Minicon Report and A Conspiracy Unmasked (quite long, sorry)

[pegkerr]

Minicon was a really remarkable experience for me this year.

We decided to stay at the hotel this year, at least on Friday and Saturday night. I treated the girls and myself for lice on Thursday night and we packed. On Friday, the girls went off to day care (no school for Good Friday), Rob and I worked on taxes, I did mountains of laundry (lice clean up) and some whacking at HPEF board stuff, and then Rob went off to deal with a legal client and I picked up the girls and checked into the hotel.

I stopped by the dealer's room and visited elisem's jewelry table, saying hello to truepenny and papersky, and to visit "my necklace." elisem had a good number of new pieces out for the convention which I duly admired ("Death's Maiden Aunt" was particularly good; Pat Wrede bought it the next day), but of course, I had my eye primarily on a necklace which I've been pining after for a year and a half (since I first saw it at the Minneapolis World Fantasy). It is a very lengthy piece (almost five yards long!) made of irridescent glass, Sworovski crystal, and vintage German beads, and the colors remind me of light shining through ice, like the ice palace. What made it even more perfect was that Elise had entitled it, "Down All Those Glittering Halls."

However, the retail price was quite expensive, so this was not something that could be a little impulse purchase. I had told elisem that I wanted to buy it as a reward for myself when I sold the book--although lately the work on the book had ground to such a halt that I have been wondering sadly whether that day would ever come. truepenny and papersky greeted me cheerfully, and told me, as they have before, that they have not been above discouraging potential customers who have looked at "my" necklace. I thought hard about it, and decided that this wasn't fair to Elise, to put the necklace off limits for me if she had another serious buyer. So I decided, in sort of an act of faith in myself and in my ability to finish the book, to put some money down on the necklace myself. I wrote out a check, which represented about a tenth of the tag price of the necklace, and watched with jealous possessiveness as elisem marked it as "Sold." It was a big relief. It would take awhile, but I'd find some way to pay for it, and at least now no one else could buy it out from under me.

I hung out with friends on Friday night and enjoyed some good conversations, including ones with harryleblanc, Laurie Winter, Jim Frenkel, and minnehaha B and K. Went to the Kruschenko's party and talked with Shari (S.N. Arly) and others about Tolkien's poetry, and The Simarillian.

The next morning, before I set off for my panels, I asked Rob to check my head over. He has not been able to check my head as regularly as I've been checking the girls, because he has been off a good part of the time doing work for a legal client on the side. He found a live louse on me, and we found another live louse on Fiona.

Our second lice treatment, again, had failed.

I found this excruciatingly depressing. Now we would have to start all over again with the laundry and cleaning and nit-picking when we got home. I also did not relish the prospect of having to explain to the hotel when we checked out that we had contaminated their room with lice.

I went off to my panels. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the young reader's roundtable that Fiona and Delia participated in with the convention Guest of Honor Sharyn November (sdn). I am told that Delia brought down the house by remarking artlessly that her mother tended to recommend boring books. Fiona made an unabashed appeal to Sharyn to send her more books, and Sharyn, bless her, promised to do so.

Meanwhile, I was doing the Tolkien poetry panel. We opened with my pointing out Humphrey Carpenter's observation that Tolkien's mythopoeic work could be said to have sprung, in fact, from a poem. When he was twenty-one, he became fascinated with a line from an Anglo Saxon religious poem, Crist of Cynewulf:

Eala Earendel engla beorhtast
ofer middangeard monnum sended.

"Hail Earendel, brightest of angels/above the middle earth sent unto men." In response to this, Tolkien wrote his "Voyage of Earendel" poem:

Earendel sprang up from the Ocean's cup
In the gloom of the mid-world's rim;
From the door of Night as a ray of light
Leapt over the twilight brim,
And launching his bark like a silver spark
From the golden-fading sand
Down the sunlit breadth of Day's fiery death
He sped from Westerland.

which, of course, shows the first indications of his own personal mythology.

All my panels went well. I had thought I would cut the one on writing groups, but I ended going to that one, too. Rob and I and the girls went out for dinner with Pat Wrede afterwards, where the girls eagerly plied her with suggestions for what she should write in her next Enchanted Forest Chronicle book.

After dinner, my head was itching, and I was worried, so I told Rob I was going to the room to comb it out and see what I would find. I knelt over the tub and read The Languages of Middle-earth upside down as I vigorously combed out my hair. After about fifteen minutes, I took a look at the hairs I had combed out and my heart absolutely sank at the sight of the lice crawling around amongst them. Despite the two treatments, my infestation was obviously worse than ever, the worst I'd ever had.

It was an extremely low moment.

I didn't stay out too late on Saturday night. We had enjoyed a little more freedom this year with the girls at the convention, because we felt they were old enough to leave alone occasionally in the consuite, and in the room, with the understanding that they could call us on the cell phone and one of us would come right away. This new additional freedom was a real relief. The girls did a shift volunteering as gophers in the Con Suite, and they enjoyed that enormously. Nevertheless, when they were ready to go to bed Saturday night, I really was, too.

I didn't attend any panels on Sunday. We had brunch at Hell's Kitchen, hung around the dealer's room, where I bought yet more books, including 1crowdedhour's A Scholar of Magics.

Then, we attended Closing Ceremonies, where I received one of the greatest shocks and surprises of my entire life. The Closing Ceremonies began as always, with the balloons being batted around by the people in the audience, and the ceremonial assassination of the Minn-stf President. And then, papersky came to the podium and grabbed the microphone.

My eyes widened as she made her announcement, and then I started to cry. I don't remember exactly how she put it, because I was so stunned by the import of her announcement, but Jo told the assembled onlookers the story of my necklace, and then said that a collection had been taken up to buy it for me. "We believe in her," she said. "We are giving this to her as a sign of our faith in her. We believe she will write this book." And then, beaming, she pulled the necklace out of her pocket and beckoned to me to come up so that she could put it on me. I stumbled up, so blinded by tears that I could hardly see. "Wear it," Jo whispered as she draped that beautiful necklace over my neck. "Wear it, and write the book. We know you will." I turned to the crowd and cried even harder as they cheered. "I'm overwhelmed," was all I could manage to say. "Thank you so much."

They told me afterwards that once Jo had the idea, the money was raised so quickly that it surprised even the authors of the conspiracy, in just a day and a half. Jo couldn't even tell me how many people contributed, but many of them included people on this friends list.

I am so grateful to all of you, and I'm moved beyond all measure, beyond any way that I can describe (and me a professional writer, too!), by this sign you have given me of your belief in me and my writing.

Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you so very much.

dd_b took some pictures, and we'll post them as soon as may be so that you can see the necklace.