I just got back from Potlatch 17. This was my first con. Conveniently, it was held right here in Seattle. It was also conveniently awesome.

I don’t think that I could do justice to it in prose, actually. Until this weekend I had never met a single SFF writer in person, except for once seeing Ursula K. LeGuin at a reading. This weekend I was plunged into a sea of seasoned pros, newly-published young writers, and hopeless wannabes like me. I was suddenly and unexpectedly surrounded by people with the same interests, the same experiences, and the same aspirations as me. It was literally a revelation. On Friday night, I was literally shaking when I went to bed; Saturday morning I woke up dreaming about the evening before.

I’m still very much on a high. Enough of a high that I spontaneously started a blog :).

I’m not going to try to recap the actual content of the weekend. But these were the Hopeless Wannabes, the people that I actually hung out with most of the weekend (all unpublished writers, for the most part):

• Jessie Kwak, making us “Jessie and Jesse” for the whole conference
• C.S. Inman aka Sän, who said nice but completely untrue things about me on his blog
• Elizabeth Coleman
• Eva Folsom (no site?)
• Natasha Oliver (also no site)
• Jennifer Hopkins (no site–seriously people, get with the times. If Google doesn’t know about you, then you don’t exist.)
• Brian LeBlanc

And here were the Big Important Authors that I spoke to. There were many more authors than this at the con, of course, but these were the ones that I actually talked to and who might actually remember me.

• Vylar Kaftan, who was so nice that I was literally stunned
• Cherie Priest, with whom I made a fool of myself when we met
• Mary Rosenblum, who led my writer’s workshop
• Suzy Charnas, who was the other leader of my writer’s workshop

I’m going to be building a blogroll with these people and others soon.