Friends Everywhere

This past weekend was spent at our local Scottish-Irish festival. This is one of–or the–largest festival of this type in the country, and my husband and I went for the whole weekend, because we’re fairly active with our respective clans and like to go all out at this sort of thing.

During some downtime on Sunday, I got out my current read–Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog (time travel, on the humorous side)–and had just settled in when someone wandered by and asked what I was reading.

(We tend to be at the Clan Campbell tent most of the time–of course, we are Campbells, but the people who run the clan here are extremely friendly, and we seem to pick up all sorts of other clanspeople all the time. Half the time there’s a lone Campbell floating around for official business, and everyone else is from some other clan.)

Anyway, this person–no idea what clan–had never heard of Connie Willis but was a fan of science fiction and fantasy in general, so we talked for a long time. And eventually we incorporated a Mackay and one of the Campbell leaders into the conversation (and, as you can probably imagine, we couldn’t escape the requisite Outlander discussion).

Are Scottish/Irish people more likely to read scifi/fantasy? (With the current exception of Outlander. And Highlander. Scots love Highlander. For obvious reasons.) Oh, I doubt it. But it does show that you can find likeminded people just about anywhere, though it is helped along by actually having a scifi/fantasy book along with you.

Ran into a couple of other authors too. Should have taken bookmarks/business cards. Let that be a lesson to me.

Have you ever found a friend through carrying a book/wearing a tshirt/some other random thing?