We hit the road again after breakfast and arrived at the Minneapolis Hilton Twin Towers shortly after noon, their time. This was a remarkable feat in that I'd neglected to bring the driving instructions with me and Greg had to negotiate by guesswork since the printouts I did have didn't list the hotel's address. Still, we made good time and arrived before any panels began.

Minicon registration had sent pre-printed forms with membership numbers via e-mail to each pre-registered guest. Take this and a picture ID to registration and they take the e-mail printout and hand you your program book, etc. Simple. Easy. Quick. The bulk of the work was done before the registration desk opened.

Minicon is traditionally a large convention with about 3,000 guests, gaming, media, and other activities. Somewhere along the line, certain members felt it had grown too large and a split had occurred. There will be other conventions at Minicon that focus on fannish, gaming, and media events, but Minicon itself has chosen to re-invent itself and as a result, membership this year was approximately half the usual attendance.

The Hilton hotel was spacious; you could wander around without feeling crowded. The convention apparently had all or almost all of the meeting rooms on the second and third floors and, while the hotel was filled with other guests, there were none of those encounters that make for awkward moments and interesting fannish lore.

Parties were everywhere, so much so, that our own was lightly attended and we bought home more snacks and drinks than we took with us. I counted at least five publishing-related parties and fifteen fannish parties. That was just Friday night. I don't know how many covered both nights of the convention.

Author's Roundtables were hotly attended, but these roundtables included such notables as Lois McMaster Bujold (I'm sure everyone reading this knows who she is) and publishing notables like Patrick Nielsen Hayden (a TOR editor). I doubt InConJunction could generate an equal amount of interest with roundtables unless they focused on the gaming guests.

The masquerade was abolished for the first time this year and I got to see in advance what it would be like if InConJunction followed the suggestion for hall costuming with photos posted in an area where everyone can view them.

Last year, Minicon had one of the most elaborate non-WorldCon masquerades of any convention, complete with stage and lighting far beyond what InConJunction usually provides. Attendance is always high and participation includes costumes which could enter WorldCon and walk away with prizes. This year, masquerading was light and I never saw anyone standing near the posting of pictures. The bottom line is that the people who attended Minicon this year simply were uninterested in the masquerade. While a few people felt it would be fun, costuming was mostly by children and people wearing period costumes.

The motto for programming this year was: More programming, and less of it -- or something to that effect. The word was, "What is the point of having all these interesting panels when you can only attend one at a time?" Thus, effort was made to schedule the panels into fewer tracks where there would seldom be an overlap of interested parties wanting to attend more than one panel at a time. There were also no panels for a two-hour break in the evening to give participants ample time to eat and/or prepare for the evening events. The dealer's room was open an amazingly long time and there was a 9:00 p.m. Tour of the Art Show conducted by guides. No wandering around. Keep up with the group.

The most interesting panel on Friday night, imho, was The Cold Equations: Let's Settle This Once And For All. For those of you unfamiliar with this well-known Analog story written years ago -- this is a story wherein the shuttle pilot is taking an emergency shipment of vaccine to a plague-stricken settlement and there's just enough fuel for the weight of the ship, cargo, and himself. He finds a cute, stowaway girl and he has to shove her out the airlock. The question was: is the story a cheat or a classic? Did the author stack the deck? Was there another answer possible within the story's own terms? And why would the author do a thing like this if he didn't have to do it? The room was full and people were debating furiously. An excellent panel.

Opening ceremonies began in the Grand Ballroom at 8:00 p.m. and there were four blimps floating around and remotely controlled. Unfortunately, they weren't well-guided and at least one of them attacked the speaker, managing to go nose-to-nose with him before being led away by what one presumes was a "navigator" and set free elsewhere. Another disadvantage to the blimps is that they tended to make loud farting noises that were, at first, mistaken for a bagpiper being loose in the room. The offending blimp was caught, fixed, and turned loose again about mid-way through the ceremonies.

That evening, Greg and I skipped all the parties to stagger back and forth down the hall with ice and fill the bathtub so that we'd have cold drinks for all the SFWA members who stopped by our official SFWA suite -- all half dozen of them. Oh well -- it was a new idea and it was a private party.

The morning started for me with the SFWA regional meeting. Things went well and I grabbed a quick lunch and prepared for the SFWA Emergency Medical Fund Auction at 1:00 p.m. wherein we auctioned off collectables (mostly bound galleys) to raise funds for SFWA members with insufficient or non-existing medical insurance.

A panel I very much regret missing is SPY vs. SPY in the Computer Age: A talk about dead drops, semaphores, cutouts, telltales -- the tools of spying. Another excellent panel of which I caught only a small peek was History As The Hard Science In SF - given that history is just as much a core science in our genre as astronomy, biology, or physics and that our concept of what comes next in the human story is determined by our idea of what's happened up to now. Another panel I missed was the Milk-And-Cookies Storytelling hour wherein Jane Yolen (best known for children's stories which are NOT your typical children's stories) tells stories. The audience listens, eats their cookies, and drinks their milk.

