T-5 days and counting...

For me, Norwescon starts Wednesday! Alternatively, it started months ago. That's the fun of being on concom, even at lower levels. And that's why - for someone who hasn't published a fanzine in a while - I do an awful lot of fanzine publishing. (E.g., today's unauthorised three-copy custom-built-by-me seven-page booklet-format edition of Ansible's April 2004 web version. Why? Because I like paper, that's why.) I run the at-convention lending fanzine library, and it's getting more difficult every year - more and more people seem to be going to tiny print runs and .pdf distribution for any other copies. Which is fine, except that they don't then bother responding to a convention librarian's request for preprinted copies, and so I have to do them all myself.

And that's why I was binding other people's fanzines half the night.

I also did the large-type version of the daily at-convention newsletter template. (Oh; I also publish the daily convention newsletter.) The library keeps me busy before the con, but doesn't take much time once things are going; the daily 'zine keeps me busy the weekend, but doesn't take much in advance, except for theme/title/design and layout/etc. There's more to that than you might think, because I overhaul the thing every single year, to go with that year's convention theme. (Or to work against it, or in one case, to very specifically and very explicitly ignore it, because WHAT THE FUCK?) The list so far:

1. The Claw! ("The Claw decides who stays and who goes." Because what the fuck kind of SF convention theme is "Year of the Child," anyway? All the 'zine staff members were called Zealots.)
2. Mr.Cranky's Disruptive Newsletter ("The words of our founder: Get th' hell off my land!" People still want Mr.Cranky mugs - no, he's no relation to the movie reviewer; mine was modelled after Mr. Yuk on the poison labels, with a healthy dose of any old man who has ever thrown a brick at a cat and written a confused, typewritten letter to the editor about the paper wasted by including spaces after periods. That's why it's Mr.Cranky, and not, not, not Mr. Cranky. "EM AR DOT CRANKY!")
3. Gothpark (The full title was Gothpark Chronicles, for that extra touch of pretensiousness; Neil Gaiman was GoH and I knew we'd get a zillion extra goths and South Park was still relatively new, and "Vampire Lord Fatass" was too good an opportunity to skip. I made all four of the Gothpark characters out of Publisher '97 art objects.)
4. Fax Cascadia (The best I ever did going with a theme instead of against it; it was "also" the newsletter of the first Cascadian Worldcon, held in conjunction with Norwescon, in an alternate history.)
5. Ad Astro! ("Stupid puns will save us all," but while I like the poster and love the logo, the 'zine itself came out kind of dreary. The only thing that saved it for me was that we got parodied by someone releasing Ad Aspirin at the convention and slamming us on page one. Yay!)
6. Inevitability (The year I looked at the theme and said, "Fuck it. Robots take over the world." And went completely batshit with the design. So many people so didn't get it, but it's still my favourite and I think it's a thing of beauty. It's also the only one to get mentioned in the fannish press, so it wasn't just me. The clue that a surprising number of people didn't get was to read it in the voices of the robots whose pictures were next to the text you were reading - specifically like with an Internet Q&A site. But everybody loved the Cylon Death Squad Joke Patrol. Personally, I preferred "SING ALONG OR DIE! With Tobor!" but, well, there you are.)
7. The Great and Terrible Voice of OZ (Not bad; completely on theme; not as interesting as Fax Cascadia because I had less room to play. For some reason, costumers at the convention really, really seemed to like it.)
8. Letters from Yingzhou (Actually nicely on theme, and I think very pretty, but too many people had not read The Years of Rice and Salt so didn't make the connection. Expecting this, I played it very low key and it was fine, if mildly confusing. "Dara (R'ykandar Korra'ti) was your Imperial Editor. as always, even if she played it pretty straight this year just to show she could." No one realised that I used an actual Chinese typeface for the English-language body text, either. It was "Gulim." Because I'm just that kind of obsessive.)

And then there's this year's, of course, which is still a secret.

In real life news, annathepiper and others have already talked about the wedding; I danced a lot more than I usually do, and I attribute that to having a lovely new silk dress to dance in. jessicac looked just as good as everybody else has said, if not better. They did the trick of leaving disposable cameras out for the guests to take pictures at the reception; they're going to have a lot of shots to pick through when they get back from their honeymoon, because rmd and I made sure that all the shots were used. ^_^

Also, I finally got around to installing the Japanese-language learning aid software I picked up for Windows a while ago; the vocabulary-training section actually seems useful, with audio, written (not in Romanji, either - yay!), and pictoral cues. Yay! And the other thing I did tonight: make those useless Ikea battery-powered closet/cabinet lights I bought a year or so ago(!) useful by wiring in a real switch and putting them up in our windowless, unwired-and-nearly-unwirable bedroom closet. They work great, there's now a light in the closet, and I'm much more pleased about it than I really should be, but don't care. I can find my clothes now at night. Yay! ^_^