Part the first can be found here.
If you came here for the Nude Cyclists on Lygon street, I’ll get to that shortly.
Friday, the First convention day.
I awoke with the same headache that I had gone to bed with. I had been nervous about leaving my clothes bag in the dorm room (hey Bonds are top quality underwear), but upon arising I noticed that my room mate had left his macbook pro on the bunk(seriously who backpacks with a macbook). I decided then to worry no more about my tighty-whiteys.
I arrived early-ish and sat in the Bar1 seriously a vital spot at any convention. My first panel was Splicing Genres with Jane Routley, Claire Corbett and Lisa Hannett and my impressions were that Australians are playing on the edge of genre quite well and as long as the author can get the mode right then something worthwhile and fresh is turned out.
Next up was Tales as old as time – a panel on fairy tales, where the wolf featured prominently as a topic of discussion. There was also mention of the dark origins of many of our well known tales; sanitised first by the Grimms and then by Disney. Also How our forebears made no distinction between tales for children and adults in their folk tales.
This flowed quite naturally into the Twelfth Planet Press Hour. A celebration of TPP authors and the Press. I met Alex Pierce for the first time and helped lighten the load of cupcakes she was distributing amongst the crowd.
The crowd was huge, I would have said about 60 odd at least. Alisa Krasnostein stood on a chair to address the throng and all the Twelfth Planet Press authors in attendance had their photo taken.
(photo: Cat Sparks)
After this, a group of us absconded to Lygon street. Where after ordering our meals at one of the famous and really well priced Italian pizza joints we were treated to the wonderful sight of a large group of naked cyclists, Police Incident van in tow.
Sorry no pictures2 . It was a cold night and I didn’t catch the cause they were riding for.
1. The was a lot of sitting in the bar. It was the unofficial convention free form panel where many authors held court and chatted.There may have been some drinking…↩
2. I’ll let you imagine something akin to the Melbourne football team naked on bicycles↩
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