That evening's SFWA Suite was once again lightly attended, although we easily doubled our number of guests. Unfortunately, they kept bringing food and drinks with them and insisting they'd eaten too much earlier.

The Industry Fen Don't See was an interesting panel Sunday morning and one that works best when you have actual people from the publishing industry to tell you about the agents, production departments, packaging, marketing and other invisible lodges of the craft.

My one single panel on Sunday was What's Depressing, What's Cautionary, What's Uplifing. I admit to being puzzled before arriving, but it seems this grew out of someone's comment that a particular novel was depressing. "No," was the response, "it's merely cautionary, showing us what could happen if this goes on." Other people found the same book uplifting, showing hope for the future. So the question for us professionals was what we wrote, how we saw it, what we read that we thought was depressing, cautionary, or uplifting. Audience participation was high.

Breaking The Law In Comics is one panel I'd like to see come to InConJunction. The discussion was: Can your superhero team be sued for collateral damage if you take out half of downtown in a fight with a supervillain? How much legal protection does a secret identity give you? Do heroes who use energy-based superpowers contribute to global warning and are such powers in violation of the Law of Conservation of Energy? I think we could do great things with this panel, folks. Think about it.

We left Minicon about 1:00 p.m., (remember, we had to make the one-hour adjustment up for Daylight Savings Time that morning which put us back on Indiana time) and reached home shortly after midnight. It was fun. It was exhausting. It wasn't your typical Minicon. This is the kind of convention that excites me as a writer and a fan of literature. I doubt, however, that gaming and media fans will be at all interested in driving this far for a convention. They might feel differently about the splinter convention which will be held later in the year and focus on all those things that Minicon omitted.

I just found the best internet-related definition I've seen since SPAM. It's MEATLOAF. Forget the band and the movie. This is the official definition of Meatloaf: Unsolicited personal mass email. A relative of Spam, but homemade. "Some of the meatloaf I get is funny, but the majority is just annoying."

My clarification follows:

Unlike SPAM, which usually originates from unknown people or companies hoping to benefit in much the same way that phone solicitors or junk mailers hope to benefit, MEATLOAF usually originates with someone you know, sending something he or she found while cruising the net that he/she wants to share. SPAMMERs are ruthless and don't care if they offend you because they hope to get positive responses from a minority of those who receive the offending message. MEATLOAF mailers have good intentions and often respond with confusion and an expression of hurt feelings when told that the recipient wants to be removed from this and all future mailing lists.

As might be expected, I found this definition after being MEATLOAFED in a writers newsgroup wherein one clueless individiual really and truly thought he was doing a good deed sending e-mail messages to a mailing list he had s/t/o/l/e/n compiled from other lists wherein he encouraged people to check out website that he thought might be of interest to writers. These were usually websites the older and more experienced of us already knew about and we were getting a little tired of the one-message-a-week he was sending. There was no "to be removed from this list..." on his e-mail messages because he was, as I said earlier, clueless.

He said that since he hadn't received any complaints and had received a few "thank-you's," then he was obviously doing a good thing and was SHOCKED! (SHOCKED!, I repeat) to discover that not everyone on the newslist viewed his messages with such favor. Some accused him of SPAMMING, while others insisted it didn't quite fit the definition. Thus, it was that I came to find the definition: MEATLOAF, which we agree perfectly fits this situation.

I wish I could claim credit for the word, but I found it while reading a magazine.

Adam said, "Lord, when I was in the garden, you walked with me every day. Now I do not see you anymore. I am lonesome here and it is difficult for me to remember how much you love me."

And God said, "No problem! I will create a companion for you that will be with you forever & who will be a reflection of my love for you, so that you will love me even when you cannot see me. Regardless of how selfish or childish or unlovable you may be, this new companion will accept you as you are and will love you as I do, in spite of yourself."

And God created a new animal to be a companion for Adam. And it was a good animal. And God was pleased. And the new animal was pleased to be with Adam and he wagged his tail. And Adam said, "Lord, I have already named all the animals in the Kingdom and I cannot think of a name for this new animal."

And God said, "No problem! Because I have created this new animal to be a reflection of my love for you, his name will be a reflection of my own name, and you will call him DOG." And Dog lived with Adam and was a companion to him and loved him. And Adam was comforted. And God was pleased. And Dog was content and wagged his tail.

After a while, it came to pass that Adam's guardian angel came to the Lord and said, "Lord, Adam has become filled with pride. He struts and preens like a peacock & he believes he is worthy of adoration. Dog has indeed taught him that he is loved, but perhaps too well."

And the Lord said, "No problem! I will create for him a companion who will be with him forever & who will see him as he is. The companion will remind him of his limitations, so he will know that he is not always worthy of adoration."

And God created CAT to be a companion to Adam. And Cat would not obey Adam. And when Adam gazed into Cat's eyes, he was reminded that he was not the Supreme Being.

And Adam learned humility.
And God was pleased.
And Adam was greatly improved.
And Dog was happy.
And Cat didn't give a shit one way or the other.