I am freshly back from Norwescon, but the first joyful thing I have to share is not about the con, but that the Organization for Transformative Works is now open for membership! \o/ And you can read all about it (in English, Čeština, Deutsch, Español, Français, and Italiano) at the otw_news community -- where, by the way, we are eagerly looking for more translators. You can also see our very cool (if I do say so myself, cough) roadmap for the design of our archive software.

I got to meet a whole bunch of really smashing fellow fans, including Rob Carlos, who started sketching in my Q&A at 11am on Friday, and less than 24 hours later handed me this piece, which he's put in the wiki: Temeraire, Lily, Maximus. Oh, and then as an afterthought he whipped out this one the very next day: Napoleon & Lien.

I also happily scored a copy of Pat Rothfuss's first book, another one by the very dapper Bruce Taylor, and two spectacular art books by Ciruelo, the artist guest of honor -- I've loved his work for years so it was an especial treat to meet him, and also to hopefully not-too-embarrassingly fangirl all over Dan Simmons. *g* I also picked up a truly fabulous feather headdress in the dealer's room and a couple of pieces by Mai Nguyen, but sadly wasn't able to stay for the art auction to try and grab the larger one. But it is just as well! Cons are dangerous places for the wallet.

Of course for now the books have joined my sad unread pile, while lies behind the terrifying stack of the copyedited MS that I am supposed to be working on right now. My current excuse is the copyeditor switched to blue pencil from red, and all my copyediting pencils were carefully chosen blue exactly for contrast! argh. But I have dug out a few hot-pinkish ones from my old box of colored pencils and hand-sharpened them with a penknife since they are too crumbly for the pencil sharpener (uphill in the snow! both ways!) and must go back to the grind.

Last bit of glee: while I was at the con, Bill of Subterranean Press sent me the hot-off-the-presses limited edition! I don't know if I mentioned what they're doing with the covers -- after some back and forth with Dominic Harman (who did the gorgeous original UK covers), the decision was that for the first three, we'd do modified versions of the three UK covers, and then starting with book 4, Dominic will be creating new art in the UK-cover style, for a complete matching set. \o/

Tags: conventions, otw, temeraire