Readercon, Day 1

To start with, Joy and I drove past Walden pond to get here. It’s someplace that I knew was real, but never really thought of as real, know what I mean? People were swimming and playing; for most of them, I’m sure it was just the local pond, not some literary shrine. I was most taken with the trees. Walden pond sits in a bowl, surrounded by trees. The trees are probably not that remarkable, except that I’ve been living with limited access to them for months now. And no really big trees. But here, I couldn’t see the sky.

We drove on to Readercon. At first, it was a little bewildering to wander around knowing that there were people here who I knew online. I just didn’t know what they looked like.

So Joy and I decided to dive into the panels. We started with A Nomenclature of the Fantastic, then moved on to a reading of China Mieville’s new unpublished novel. He has a beautiful reading voice.

Afterwards, we ran into Doug Cohen, John Joseph Adams, which were the only two I’d met before. Then I met Paul Berger, who is in Twenty Epics with me. Joy introduced me to Will McIntosh, who I knew from Codex but had never met. We did not get to see Jenny Rae Rappaport, who was supposed to be our roommate, because she is at home with a nasty stomach flu. Everyone send her get well wishes.

I also met David Louis Edelman, whose first novel just came out; Lancer Kind, a fellow West Coaster and many other people whose business cards I didn’t take. I’m terrible at names.

Oh! And I sold a copy of Shimmer.

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