I had a seriously great time. Hung out with many fabulous people but didn’t get to spend enough time with any of them. Got back to the city and went straight to the theater to pick up the dead dog and the intestines.

My god… I have such a strange job.

Anyway, I’ll try to do a full con report soon.

I have had great fun at the convention so far. I’ve split off from the crowd occasionally to do phone calls trying to deal with some complications in the show.

Tell you about it all later. Right now, I’m going to try to get an actual full night of sleep. It’s only 1:30 am. That’s early, compared to my usual schedule.

I got on the train with no further mishaps and was rewarded by getting to sit next to the lovely and talented Andrea Kail on my way up. Granted, I spent about half the trip sleeping, but the conversation prior to that was great.

It was hard to cross the lobby without running into someone that I knew, which was a wonderful feeling. Like old home week.

Now, I’m off with Beth Wodzinski to pick up supplies for the Shimmer pirate party. Yarr!

Pirate Issue Release Party: Friday — 9:30pm, Suite 556

Today started with me sleeping through my alarm, though waking up in enough time to make the 8:15 train to Saratoga if I hurried. I ran out the door, struggling along with pounds of Shimmer magazines in my backpack, and came down to the steps of the subway station just as the train I needed was arriving. Whew.

And then, in a bonus stroke, when we got to 96th street, the express train magically appeared across the track. I hopped over and started breathing a little easier. I even got a seat.

Then the train stopped in the tunnel.

It crawled forward finally arriving at NY Penn Station at 8:07. Gah! I ran into the building, sweat pouring down under my coat, knowing that I wasn’t going to make it, but having to try. After all, Amtrak had sent an announcement to expect delays. Maybe it was late pulling in to Penn. Sure enough, I checked the board and it was still there. I grabbed my ticket, no line, and turned to the gate.

Which I couldn’t find. Oh, sure… there was a track 5 E, but it was only accessible by an escalator, which was going up. I needed to go down. A station attendant saw me and another man run to 5 E and look panicked. He shouted, “The stairwell behind you. Run! It might still be there.”

I ran. Top of the stairs. Glory be! The train was still there.

At the first landing, the doors shut. Halfway past that, the train pulled forward. I stopped and dropped my bag. The other man did the same thing. Almost in unison, we cursed.

I turned around, lugged my bag upstairs to exchange my ticket for the afternoon train.

That done, I walked back to the red line to go home. A line from the platform wound down into the main terminal. It wasn’t moving and from where I stood, I could see the crowd at the top, filling the platform. Someone said, “Train’s not running.”

“Any of them?”

“Not on this line. An ‘incident’.”

Groaning, I walked back to the other end of the station to take the C train home. As I waited, I watched six E trains come by and a couple of A’s but no C. Finally, an announcement said that they were running “slower than usual due to an earlier incident.”

What’s with all the incidents? After waiting for forty-five minutes, a C finally came, just as I was about to give up.

I got home about 10:30 and collapsed in bed.

Half an hour later, the phone rang. The production had run into a problem and wanted to know what they should do. With a sense of grim irony, I said, “Fortunately, I missed my train this morning. I’m still in town.”

So, I skipped the afternoon train, fixed the intestines and the dead dog and will go to World Fantasy tomorrow. Somewhere in all of this, I’m planning on sleeping more than half an hour.

I’ll be at World Fantasy this year, which I’m very much looking forward to.

Is anyone besides me wanting to go to the harness racing on Saturday night? One of my favorite books growing up was Born To Trot which was set around the world of harness racing. I loved that book and have always wanted to see trotters in action.

Well. I got home around 1:30 am. My flight was delayed out of Austin and I just barely caught the connecting flight. Alas, my luggage did not. The wait for the flight to take off would have been worse had I not had a lovely conversation with Sally Harding.

The weekend is a complete blur, so I’m not going to try to tell you about things in chronological order. Because Beth and I were running around getting ready for the Shimmer pirate party, I only made it to a couple of panels. The panel on Alternate History sparked a pretty exciting conversation. The panel had been talking about “deep stories” as the point where events had changed in an alternate history. Howard Waldrop was talking about the Cone of History and used the words “Alternate Future.” I asked if anyone had every done a SF story with an alternate history deep story. You know, like, what would space look like if Lincoln hadn’t been shot? The panel stopped dead and then they all started saying that they couldn’t think of an example and wanted to write one. In one of those moments of telepathy, where I don’t remember having the conversation with Beth, we agreed that Shimmer had to do an anthology of Alternate Future stories. I announced that to the room at large and Paul Park said, “What are you going to call it?”

