I’m just back from the dead dog party. It is very late, so this will be brief.

Hannu’s Guest of Honor event was wonderful. He talked for about 20 minutes on the history and symbolism of spacesuits. Then he read a really lovely short story about one of the black seamstresses who hand-sewed the spacesuits for the Apollo astronauts. I very much hope that story will appear online in due course.

The Women & Publishing panel went well. Elizabeth Bear, Tanya Tynjälä & Johanna Sinisalo were all wonderful as expected (and all had very different perspectives from around the globe). I was also delighted to make the acquaintance of a rising star of Finnish fiction, Salla Simukka. She’s very smart, she’s as good as Gail Carriger when it comes to fashion, and the first book of her trilogy is out in English in August. The panel was apparently so engrossing that our program gopher forgot to watch the time and tell us when to stop.

I went straight from there to the LGBT panel. It had been put in one of the smaller programming rooms, but on the basis of similar panels at other events I expected about half a dozen people, all of whom identified as LGBT. When I got to the room I found that it was packed solid and people were being turned away, 10 minutes before the scheduled start. Suzanne van Rooyen and Markku Soikkeli helped me put together a great panel, though we really only scratched the surface of the topic. I’ve been talking to the Archipelacon programming people about doing something similar, in a bigger room, next year.

Thankfully the hall costume judging was mostly done by the time I got there, so my lack of brain cells did not cause any problems. Closing ceremonies went very smoothly, and I got a couple of hours power-napping before the dead dog, which helped me survive the evening. Now I need sleep.

I’ll be doing at least two more posts in due course. One will be the reading list from the LGBT panel. The other will be the photos from the masquerade which Joonas Puuppo has kindly sent me.