The convention was pretty terrific on all fronts. Saw old friends, made some new ones, had a very nice SH tea party, danced my little heart out at the dance, sold a couple of pieces of art (!), did fun panels, gave a reading that went over very well. I read "Monsoon Day", and that was probably the high point of the convention -- not the actual reading, but the fact that Molly Gloss, Carol Emshwiller, and assorted others came up to me afterwards to tell me how much they liked it. Yippee! I need to make some minor tweaks to that piece, and then I think I'm going to send it out to The Atlantic, et. al. Would feel better if Jed looked at it first. I think I'll go poke at him about it.
I sold the spinning piece, and "Invocation", and "Fringes". Several people said they liked the U Chicago piece, but it was out of their price range -- it'd be out of mine, too. :-) I don't think I'm going to drag it around the country with me -- it's heavy and fragile. I'll leave it in Chicago with Kevin, and take it back up to WisCon next year, I think. Though I may also see if any of the campus coffeeshops want to take a shot at selling it. Not sure if they handle student art.
Generally, people seemed to like the torn paper and pressed flower collages better than the more eclectic ones. I'm not sure if that really means anything, though. I'll probably keep doing whatever feels right for the poem at hand. Jed and I are going to WesterCon at the beginning of July, and I think I'll bring some art -- which means that I'll probably make a couple more collages either here in Chicago, or in Oakland. I'm planning on arriving around June 11th, so there's a couple of weeks there before the con. Pieces I'm thinking of working on:
- Fraying Edges
- Even Arthur Would Forgive
- Tragic Love Song
- Chorus
- Dreams of a Lover
- Letter
- Oak Arching Above Me
- Puzzle from Hell
- Katie's Dragon
- Storytellers
Speaking of not-so-fun stuff, Paul and Marcia have done a terrific job of dealing with the Eric remnants. They went in and cleaned the rotting food out of the fridge, emptied the trash, defrosted the freezer, looked around to see if anything was missing, hid some semi-valuable stuff just in case Eric breaks in, and will water the plants until Carol takes over in July. Friends are just amazing. My fish are even still alive! So I'm still out a chunk of money, but aside from that, everything seems okay.
And now I really need to get to work. The plan for the next two weeks -- cram on BW stuff, help Kevin pack and move. Talk to you later...
12:30. Of course, before I start real work, I have all this catch-up work to do... I took some time and added a link from my home page to the page of poem collages -- I also spent a while updating that page. I feel somewhat nervous about this bold move -- when the link was buried in my journal, I could feel comforted in knowing that only y'all, who already knew and loved me, would be looking at the art. But now just any random yahoo who wanders by might look at it. And what if they don't think it's good? What if they laugh at me? Eep! It's funny -- I know lots of people who have that kind of anxiety about their writing, and I never really got it. Sure, some of my writing is laughable, but that doesn't stop me from showing it to the world. But somehow I'm much more anxious about the art -- maybe because I'm still not confident I should be calling it "art". Writing is just writing -- you can't get away from that, right? But art -- it belongs in capital letters, you know? ART! And it's going to take me a while to be confident that these collages "count". Goofy, I know. Having people spend lots of money on them helps convince me, though. :-)