And all their minds transfigured so together

I am home from Readercon. It was lovely. At this moment, I feel as though my most enduring memories of the con may end up being a terrifying cupcake and scottedelman's falsetto, but neither of these is a bad thing.¹ I finally got to meet handful_ofdust and Steve in person, after which we successfully managed to eat dinner together three nights in a row; I was introduced to asakiyume's father, who wrote one of my favorite stories in Not One of Us last year; cucumberseed gave me illustrations. The first page of hans_the_bold's masterwork Gay, Bejeweled, Nazi Bikers of Gor was read out loud by Craig Shaw Gardner (unusually failing to keep a straight face) as a kind of brain-pummeling postscript to Kirk Poland. Epic late-night conversation with greygirlbeast, humglum, Gemma, Erik, readingthedark, nineweaving, and Michael Cisco started with free-floating topics in different corners of the room and eventually coalesced into a workshop. I did not win the Rhysling Award,² but I finished a poem. The Shakespeare reading was quite fun; there is talk of a Tempest next year. I am peculiarly pleased that I am now in possession of the remains of a bottle of Kraken Black Spiced Rum. time_shark and Anita are staying with my parents tonight.

My poem "Leukothea's Odyssey 6" is now online at Goblin Fruit. It's Odyssey femmeslash. I was inspired last August by the breathtaking stupidity of John C. Wright.

I'm sure I haven't mentioned enough. Sleep did not happen. There were people I missed. Still, I think this was a particularly good year.

1. Seriously, about the falsetto. Scott Edelman read Francis Flute in the last hour of A Midsummer Night's Dream and his Thisbe was straight out of Monty Python, a kind of hallooing dowager duchess. Occasionally thereafter he would hail other former cast members at this pitch: it was awesome. The cupcake purportedly originated at Wilson Farms, but it was larger than the heads of several people in Mike and Anita's room and frosted in an unholy mélange of electric blues, chartreuse greens, and cadmium yellow, with the result that it was first propitiated as a god, then nervously eyed in case it did anything to prove it, and finally collapsed forward under its own weight with a propulsive blurt of frosting, causing me to realize that it resembled nothing so much as a Portuguese man-o'-war crossed with a sea cucumber and was clearly therefore a dessert from the depths of R'lyeh. I have no idea if anyone finished it. I would be rather worried to learn they did.

2. Mazel tov, Samantha Henderson, Kendall Evans, and Ann K. Schwader, who did!