Three hours widdershins.
So! Readercon. —There was gonna be a whole long con report thing like I haven’t done in a long long time but; but. It just wasn’t gelling. (A taste:
And then out in the hall there’s Greer Gilman, and here’s me, stammering at the sheer impossibility of taking up that one time, too many years ago, when on a whim I pulled an unassuming yellow mass-market paperback from the shelf of a Harvard Square bookshop and opened it up and there on the first page fell into those, those sentences, those goddamn words, that voice; the cadences which tug at my fingers even now, ringing and echoing will I or no in whatever I try to write myself—how—how do I, how do I take that, all that, and fit it somehow all into a flatly simple “Gosh, I, I really like your stuff.”
(—There was quite a bit more in that vein. So: not such a loss?) —Anyway. In and amongst the starstruck knee-knocking (I gave a copy of Dicebox to Samuel Delany! I pestered Ellen Kushner for a photograph! I told Paul Park how much I like Starbridge!), the old friends-rendezvousing (Emily Care and Epidiah drove down for lunch! I completely failed to recognize Vinnie!) and new friends-making (David Shaw made me a drink! Sofia Samatar made me stammer! Natalie Luhrs didn’t glue my hand to my beard! Daniel José Older thinks I look like Kevin Kline!), the Friday doldrums (I made a complete fool of myself in re: storyability! I was suddenly convinced my impostor syndrome wasn’t nearly as overwhelming as anyone else’s!) and the Saturday redounds (the cheeky Butts in Literature panel! the impromptu dance party!), the book-securing (American Shore! Starboard Wine! the Ben Jonson chapbooks!) and panel-attending (Theater and the Interrupted Ritual! Plot Without Conflict! a showing of The Polymath! The Gothic in 19th Century Science Fiction! Variations on the Theme of Unreliable Narrators! the aforementioned Butts!), I went and—gave a reading? did a reading? read?
I stood before a small (but select) crowd and read, aloud, words I had written: a first, for me. —That introductory party scene, and also the scene where the Axehandle confronts Mr. Lier—or was it vice-versa?—because one should always give some time to the antagonists, but mostly because my favorite magic tricks are the ones where the magician tells you exactly how they’re doing what they do even as they pull it off before your very eyes. (But perhaps I’ve said too much.) —It went well, well enough; thanks especially to Carrie Bernstein, Joshua A.C. Newman, Sofia Samatar, Felix Gilman, and Emily Wagner—small, as I said, but select.
—The Monday morning after—after helping tear down and pack up with the unflappable Stefan Krzywicki and the inimitable Jess Nevins and then cart across what felt like half this half of Massachusetts, and believe me when I tell you we will none of us hear that saying about the monkeys and the circus the same way ever again, and then there was a good eight hours of blissful oblivion in a basement room walled with more board games than I think I’ve ever seen in one place (and I, you should understand, have seen quite a few)—after that, on Monday morning, I sat down to breakfast with Emily Wagner. —I haven’t mentioned Emily much yet, have I.
“You know,” she said, as she forked up a bite from a blueberry pancake that was more blueberry than pancake. “This is all Amal’s fault.”
—Amal El-Mohtar, honey-poet, critic of note, harpist and fencer, who’d challenged me to a duel, who’d boomed out my name when she learned I’d arrived, who’d pushed me out into the hall to meet Greer Gilman when I stammered something about those words, that voice. —“How do you figure?” I said, sipping some coffee.
“She wrote the poem,” said Emily. “In the Bordertown collection that you reviewed, and you liked it, and I said that I liked that, on Twitter, so you followed me, and I followed you, and here we are.”
And I looked around the here where we were, this train station refitted as a steampunk diner—excuse me, this diner decorated in an æsthetic of “Neo-Victorian Whimsy” (plus rivets), forty-five minutes or so north, by car, from Harvard Square, twenty-three years away from that unassuming yellow paperback, still on my shelves, an eighth of a day ahead of where I live now, across the country, a distance I’d be flying back later that day, a distance I’d covered the Thursday before, at the invitation of Readercon, at the urging of this person sitting across the table from me, this old friend I’d just met this weekend, this new friend I’ve known for years, as words, on a screen, who did an enormous amount of work to help pull all this together, the panels, the books, the readings, the butts, the dancing, the writers, the readers, and me and my knocking knees; who insisted I stay in their basement when I needed an extra night and was willing to drive through a Boston rush hour to get me where I needed to be—
I bought her breakfast. It was the least I could do.
—posted 3552 days ago
