Time stopped by

So Friday at Arisia was great, and Saturday at Arisia was exhausting and difficult, and I was not sure at all how today at Arisia was going to go. Answer: fantastic.

The reading was a three-way split with Gillian Daniels and Adrienne J. Odasso; in the last half-hour it evolved into a panel with audience questions and discussion of everything from fanfiction to market research to different forms of publishing to recommendations. I heard some wonderful poems and a story I want the last few pages of. I sold eight copies of Ghost Signs. (One went in trade to ajodasso for their new collection The Dishonesty of Dreams.) There was a bunch of disorganized talking in the hall afterward. It was good.

Afterward I was more or less out of con tolerance—I have been so exhausted that I was nearly incapable of getting out of bed in time to eat, take antibiotics, and leave for the reading—but derspatchel and I briefly visited the art show¹ and had an amazing experience in the dealer's room² and then we were both out of blood sugar, so we walked to Penang in Chinatown. We split an order of roti canai; Rob got his traditional beef rendang with Thai iced tea. I had a durian shake, because there are not many places in Boston I can order one, and I decided to try the nasi lemak, primarily because it included pandan-flavored rice. It was the best breakfast for dinner I have eaten in my life. Coconut-pandan rice surrounded by chicken curry, crunchy sweet dried anchovies, halves of hard-boiled egg, and some kind of vegetable pickle. There were onions which I did not eat, but the anchovies very quickly went away. It was warm and complex and filling and a respectable level of spicy without being lacerating and I have always ordered the house special squid when I eat at Penang, but I think it is nasi lemak from now on. Or at least the next several visits. I don't think I can replicate it at home without a lot of grocery shopping.

And after that we walked around Boston until it started raining so hard that there was no point in continuing home on foot and we caught the bus from Lechmere. Tomorrow I have to say intelligent things on a panel at eleven-thirty in the morning, which is the only part I am not looking forward to. In the evening, Rob and I have plans to meet his father and stepmother for dinner in Somerville. I can't fall over and hibernate after that because I have a dentist's appointment, but I'm going to try anyway.

1. Yesterday or the day before, I had seen a painting called "Midnight" by Sarah Clemens: on fossil stone, a long-haired tuxedo cat with brilliant green eyes and wings like soldered glass. I could not afford it and there was already a bid in, but I didn't want to let it get away without Rob seeing it.

2. On the first day of the con, I was browsing the shelves from Somewhere in Time when I found a pristine hardcover of Joan Aiken's A Necklace of Raindrops (1968), which I had loved in elementary school and not read since. Jean warned me that it would be expensive: in thirty-seven years of dealing in used books, he'd seen two copies and this was one. Sure enough, when I came back this evening with Rob, it turned out it was two hundred and fifty dollars and I don't have that kind of money right now. I could afford a small Dell paperback called Invasion from Mars: Interplanetary Stories (1949), edited by Orson Welles. Jean gave it to me as a gift, promising to find me an affordable copy of A Necklace of Raindrops—because I remembered it so fondly, he'd read the story. I got the book home and opened it and discovered that not only does it reprint Ray Bradbury's "Zero Hour" and "The Million Year Picnic," Theodore Sturgeon's "Farewell to Eden," Heinlein's "The Green Hills of Earth," and a bunch of other stories I haven't read recently or ever, it contains Howard Koch's complete radio script for the Mercury Theatre's War of the Worlds. It's an amazing find. I am going to take a shower and read it now.

We grew up with birds and bees

I made it through my last day of Arisia on an hour and a half of sleep. Both panels, I think, went well. "Non-Genre Books that Genre Fans Love" turned into an interrogation of the concept of "genre"; based on audience response, "The Wonderful Panel of Oz" could have gone on another hour and involved everyone in the room. I lingered with ladymondegreen and genarti and then caught the trains back. derspatchel's father and stepmother were visiting from western Massachusetts; we went to dinner with them at Out of the Blue, where I had many clams and some cannoli. It was really nice. We hadn't seen them since our wedding. Apparently the cats were conspicuously cute all afternoon.

Over the weekend, my contributor's copy of The Long and the Short and the Tall arrived, containing my flash "I Love You Like a Mountain" and my poem "The Crane Husband." The first is about a geological phenomenon with boundary issues and is named after the song; the second is a retelling and was not written while listening to the Decemberists.

My flash "And Black Unfathomable Lakes" (Not One of Us #50) has been accepted for reprint by Joanne Merriam for The Museum of All Things Awesome and That Go Boom. It's a tribute to Peter Cushing. Also Yvonne Monlaur.

Someone at my last panel had a T-shirt reading "Alan Turing Fought Nazis with Science." I couldn't find them afterward to compliment them, but it is entirely true.