The first day of P-Con has massed without major incident and with much amusement.

I did a panel about superheroes in fiction, largely on the strength of Karen Burnham’s excellent paper on the subject, and a very knowledgeable audience.

That was quickly followed by a panel on mentioning the unmentionable. Apparently you can get away with almost anything in fiction, though killing young children and dogs is still frowned upon. What is a problem, however, is covers. US publishers are apparently still very reluctant to put brown-skinned people on the cover; and all publishers are reluctant to put disabled people on the cover. You can, as Justine Larbalestier proved, do something about this. However, publishers are not always wrong about what people will buy. Sometimes there is a trade-off to be made between having the cover you want, and selling the book; and if you happen to have a book that you want to be read by the sort of people who might not buy it if it has the wrong sort of person on the cover…

Nick Harkaway’s Guest of Honour speech was a lot of fun, especially the bits of The Gone Away World that he read. I believe that I have film of it on the Flip, and hope to put it online in a week or two.

Clare, poor dear, has gone down with some sort of infection and is hiding in her room. I did, however, check with Nick, and can now reveal that what she was doing last night was making an extended phone call to people in Texas as part of the campaign to save the life of Linda Carty.

My final panel for the day was on international genre writers. I thought we spend rather too much time talking about translations and not enough time actually plugging people’s books. Also the audience was very small as we were up against a discussion of social networking. But we did cover a bunch of good issues.

I have gathered up my courage and entered the Frank Darcy Award contest for drabble-writing. Laura Anne Gilman has entered as well, and I expect her story to be much better than mine.

Thus far there has been no sign of Cthulhu cultists, possibly because Fluff and his minions are not here.