It's a new one, dark with the night

I am not going to say that the highlight of my day was petting a hedgehog, because my day has contained quite a lot of nice things: hearing rushthatspeaks read from their novel in progress, loitering in the dealer's room with Jean Gonzalez of Somewhere in Time where I still can't afford the first edition of Nicholas Stuart Gray's The Apple-Stone (1965), loitering in the dealer's room with Steve Berman of Lethe Press who is my publisher and handed out ARCs of my collection until they were gone, eating fried watercress and spicy, seafood-filled fried rice at Lime Leaf with Rush-That-Speaks and ashnistrike, talking about TV shows I mostly don't watch with vandrendehare, kate_nepveu, and handful_ofdust, talking about Jacques Offenbach and Charles Keeping and Stephen Gammell with Michael Cisco and Farah Rose Smith and eventually showing them the first ten minutes of Liam Gavin's A Dark Song (2016), further hanging out with Ashnistrike and nineweaving, and receiving a much-needed back rub from ckd. I had no panels and therefore I slept until from seven in the morning until noon-ish and had a real dinner instead of hotel bar snacks. I did not keep having to run out on conversations.

But on the way out of the green room with Farah, we passed B. Diane Martin carrying some kind of soft pet carrier in one hand and cradling a hedgehog against her breast with the other and what did you expect me to do, walk on? The hedgehog turned out to be named Splanky after the Count Basie song; he is eight months old and his prickles are soft and he can be very gently petted from the middle of his back toward his rump (the head is so defensively spiked that it cannot be petted in any direction without rubbing the prickles against the grain, which is not pleasant for the hedgehog) which he seemed to like, although like a young cat he was very definite about how much attention he wanted from people who were not his people; then he burrowed back into Diane's hand again. His soft snout was so constantly in motion that even allowing for low light and my primitive phone, in almost every picture I tried to take of him his nose was a blur. I understand that entire breeds of hedgehog have been domesticated as pets, but it still felt like something rare and wild: a hedgehog at a convention. Who let me pet him. He has a very sweet face.

Any way you go there's a road to be stronger

I am home from Readercon. I am lying on the couch with Hestia curled up on the nearest cushion, watching that vague after-sunset spectrum you get on clear evenings: stone-pink, sand-gold, apple-green, smoke-blue. I am covered in fur from her attentive brother, who as soon as I sat down on the bed to talk to spatch planted himself purringly in my lap and kneaded his many claws in possessive happiness and groomed my hands and my chin and any of the rest of me he could reach, because I had been gone for four days and I smelled like people who were not my cats. I am also slightly covered in curry noodle from dinner at Dakzen with choco_frosh, but their yen ta fo and khao soi were worth it. My last panel of the convention, with the priceless name "Our Bodies, Our Elves: Sexual Awakenings in Epic Fantasy," turned out to be about five panels in the same fifty minutes, but it was fun and kept spinning new questions and I was strongly recommended Cecilia Grant's A Lady Awakened (2011) afterward based on something I had said about wanting to see more value-neutral bad sex in genre fiction, so I guess it's time to revive my het-romance-reading skills.

This was a good convention. I did not see everyone I wanted to see—or as much of everyone as I wanted—but the panels I had worried about went well and I did not burn out on enjoying conversation until the very last hours of this afternoon and people enthused about my forthcoming book, which is just stunning. I bought books and had nice food. I want to sleep for a week and I won't get the chance, but right now I am surrounded by cats (Autolycus has taken up a nearby position) and I am under no obligation to do anything for the rest of tonight. Even make rice pudding, which I had thought of doing, but might disturb the cats.

Forget the Sleepless Shores has its first review on Goodreads. And it's positive.

This is all right.