bohemiancoast

Came home via sleeper. Am exhausted. Con vv good. Appear to have contracted hideous incurable Bridget Jones virus along with most of fandom. v bad. Is there an antidote?

Ahem. Start again.

I spent most of the convention in and around the fan room and its associated programme, which were being run by the Plokta cabal with the help of the

fishlifters. I did get 5 hours sleep a night, except where I didn't. Um. I always left enough time to get five hours sleep and then an hour of getting up and getting breakfast before whatever I was doing, except that twice (Saturday and Sunday nights), I woke up after 3 hours sleep, lively, clear-headed and generally up for getting on with it ("still drunk", said the greek chorus). That allowed me to meet loads of interesting new and old fans who also tend to stay up too late.

I don't know to what extent the fan room suited the con. It worked exactly as we'd planned; the bar area was a bit more mixed, with more people I didn't know, still quite comfy though, and the lounge area was more comfortable and more prone to having my friends in it, but I think still welcoming to people who didn't know us all. I found it straightforward to find interesting conversations at any time, but I liked that it was also a place in which people could chill with a fanzine or a book, or whack each other with foam lightsabres. We gave away thousands of fanzines, and I must have had dozens of conversations where people looked at the massive stacks (no mouldering piles here; this was Greg's selection of duplicates of the better fanzines, alphabetised and sorted by continent. You aren't ever going to see a fanzine giveaway table like this again) and said 'where do I start' -- I'd pull out six likely fanzines more or less at random, suggest they read those and then write to editors for newer copies where the address is the same. We also raised money for fan funds through the auction, donations, a sales table, and the Great Tat Tombola -- we discovered that only the British understand what a tombola (a form of instant win raffle where you pull tickets from a drum and (normally) tickets ending in 0 or 5 are winners) is. Or what tat is for that matter.

We got a Hugo for Plokta, not bad after only 34 and-a-bit issues and 7 nominations. People tell me I squealed but I thought it was

frostfox, who was sitting right in front of me and who had just won the Fan Artist Hugo. I am grinning like a maniac in all the photos. We hijacked the official Hugo photocall to get proper photos of the entire cabal together (apart from children and cats), though I haven't yet seen one that doesn't make me look wild-eyed and psychotic. After the photos we rode through the streets of Glasgow in an open topped bus brandishing our Hugos -- I recommend this. We then went to the Hugo Losers party, where the general excitement of the night caused me to take 45 minutes to notice I was in a massive queue for 1/2 glass of cheap tepid wine and a small plate of finger food. At which point we left. We spent a little while with the CUSFS gathering in the bar (Mike and I are apparently the first CUSFS alumni to win a Hugo, surprisingly); I regret not spending longer here as many of my oldest fannish friends were there, but I erroneously believed I had a duty to hit parties. I then realised that there were loads of parties, the proportion of people I knew was way down on the fan room, I didn't appear to have quite enough energy to 'work the room', and I was missing the Fannish Olympics back at the Moat House. So

papersky and

elisem rescued me, we returned, and Much Champagne followed. In our absence

dmw had retained his knurdling record, and

ednun had managed a perfect score on the entirely fiendish Towel Fu.

Here's a pic of my Hugo; other ignominies it suffered included Hugo Ring Toss (thanks to

eyeliner297 for loan of bracelets) and How The Devil Are We Supposed to Unscrew This For Packing?

More later; I really am too shattered to write a con report. It was fun.