Toronto International Book Fair report

It's five days since I got home from Inspire!, the Toronto International Book Fair, and I'm just about recovered enough to write about it. This was the first year for the Fair and they were very enthusiastic about having SFWA participate, so Communications Director Jaym Gates and I organized setting up a booth and getting SFWA members involved in the Fair's programming. Lots of members from across Canada and the U.S. sent postcards, bookmarks, buttons and other material to hand out to attendees, and we also had pamphlets about SFWA and Writer Beware, the two most recent issues of the SFWA Bulletin, the 2014 and 2013 Nebula anthologies and volume one of the Grant Masters anthology.

SFWA Showcase reading

Our first item on the program, the SFWA Showcase Reading Series, featured Alyx Dellamonica, Ed Hoornaert, Robin Riopelle and Karina Sumner-Smith all doing short (5-6 minute) readings from their works. It was on Friday, when most of the attendees were kids, parents or teachers, and while it didn't attract a huge crowd the readers were all warmly received.

"The Future Ain't What It Used to Be" panel

On Saturday I got my own six-minute slot in the Put That On Your Bookshelf: Quirky Shorts reading, where I shared the stage with D.D. Miller and Shawn Syms and managed to read all of "When We Have Time". Finally we had our panel, "The Future Ain't What It Used to Be," in which Andrew Barton led a lively discussion between Julie Czerneda, Douglas Smith and Stephanie Bedwell-Grime that started with the question of why we didn't get the future SF promised us and moved on to many interesting places. Saturday was much livelier and we had a standing-room-only crowd for this one.

SFWA wasn't involved in any official programming on Sunday but traffic to our table was still good, and by the end we were out of Writer Beware pamphlets and Bulletins and down to our last copy of each of the anthologies. Then, after many chats with readers, writers, and friends old and new, not to mention witnessing the ChiZine crew descend upon the Piller's booth in a mad frenzy for free lunch meat products, it was time to pack up and head home.

Oh, and Popeye stole my pen.



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Spoiler Space: "When We Have Time"

Last night my wife was saying how lucky it was that her mother was able to find a birthday present for us to give to my grandmother. This led me to say that where the last generation borrowed money from their parents, we borrow time.*

I am not completely talking out of my ass when I say that people around my age view time differently than previous generations have: look at the trends in when people get married, for example, and (especially) when they have kids. My Dad, who was forty when I was born, was practically a generation older than most of my friends' dads; my older son was born when I was 36 and not a lot of his peers' parents are younger than me.

That's probably why, while some of the time travel stories I've written use the familiar SF trope of people moving through time, I've also written a bunch that focus on time as a commodity: something that can be manipulated, hoarded, bought and sold. "When We Have Time" is a story where, to paraphrase Giles on Buffy, the subtext is rapidly approaching being text: it was written at a time when we were living in a place we didn't want to live, when I had a job that I would come a hair's-breadth from losing every five months, and when we both knew that this definitely wasn't the time to have kids. Now I live in a place I like, have a job I love, have wonderful kids -- and think, as I'm rushing to pick them up and then make dinner every night, how much I would give to have just a little more time. Plus ça change...

The one Canadian reference in this story is pretty obvious, the Canadian Tire one-speed bike pictured above. I had one, and so did you.

* (I'm aware that lots of people in my generation borrow money, too. Shut up, I'm making a point here.)

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