Home, highlights, and dead tired.

I am home from Conflikt! I got up at 4:08 am this morning in order to catch my commuter flight back to San Francisco, and managed to stay awake long enough to read most of the way through Graveminder by Melissa Marr, after finishing Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear. And this is why Seanans always travel with lots and lots of reading material. Nothing brings on insomnia like having nothing to read.

I'd like to say that it was a good convention, but I'll be honest: I don't know. For me, it was a series of charms strung on a silken cord, and some of them were brilliant, and some of them were bright, and some of them could have used a spot of polish, and very few of them went together in a logical way, because that is what a convention while already exhausted and overworked looks like. I had fun. I am awake enough to be quite sure of that.

But oh, there were amazing things. Talis came, white horse girl all the way across the water, one of the oldest denizens of the Babylon Wood, and she sang "Still Catch the Tide" and "Ten Years" in her concert, and I cried like a very crying thing, as did Vixy. There are very few people in this world who can break my heart like Talis can, or who I love half so much for doing it. And she had her new album! Queen of Spindles, and she put it in my hand like a promise or a prayer, and I listened to it all the way home.

Pin-trading with Jovanie and Anne, and stealing Anne's Companion Cube pillow over and over again. Dinner with Brooke and Judi and Ryan, followed by chocolate books. Lunch with Jennifer. Fringe with Ryan and rooming with Brooke and going to Old Navy (as always). The Suttons, tearing up the stage, and Sunnie's Mama Gitka, and Katie Tinney writing the "Wicked Girls" parody I think I shall everafter love most of them all. And rain, and 7-11, and hugs, and friends, and home. I went home this weekend. I will go back soon.

Perhaps then I will be able to stay.

So this is my charm bracelet of a weekend. It flashes lovely in the light, and I can work the clasp even when I'm tired. Soon I'll go to my bed, and my cats, and my dreams of the wood, but for now, I am still partway on a plane, and I am very very far away from home.

A brief note on the Hugos before I return to staring at the walls.

Hey, guys. Just a quick reminder that tomorrow, January 31st, 2012, is your last chance to obtain a Chicon 7 supporting membership with full Hugo nomination and voting rights. You will be able to obtain a voting membership after this, but you won't have the opportunity to nominate. You can find details here, on the Chicon 7 website. Supporting memberships are $50 USD.

Why is this a good deal?

$50 is a lot of money, right? So why is this a good deal? Two reasons, really.

Everybody likes books.

The Hugo Awards now come with an electronic voting packet that contains all the nominated fiction, and a lot of the nominated non-fiction. So that's between four and six novels good enough to make the ballot, four and six novellas, novelettes, short stories...it's like a giant Kinderegg of fictional goodness. No matter how you cut it, $50 for that much reading material is a pretty damn good deal, and that's just the fiction. It's a great way to see what the community considered worthy of recognition in any given year, like a really super-sized version of the Hugo nominee anthologies I used to read when I was a kid.

Be part of the process.

The Hugos are nominated, and voted, by a relatively small percentage of the overall community, and every year, people complain about how the winners aren't their choices. Okay. So change it. By putting in a nominating ballot, you shape the final ballot. By voting, you shape the winners. If we want this award to represent our whole community, we need to participate.

It has never been easier to read all the nominated material. It has never been easier to be a part of the process. If you want the Hugos to reflect the material you believe should be winning, you need to participate.

$50 ain't cheap. But what you get for it isn't cheap, either. You get books; you get a voice; and you get to shape what our community recognizes.

It's pretty damn cool.