LunaCon
I am going to LunaCon the weekend of March 19th. This is one of those older conventions that has a flavor all its own including the Hotel. Someone once described it as Tardis like in that you find yourself in what seems to change as you walk through it. I think this is one of the last years for the Hotel in Rye New York which is good and bad. Your food choices are very limited in the area. Most people are limited to the hotel. Unlike say DragonCon, where there are a number of restaurants of various cost all through the downtown area.
Overall I really liked the last LunaCon I went to. I was able to meet Alan Dean Foster which was nice since I ended up being his editor on a couple of projects after that. I also was able to hang around with the group of Usual Suspects that have become my friends over the years I have been up in New York. This year I am on several panels on a diverse range of subjects. So Peter is giving me a weekend pass from being Mommy since he is hard at work on the next New Frontier Novel and is going to I-Con the next weekend.
I am doing something new this year. I am entering the Art Show with some of my puppets and dolls. Some of them are new designs so I am throwing them out there to see what sticks. I had a few at FarPoint, but I think this batch is much more fun than the last one. I love problem solving a concept or drawing of a puppet. Some are straight forward. They are standard rod, hand and rod, hand, or string puppets. Then there are the others that do not follow the typical body form. Those you have to experiment with until you get them working smoothly. Then there is the CLEVER IDEA ™ which you think “would it be cool if this puppet could” [fill in the blank]. The first one of these I ever had was when I made a puppet based on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Which was wouldn’t it be cool if the eyes lit up. Which I did in conjunction with my electronics wiz brother. The eyes were small red LEDs with a battery pack in the back of the puppet. We boosted the input to the LEDs to make them brighter. Overtime we found two problems with this. We knew that the burnout rate on the LEDs was going to be higher than usual due to the additional power and have since been kicking ourselves that we didn’t make it easier to remove the dead LEDs and replace them. You have to strip the whole system out of the puppet. Rebuild and reinsert. The other problem I had not considered was heat. Because we were pushing the limit of the LEDs, we were generating more heat and the wires in the head became hot. Sometimes very hot. With a puppeteer’s hand in the head, there is no place really for the heat to go so I tend to limit how long I have the eyes on and how long I use the puppet. The original is retired now since it was signed by various people who worked on Sandman and it hit that magic “Gee it looks ratty” point. Morphy II is owned by Neil and has a much better LED system than Morphy I. Someday I’ll get around to building Morphy III since I have learned quite a bit since building the original.
Overall I really liked the last LunaCon I went to. I was able to meet Alan Dean Foster which was nice since I ended up being his editor on a couple of projects after that. I also was able to hang around with the group of Usual Suspects that have become my friends over the years I have been up in New York. This year I am on several panels on a diverse range of subjects. So Peter is giving me a weekend pass from being Mommy since he is hard at work on the next New Frontier Novel and is going to I-Con the next weekend.
I am doing something new this year. I am entering the Art Show with some of my puppets and dolls. Some of them are new designs so I am throwing them out there to see what sticks. I had a few at FarPoint, but I think this batch is much more fun than the last one. I love problem solving a concept or drawing of a puppet. Some are straight forward. They are standard rod, hand and rod, hand, or string puppets. Then there are the others that do not follow the typical body form. Those you have to experiment with until you get them working smoothly. Then there is the CLEVER IDEA ™ which you think “would it be cool if this puppet could” [fill in the blank]. The first one of these I ever had was when I made a puppet based on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Which was wouldn’t it be cool if the eyes lit up. Which I did in conjunction with my electronics wiz brother. The eyes were small red LEDs with a battery pack in the back of the puppet. We boosted the input to the LEDs to make them brighter. Overtime we found two problems with this. We knew that the burnout rate on the LEDs was going to be higher than usual due to the additional power and have since been kicking ourselves that we didn’t make it easier to remove the dead LEDs and replace them. You have to strip the whole system out of the puppet. Rebuild and reinsert. The other problem I had not considered was heat. Because we were pushing the limit of the LEDs, we were generating more heat and the wires in the head became hot. Sometimes very hot. With a puppeteer’s hand in the head, there is no place really for the heat to go so I tend to limit how long I have the eyes on and how long I use the puppet. The original is retired now since it was signed by various people who worked on Sandman and it hit that magic “Gee it looks ratty” point. Morphy II is owned by Neil and has a much better LED system than Morphy I. Someday I’ll get around to building Morphy III since I have learned quite a bit since building the original.