In a Nutshell

World Fantasy was a terrific convention.  I saw numbers of old friends I rarely meet, and I hope I made some newer, lasting friends.  Because too many of my peers now belong to the early-to-bed, early-to-rise school, I found myself partying with a younger crowd.  (They had better Scotch, anyway.)

It was great to see a dealers’ room choked with books.  There was only one table that wasn’t books, and that was jewelry.  It should have been books.

There’s a sufficiently German influence in Columbus that practically every restaurant I went to made its own sausage.  I went to a traditional family-owned place called Schmidt’s Sausage Haus that should be called Wurst With Everything.  They had several kinds of homemade wurst along with sauer and other forms of kraut, and hot German potato salad and other kinds of potatoes.   It went down very well with a 32-ounce mug of their very own home brewed dark beer.

My other meals stuck to my ribs equally well.  In fact I had the ribs.  I had the Big Heap of Fried Fish.  And I knew that I was in the Midwest when I went to the award banquet and was served a 14-ounce medium-rare New York-cut steak on a heap of mashed potatoes.  (Tough, but flavorful.  Though I am not without appetite, I couldn’t finish it.)

Since WFC is very much a professionals’ convention, with most of the attendees being writers, editors, journalists, artists, and others who have some professional reason for being there, I am pleased to report the news I heard while hanging out among my peers.

• Science fiction is dead.

• “Hey!  I just sold this space opera trilogy for mucho bucks!”

• Steampunk is really cool and is selling like hotcakes.

• Steampunk sucks!

• “Hey, I just sold my zombie steampunk novel for mucho bucks!”

• There’s a complete glut of urban fantasy.  The market can’t possibly support all of this.

• “Hey, I just sold my urban fantasy for mucho bucks!”

• My editor won’t return my emails or ph0ne calls.

• My editor hasn’t bothered to read the book I submitted eighteen months ago.

• “Hey, my editor just bought someone else’s trilogy for mucho bucks!”

• Traditional high fantasy is dying.  Only old people read it, and once they die, it’s over.

• Didn’t the Lord of the Rings movies make, like, a billion dollars or something?

• “Hey, Game of Thrones is going to be on HBO!”

• It’s the publishing apocalypse!

• Ebooks will save us all!

Which goes to show that a publishing apocalypse isn’t an apocalypse at all if it wasn’t your piece of publishing that just got trampled under the hooves of the Four Horsemen.  (Whose names, by the way, are Acquisition, Editorial, Promotion, and Distribution— and actually it only takes one of them trampling you to zero out your career.)

Still, if you’re going to have a publishing apocalypse, World Fantasy is definitely the place to have it.  If the ship is going down, you might as well go down with people that you like.