As usual, the Monday after the convention leaves me feeling like London after the Blitz.

There’s just something about conventions that really takes it out of you. It’s like life at a science fiction convention is just so much more rich and stimulating than the usual humdrum reality that it goes through a week’s worth of your physical and mental resources in just three days, and it takes a day or two to catch up again.

So the period between leaving the hotel this morning (only fifteen minutes before mandatory checkout at noon) and getting home seemed very long. I was ravenously hungry (so my blood sugar was low) and somewhat dehydrated, so I spent that interval in a mental state between waking life and sleep, playing tag with consciousness all the way.

Once I got home, I inhaled some food then went right to sleep, and didn’t wake up again till 4:30 pm. And honestly, I still could use another ten winks or so before I will feel fully human again.

One good thing, though, is that I have been too damned tired to feel any post-con depression. I am just glad to be back home where things are routine and predictable and I have food in the cupboards and the fridge and I can get a drink of water whenever I want and I can just fall apart and not worry about what to do next for a while.

Usually, after a convention, I feel a little sad because it’s all over now. It’s pretty much exactly like the feeling you get on Boxing Day when Christmas is officially over. You are glad it happened, but sad it’s over.

Not this time, at least, not yet.

I had a great con. Went to lots of panels, gorged myself on mental stimulation. If there is one thing where I have never been sated, it is my appetite for mentally stimulating conversation. I don’t think I am ever happier than when I am talking with intelligent, insightful, interested people. If I had my way, I would spend years just traveling the world to wherever there was a good chance of finding smart people who really care about ideas who love to talk to others of the same ilk.

Because that is totally my ilk. Thinkers and dreamers and visionaries. It’s quite the ilk.

Went to a panel on alien languages. All right, science fiction meets language, talk about perfect fodder for science fiction writers like myself. Sadly, the panel turned out to just be a fast paced lecture by this one dude and while a lot of of it was interesting (did you know there was a border collie named Chaser who knows over 1000 words?) and some of it did touch on the kind of deep discussion of the nature of language that I was looking for, it mostly seemed, in retrospect, to be one long excuse for the lecturer to tell us about the neato cool crab-like aliens who communicate by biological radio he had invented for his as yet unpublished debut novel.

Hmph. How lame. There was barely any discussion at all, and I have come to expect a certain amount of audience interaction in my panels. Despite my academic brilliance, I have never actually been that good at just sitting there and listening. The longer that goes on, the harder it gets for me to keep my mind from just tuning out the lecturer and retreating into that rich inner life us creative types are prone to having.

In school, I conquered this by sitting up front when I could (also helped with reading the blackboard) and, above all, asking questions. Being able to ask questions is mandatory for me. It is how I remain engaged.

Anyhow, that panel was okay but disappointing. I did another that was very interesting and even useful. It was called Live Slush Pile, and the idea is people anonymously submit the first page of unsold manuscripts to a panel of editors and publishers. Said first pages are read cold to the panel, and as they are read, the panel members raise their hand to vote to stop the reading and explain why they would have rejected the manuscript at that point.

Brutal, to be sure. There was some terrible shit in that slush pile and they were fairly blunt about what was wrong with it. One started with an expository lump. Can you imagine? Absolutely nothing had actually happened yet and we were getting the backstory of the main character.

Honestly, if I was on that panel, I would have been their Simon Cowell. I wouldn’t tell anyone they sucked or had no talent or anything like that, but I would say “That was terrible. ” and then tell them exactly why.

Sadly, I had nothing of mine that was suitable to submit. I would be more than willing to have my work mercilessly eviscerated if I learned something from it.

You don’t grow without admitting you are not perfect, after all.

What I did learn, though, is that people going through the slushpile are looking for a reason to reject your manuscript. It’s not that they are evil, it’s just that they have a lot of submissions to get through and the fastest way to do that is to judge your whole work by that precious first page.

So make that first page fucking awesome. One author’s first page got a sitting ovation from us all because it was totally gripping and made us all want to hear the second page, like, NOW.

There was only one little incident of me sort of copping out and spending time in our room napping when I could have been out doing panels, and I am proud of that. It’s much better than previous years. I am getting better and better at just pushing myself out there and leaving the social anxiety behind.

I have many more convention stories, but they will have to wait for another time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.