“Alternate Future. Is there another choice?” Howard Waldrop cautioned us that we needed to pay attention to Heinlein’s rule that you could only change one thing in a story. I know what he means, but I think with careful guidelines this could be an exciting project. So, anytime Beth and I weren’t working on the Shimmer Pirate party, we were hashing out beginning guidelines for the Alternate Future anthology. I’ll keep you posted.

I also got to hang out with folks from Codex, InkSlingers, Shimmer and meet new people. I finally met a whole host of online friends like Patrick Swenson, Lisa Mantchev, Cat Rambo, Eric James Stone, Deanna Hoak and Edmund Schubert.

Getting to be total fangirl to Peter S. Beagle and Charles Vess was very satisfying.

And then there were the folks I’d met before and getting to see them again made me happy. Mr. Fisher, Alethea Kontis, Jenny Rae Rappaport, John Joseph Adams, Ellen Datlow, Ken Scholes, Jen West, Jay Lake, Brad Beaulieu, Beth Wodzinski, Gavin Grant, Mike Munsil and his wife, Julia, Alan DeNiro and, and…there are more, but I suck with names and the weekend, as mentioned previously, is a blur.

The Pirate Party went off better than we could have hoped, since neither Beth nor I had thrown a con party before. We were totally stressed leading up to it but Melissa Tolliver saved our tails. Her son Adrick has a room decorated with pirate gear and very, very kindly let us use his stuff as part of our decorations. The piece de resistance was a giant Pirate Mr. Potato Head. Beth fell in love with it and bought one of her very own. We were also saved by Sulin, who cut lemons and got music going and took photos and generally filled in the gaps for us. I spent the party pouring drinks for folks, which was loads of fun since it meant that I got to meet everybody.

After it ended, I headed down to the Awards banquet to sit with Brad. The presentation on Six Fantastic Flags over Texas was very funny and I wish I had caught the name of the gentleman who delivered it. Everyone at the table was very nice, and despite the fact that we all introduced ourselves, I have forgotten everyone’s names except for Katie, Howard and John. I only remember them because we talked afterwards and I was able to stare at name badges and well, Brad blogged about them first. Sigh. I’ll have to come up with a better system for remembering names for the next con.

How about you? How do you remember names of people you meet at cons?

I had a great time at WFC. Highlights include the Shimmer Pirate party, where I served a drink called, pirate, to 150 or so people, while Beth tattooed them. Pictures will follow, meanwhile, here’s the drink recipe.

Shake in iced cocktail shaker & strain
3/4 oz light rum (2 cl, 3/16 gills)
3/4 oz Cognac (2 cl, 3/16 gills)
1/4 oz grenadine (1.5 cl, 1/8 gills)
1/2 oz fresh lemon juice (1.5 cl, 1/8 gills)
Serve in a cocktail glass (4.5 oz)

I met wonderful people and slept very, very little. I’ll tell you more tomorrow.

Ken Scholes, Jen West and I arrived at the hotel safely, thanks to Jen’s skillful navigation. In the lobby, we immediately met Alethea Kontis, Mr. Rick Fisher, Edmund Schubert and Michael Kabongo. After checking in and freshening up, we went over to the main hotel (we’re staying in the overflow hotel) and seemingly met the rest of the known universe.

I abandoned the fun and games to go pick Beth up at the airport around 7:00 and we whisked straight back to the conference. I would have updated last night, when I had some hopeof remembering eveyone I ran into, but the free internet in our room doesn’t work.

While searching for a perfect pirate beverage for World Fantasy, I stumbled upon CocktailDB, which is a beautifully laid out website. Rob and I have lots and lots of liquers in our cabinet from when all the puppeteers left the country. Everyone cleaned out their cabinets and dropped the supplies off with us. So, tonight I plugged in three of the ingredients from our cabinet and the database recommended a Menlo Club Cocktail. It’s very citrusy and not one I think I’ll order again although I imagine that it would be lovely on a hot summer night. I’m sipping it very, very slowly because it’s also quite potent.