new series he has coming out next year under the pen name D.B Jackson. Good times.
After that I played hooky from panels for a while in favor of wandering around and talking to people, until it was time for “A Memory of Light: Status Report,” which is exactly what it says on the tin. This ended up being (to me) a slightly hilarious undertaking, because Team Jordan were to a person staunchly close-mouthed on all but the most general details of the final novel in the series. Which is exactly as it should be, of course, but it did leave Richard Fife rather scrambling in his role as moderator to come up with questions that Harriet and Brandon et al would actually answer. Heh.
Basically the only information I got out of this panel that I didn’t already know (other than that Brandon’s idea of a vacation from writing is… writing something else) was that the initial “Spring 2012” timeframe for the release of AMoL is almost certainly overoptimistic. No one would commit to anything firm, but reading between the lines I’m betting the actual drop date will probably end up being closer to fall of next year than spring.
Which is actually great for me, selfishly, since it means I will probably have more than enough time to complete the Re-read of all the series up to that point before AMoL. So that’s jes fine with me.
Actually, it’s jes fine with me anyway. I don’t know about anyone else, but I am utterly, perfectly okay with Team Jordan taking all the time they need to get this book in as good a shape as is humanly possible before releasing it to the world. Anything worth doing is worth doing right, eh?
So then there was a costume contest. My personal favorite was “Beer Mat” (as Richard called him to distinguish him from the other Mat costume, for reasons which are probably apparent), because his costume was a fabulously accurate reproduction of Mat’s outfit on the thoroughly awesome e-book cover of TSR. That said, I totally agreed that the elaborate (and vertically hazardous) Green Man costume deserved first prize. Both Graendals were awesome as well, and the sul’dam and damane pair were excellent, in a slightly disturbing way.
…and I was going to finish the rest of the con in one post, but I am beyond exhausted, and also appear to be getting kind of sick, so we’ll stop here for now and I’ll tell you the rest later. Later!
