Wailing away on the wall of the strand

Today's sunset was a stunner. The air turned an incredible mauve and gold-hulled violet, right above the horizon: such a neon intensity, it would have lowered oppressively if it hadn't been so rich, like an entire skyful of afterimage. The clouds had that sketched-charcoal and sandbar three-dimensionality, where you seem to look out over rather than up into them, and in a few minutes the colors visible between the trees had all faded into the apple-green, backlit blue I associate most of all with winter twilight. There is an almost imperceptibly thin new moon there now, a nail-scratch of light on the sky. And this afternoon, I walked from the con hotel down Summer Street to South Station, over the water with the sun crumpled up on it and the brilliant clarity of the air and the light that requires an entire nineteenth-century school of painting to reproduce accurately, in shafts, where even the clouds are luminous; bridge-struts, pylons, cells of sky-blue mirrored over and over in skyscraper windows. I don't see enough skylines in my ordinary life. I love them. I wish I could take photographs.

We packed up the table in the dealer's room this morning, so I had a chance to attend two panels—what makes vivid writing and what defines American rather than British fantasy—and have lunch with nineweaving, converse properly with matociquala for the first time in over a year, and meet kayselkiemoon in person. (Lunch with farwing yesterday was also awesome. And a man came up to me and asked if I'd modeled for the painting on the cover of Jane Yolen's Once Upon A Time (She Said), which I had not, but I was still honored.) I read Ilario last night, and Elizabeth Hand's Saffron and Brimstone this afternoon, and both were excellently worth it. I met several people whose names I should have taken down. All the traditional hallmarks of a con in only a few hours . . .

I have three different songs stuck in my head. How does this happen?