Balticon is at the Hunt Valley Marriott again this year. That means we get a lot more exercies than at most cons, partly because the hotel is spread out and our room is clear to heck and gone (and on the second floor), but also because the hotel food is not great and a shopping center full of restaurants is about a 10 to 15 minute walk way. As long as it doesn't rain, things look good on that front.

I don't like to complain about an all-volunteer event (not that that stops me), but I do wish they had put the program descriptions somewhere in the handouts. The pocket guide has the easy-to-read schedule with participants' names and a panel title, but no description. Usually they put that in the larger souvenir program but no, there's nothing in that about the program except bios and photos of the participants.

Last night I saw a panel called Fads in First Novels. That one didn't need much description. They stuck to the topic most of the time except for a few sojourns into self publishing and some rants from the audience.

This morning I went to Darwin's Children, thinking it would be enitrely about evolution when in fact it was about writing alien species as if they werne't human. The best example anyone could come up with was Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep books. Some interesting discussions there.

The afternoon was spent in friends' readings: first up was tomdoyle, aka Tom Doyle, who coincidentally read a short story about some very alien aliens. Next was scottedelman, aka Scott Edeleman, reading a zombie story from his recent collection What Will Come After that managed to be funny even while humans were being consumed, and finally Dave William read from his new fast-paced novel The Machinery of Light. Readings are a great part of conventions. I enjoyed all of them!

I dropped in a late afternoon panel but it was clear the moderator didn't have a clear direction in mind for the topic so I decided to finish this blog post instead. I hope to make it to a launch party tonight, but meanwhile, it's time to head downstairs to see whose going to dinner!