The con is now in full swing, but to be honest that’s not a lot of action. The number of people here appear to be quite low – probably not a lot more than were in Auckland. Many of the big name Australian authors are not here. And the con is mostly strolling along on the “she’ll be right” principle (which is Australian for “no further effort required”). We are having a fun time anyway.

Lunch yesterday was courtesy of the Central Market. Medge & Bean, Paul Ewins and I bought some bread, cheese and olives and ate them. Adelaide really is a very good place to eat.

In the afternoon I was on a panel about SF awards, and attended the GoH presentation for Steve and Catherine Scholz. Both were quite good events, and both had very small audiences – less than 20 in both cases, I think.

The masked ball last night was rather better attended, but it did prove the point that if you have a “masked ball” rather than a formal masquerade then hardly anyone will actually come in costume – a mask is seen as being quite sufficient. Sean Williams is an excellent DJ. Sadly, having been up since 5:30am, I was not really in a fit state to dance the night away. However, I did mange to give the French dress an outing, and I got some very kind comments.

This evening, all being well, I will be covering the Ditmar Awards live at SF Awards Watch.

Talking of the Ditmars, quite a bit of the discussion on the awards panel revolved around lack of participation. If you have less than 100 people voting it becomes much easier for people to stuff the ballot. There is, I’m afraid, no solution to this other than getting more people to attend the convention. The Australians have tried some creative solutions, including once trying to shame people into participating by adding a character of Best Fannish Cat. The idea was that people would be so outraged at the awards being trivialized that they would all want to get involved, but I don’t think it worked. Given that I’m now wondering how I could win an award for Best Fannish Cat, I can see why.