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 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.