See the new drafts pouring in for the old campaign

Boskone was quite wonderful. While I did not get a chance to attend as many panels or readings as I wanted or intended, these inconveniences were more than made up for by the free-floating sheer awesomeness of the con, of which meeting papersky in person was paramount and not sounding like a blithering idiot around Jane Yolen was a nice second. The music jam was terminally disorganized, but the participants knew their folk, rock, folk-rock, and pirate queens; I did my duty as pusher of Dave Carter, Tracy Grammer, and Peter Bellamy, and Adam Stemple should record his acoustic-guitar version of "The Newry Highwayman," thank you very much.* The party for james_morrow's Shambling Towards Hiroshima was handing out not only copies of the book, but those little wind-up sparky Godzillas that always end up underfoot, so of course there's one now perched on the shelves near the door. And given how well the concert version of Jo Walton's Shakespeare's (canonical on Barrayar) Tam Lin worked, thanks in no small part to negothick and farwing and a Robin Goodfellow whose livejournal name someone should tell me, I want to know who I have to bribe (and how much) to get a fully staged theatrical production. There should be more shameless self-promotion in this post. For my reading, I did the first third of my novella "The Salt House" (Sirenia Digest #22), which I should now e-mail in its entirety to about half a dozen people; at least I finally got a copy to elisem, since it contains her necklace "Remember What You Say in Dreams #4." All four** of my panels went really, really well, in that they were fun and intelligent and the audience seemed to share the sentiments, although since I got less than ten hours of sleep over three days of con, I fear I do not remember them with the detail they deserve. I should start making Eric take notes. And I collapsed last night,*** and spent today at the MFA with modern Japanese ceramics, and saw The International (2009) with my father, since my mother is in Florida for a not-close relative's funeral. The headache I have like a spike sideways through my eyes is not unfamiliar, but it is still annoying me, so I am going to read some Josephine Tey and go to bed.

I am looking forward very much to this year's ICFA.

* Seriously, I want a copy. Who knows him well enough to bug him about it?

** I was only scheduled for three; Dora Goss had to bow out of Sunday's "Stealing Folklore" due to con crud, so I was her substitute death figure panelist. fjm moderated. We went totally off topic in about five minutes and argued a lot. It was good.

*** To wind down after the con, I watched the recent PBS documentary on J. Robert Oppenheimer, which surprised me by being even more depressing than I had already known about. Note to self: not a good plan after three days' sleep deprivation. Possibly ditto reading the new John le Carré, which is what I did between Saturday and Sunday; although I occasionally treat The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as comfort reading, and it does not seem to have produced any visible damage yet.