Writing this morning from the computer terminal in the Hunt Valley Marriott lobby.
On a random note, it’s odd to see my webpage on a computer other than mine. I think I made some decent generic font choices, and it looks nice, but I miss seeing the various Doctor Who fonts used on the page. As I said, it’s a random little thing. I realize that, for the first time really, I’m seeing the webpage the way everyone else does.
As for the convention, so far, so good.
The trip itself was a minor nightmare, mainly due to the insane traffic on the Washington Beltway, a sinkhole on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway that dumped a lot of traffic onto other roads, and a nasty accident outside Baltimore that closed three lanes of a four lane interstate.
Unfortunately, the sun burned my left arm during the drive. It’s a little on the painful side, and my right arm matches not at all.
Met several people last night for the first time. David Henderson, the proprietor of the Psi Phi webpage. Andrew Timson. Geoff Trowbridge. Three people I’ve known through the Internet for years, and now I have faces to place to the names. Good times.
I also met Richard White, author of the Gauntlet novel and an upcoming Star Trek: SCE novella. Long-time readers may recall that my review of White’s Gauntlet novel wasn’t that favorable, so it came as some surprise recently when I discovered White’s webpage and its link back to mine. I’d never commented on that, though I felt some sense of guilt. So, when I presented White at the autographing party last night with a copy of his Gauntlet novel for signing I think he was somewhat surprised. We had a good conversation, and it was a true pleasure to meet him.
Today will consist mainly of attending panels, though I will be at the SFWA Charity auction in the morning. I spoke last week with my marketing department about possibly donating marketing materials relating to Star Trek and Star Wars video games to the auction as a way of assisting the SFWA and putting the company’s name out there, and the marketing department has been extremely supportive of the idea. So, in the Beetle are several marketing posters and a banner for Destroy All Humans! for the auction.
The panel I’m most looking forward to today is the one for Star Trek: Titan, devoted to the novels about Captain Riker and the Titan, post-Star Trek: Nemesis.
I should be meeting Jim McCain for breakfast sometime in the next half hour, so I’ll draw this to a close.
Will there be more updates from the convention? We’ll see.
The panel I’m most looking forward to today is the one for Star Trek: Titan
Because of a certain panel member, right?
Panel??? Forget that. Lets hear about the Orion she-devil green women. 😉
No, actually I had a serious question to ask Marco. I warned him in advance at the bar Friday night. And then, at the panel I asked. And I got a good answer. 🙂
And for what it’s worth, I haven’t yet traded words with said person.
I considered it yesterday, but as a dear friend of mine said, she “could break him with [my] finger.” 😉
Hmm, I had a look at the stylesheet you’re using, but didn’t recognise any of the font names… They’re fonts which were used on the books, I presume? 🙂
and what was the question/answer?
The question was (roughly) this:
At Shore Leave last year Star Trek: Titan was given the tagline, ‘TOS for the TNG era. Taking Wing picks up from Nemesis and is fairly Romulan-centric. The Red King is a sequel to The Sundered, a novel published in 2003. And Orion’s Hounds features the Space Jellyfish from “Encounter at Farpoint” fairly prominently. TOS didn’t revisit and retread familiar ground week after week, but when looking at the three announced Titan novels rather than seeing ‘new worlds and new civilizations’ I see the old, familiar places. In what sense, then, does Titan fulfill the tagline “TOS for the TNG era”?
The answer was that it would take the first two books to deal with the aftermath of Nemesis, and with the third book and beyond we’ll be seeing things in Titan we haven’t seen in Star Trek before.
Okay?
Hmm..I’d forgotten the TNG-Tos line…though I rather liked Taking Wing, and when I realized what Red King is dealing with (from taking wing’s final pages) thought that’d be cool.