It is the last day of the con here in Epinal. The sun is shining brightly outside and the hotel lobby is full of people checking their email, sad creatures that we are. I appear to have failed to post anything at all on this blog yesterday, so here’s a pile of catch-up.

Yesterday I did some shopping and shot a pile of video interviews. The three US guests here have all had a wonderful time. I haven’t done an interview with Hal Duncan yet, but when I left him last night he was in the local Irish pub working his way through the various beers that they have so I’m pretty sure he’s happy too.

My friends at Bragelonne, one of the leading SF&F publishers in France, did a panel yesterday talking about their upcoming schedule. Stéphane Marsan talked rather too quickly for me to follow about their fantasy list. I did manage to note that James Barclay is very popular here. Tom Clegg is now handling the SF line and he made me very happy by announcing that they have a French translation of Brasyl in the works. The best audience reaction of the panel, however, was reserved for Isabelle Varange who edits their new Milady imprint. This mainly does urban fantasy and supernatural romance, but what got the audience excited was an announcement about a series of books featuring a sexy cyborg and her elf rock-star boyfriend. Go Justina!

The other panel I attended yesterday was devoted to the French-language podcast web site, Utopod. It is run by Lucas Moreno who lives in Switzerland but was born in Uruguay and who speaks Spanish, French and English fluently. He’ll be at Worldcon – look out for him. Podcasting is a fairly new idea in the Francophone world, and many of the audience had difficulty coming to grips with the idea that Utopod‘s output was available for free. They kept suggesting daft schemes by which they thought Lucas could monetize the web site, and he kept explaining why they would not work, and would just mean he had many fewer listeners. The phrase “Cory Doctorow” got used a lot.

The evening was given over to the Prix Imaginales, which I covered live for SF Awards Watch. The viewing numbers were not great, but we had people following the blog from France, Belgium, Switzerland, the UK and the USA, so I’m pretty happy. Huge thanks are due to Lionel Davoust who helped me organize the whole thing and provided helpful commentary on the French writers and publishers. You can see a picture of the trophy here. It is made of plastic so it is not quite as imposing as a Hugo, but it is undeniably cute.

After the ceremony we all headed off to Le Bagatelle for dinner where we discovered that green rhubarb is a local delicacy. And then, just in case we hadn’t had enough wine and green rhubarb liqueur, we fell into the nearby Irish pub. And that means I am all caught up here and can get on with doing SFAW posts and checking the video.