Things I need to do in Adelaide

1) Eat a pie floater. Maybe two, if I survive the first one.
2) Eat a frog cake. Oddly, the pie floater does not fill me with fear, but this little sugared treat does. Insidious looking things, I tell’s ya. Insidious.
3) Launch Horn on Sunday (5pm)
4) Pick up a bunch of Horn pre-orders for family & friends who aren’t attending the con.
5) Remember the names for the beer sizes in SA (you have pints, right guys? right?). Find a pub that has Cooper’s Stout on tap.
6) Slap Jason with a big steel gauntlet of iron resolve until he starts working on his novel.
7) Take part in the Urban Fantasy, High Fantasy, and Magic Realism panel on Saturday morning.

If you’re trying to track me down at any point during the con, that’s your rough guide for finding me. All offers to help me go find pies and black beer will be gratefully accepted 🙂

In the absence of context, I’m going with “really? Cool!”

So the nominations for the Australian Ditmar Awards have been released after a few weeks of my friends-list being packed with reminders to send in nominations and reminders about the 2008 works that are eligible. Unlike the Aurealis Awards, which I followed for years before I actually started writing SF, the Ditmars are something of a mystery to me – I lack the context to understand how they fit into the wider scheme of Australian fan culture and speculative fiction. I figured I’d get a chance to puzzle that out at while attending Conjecture, since that’s where they’re awarded this year. Then the list came out:

Best New Talent
—————
Peter M. Ball
Felicity Dowker
Jason Fischer
Gary Kemble
Amanda Pillar

And you know what? Context for understanding or no, that’s kind of cool. I’m going to stump for the Fisch to win, of course, since he’s both a fine writer and the man who is putting me up during the con, but as nomination lists go that’s a pretty nice one to be on 🙂