I must be under something else's spell
I am returned from NecronomiCon. I am exhausted. It was great.
It was not entirely felicitous that the end-of-schedule poetry workshop for which I hauled myself out of bed on sputtering nerve-ends and negative sleep was not really any such thing, but it seemed to work for its attendees; it gave me the chance to evangelize for the poetry of Le Guin and say a proper goodbye to Donald Sidney-Fryer. On my way into the dealer's room, I caught Michael Cisco and Farah Rose Smith right before they decamped for New York City, and in the dealer's room I finally picked up a copy of Ashes & Entropy (2018), an anthology of cosmic horror neo-noir edited by Robert S. Wilson that I have wanted for obvious reasons for months now. The dealer's room also contained![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ashnistrike and handful_ofdust and Steve and we all ended up having lunch once again at the second-floor restaurant of the Omni, which turns out to make shockingly good hot chocolate. Gemma recommending Everil Worrell's "The Canal" (1927) led to the discovery of Marie Nizet's Captain Vampire (1879); me recommending Tanith Lee's Kill the Dead (1980) mostly led to me wishing both my copies were not in a box. And then I tried to attend a panel and it was just not happening; there were small lights crawling around the edges of my vision; I went promptly to my room and to bed, which is how I missed both the end-of-convention wrap-up panel and an impromptu party in a cemetery. I feel a little bad about it, I understand that hallucinating in a graveyard is probably the height of Romantic poetry, but I mostly think I made the right choice. In any case, I intended to nap for half an hour and I woke up two and a half hours later, so I'm not sure how much choice was involved. In the evening spatch and I returned to Mokban for dinner and caught the last commuter train to Boston. In flagrant defiance of the recent MBTA, it was neither late nor on fire; we got home before midnight, the cats performed their rituals of household reintegration, and I fell over.
I cannot just sleep for the next week and I resent it. But this convention was worth the outlay of stamina, absolutely worth it. As I wrote to the organizers, it was an honor and a blast. The people, the programming, the conversations, the books. A weird fiction festival is a good thing to have in a person's life. And I am so very happy to have been part of it.
It was not entirely felicitous that the end-of-schedule poetry workshop for which I hauled myself out of bed on sputtering nerve-ends and negative sleep was not really any such thing, but it seemed to work for its attendees; it gave me the chance to evangelize for the poetry of Le Guin and say a proper goodbye to Donald Sidney-Fryer. On my way into the dealer's room, I caught Michael Cisco and Farah Rose Smith right before they decamped for New York City, and in the dealer's room I finally picked up a copy of Ashes & Entropy (2018), an anthology of cosmic horror neo-noir edited by Robert S. Wilson that I have wanted for obvious reasons for months now. The dealer's room also contained
ashnistrike and handful_ofdust and Steve and we all ended up having lunch once again at the second-floor restaurant of the Omni, which turns out to make shockingly good hot chocolate. Gemma recommending Everil Worrell's "The Canal" (1927) led to the discovery of Marie Nizet's Captain Vampire (1879); me recommending Tanith Lee's Kill the Dead (1980) mostly led to me wishing both my copies were not in a box. And then I tried to attend a panel and it was just not happening; there were small lights crawling around the edges of my vision; I went promptly to my room and to bed, which is how I missed both the end-of-convention wrap-up panel and an impromptu party in a cemetery. I feel a little bad about it, I understand that hallucinating in a graveyard is probably the height of Romantic poetry, but I mostly think I made the right choice. In any case, I intended to nap for half an hour and I woke up two and a half hours later, so I'm not sure how much choice was involved. In the evening spatch and I returned to Mokban for dinner and caught the last commuter train to Boston. In flagrant defiance of the recent MBTA, it was neither late nor on fire; we got home before midnight, the cats performed their rituals of household reintegration, and I fell over.I cannot just sleep for the next week and I resent it. But this convention was worth the outlay of stamina, absolutely worth it. As I wrote to the organizers, it was an honor and a blast. The people, the programming, the conversations, the books. A weird fiction festival is a good thing to have in a person's life. And I am so very happy to have been part of it.
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Thank you! I was flat out by the end of it, but it was good and it was important to have something so good this summer; all sorts of other things are on the horizon, but NecronomiCon was real. And will stay that way.
*hugs*
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Thank you! I do not know that I produced the most coherent of con travelogues in the moment, but I stand by the happiness involved.
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Thank you. I really came into this convention running on fumes and I was left wanting more. That's never guaranteed.
And thanks for drawing my attention to Marie Nizet's Captain Vampire - that sounds fascinating and I'm going to look further into it.
You're welcome! It was literally the next entry in the encyclopedia of literary vampires that Steve called up on his phone, trying to confirm the name of the author of "The Canal," but none of us had ever heard of it before. I am planning to track down a copy myself, but I would really love to hear what you think of it.
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...
< having much the same reaction of incredulity and WTF that I had when I heard about The Knight of the Burning Pestle, because honestly the title sounds like something written for the Horror section of the airport book shop about the time Angel wrapped up, and what I'm reading of the premise is doing nothing to dispel that impression, and it f'ing predates Stoker, and seriously I'm starting to wonder if premodern authors had time machines. >
In flagrant defiance of the recent MBTA, it was neither late nor on fire
That is a tragically accurate commentary, but I'm very glad!
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Honestly everything about its existence delights me. I am hoping it's good, but even if it's not, I suspect it will be delightful.
That is a tragically accurate commentary, but I'm very glad!
Thank you! Especially now that the MBTA has deleted half of the stops on our mainstay bus route, we take our victories where we find them!
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Thank you! Today I slept into the afternoon and have not yet managed to leave the house, which I feel is healthy.
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> flagrant defiance of the recent MBTA, it was neither late nor on fire
This may be more uncanny than the rest of the con put together!
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Thank you!
This may be more uncanny than the rest of the con put together!
It was impressive. Sadly, the real world has already reasserted itself:
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Thank you! Me, too. I hope it is not the last time.
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I read this section of your post to Kestrell over breakfast. She opined that "having sex atop your parent's grave" ranked higher. She then felt compelled to add "deceased parent; not barely-still-alive parent". I countered that that was well past "Romantic Poet" and into "Gothic Villain". Kes pointed out that someone else (not one of the lovers) might have done the premature burial.
Just thought you'd want to know :-)
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I appreciate the input!