The comma, the context, the collector, the green

I am home from Arisia. I am on a couch. All three panels of my last day went well. The Bellairs panel was scantly but alertly attended, the Bradbury panel packed them in at standing room and ran much more like a communal roundtable than anything with an audience, and the panel on supernatural literature in New England promptly fractured into about eight related micro-panels, which frankly agreed with our take on New England as a dense geography of literal and cultural microclimates providing fertile terrain for all kinds of different stories, although crime and horror seem disproportionately prominent, I blame the Puritans. I talked afterward with an engineer about sea levels and the Charles River Dam, only had to wait about ten minutes for the Red Line with nineweaving and ron_newman, and met spatch for a burrito on his dinner break. Then I attained this couch and haven't moved since.

Yesterday I bailed on a program item for the first time I can remember: I could either make the morning's chantey sing or I could manage the rest of the weekend and I wanted the rest of the weekend, so I went back to bed. I made it to the hotel in time for my panel on the resurgence of horror fiction, skillfully moderated by Gillian Daniels, and then I actually had dinner at a convention at a reasonable dinner time with kate_nepveu, a_reasonable_man, Nine, and Merlin Cunniff, plus drive-by from choco_frosh and child. (I had fish and chips and we talked about Little Women a lot.) The panel on anthropomorphic fiction with Rebecca Maxfield and genarti was fun and so wide-ranging I feel it could use at least two different sequel panels beyond the obvious one in which we all process our feelings about Redwall. I came straight home afterward because I had to get up early this morning to moderate Bellairs, which paid off in that I am merely flat exhausted at the moment, not actually hallucinating.

(I got into the dealer's room exactly once for ten minutes, but I came away with a copy of Barbara Hambly's Crimson Angel (2014), which is my second favorite of the later Benjamin January mysteries, so it was worth it.)

I enjoyed the traditional ballad bingo on Saturday: I did not win overall, but I did bingo a leopard-print scarf. I enjoyed the Kipling song circle, even if it was peculiarly less participatory than in previous years; we talked a lot about different settings. My reading as part of a triptych of weird New England went sufficiently well that people were asking me about the story even this afternoon, which would have been great if it were published anywhere yet. I am given to understand that the panel I moderated on box-office bombs went much better than I thought. I am still never doing four panels back-to-back again. In Arisia time, that's five hours onstage—fifteen-minute green-room/restroom/transit intervals do not downtime make. It wiped me out. It lost me the chantey sing the next morning. It helped nothing with my mood. And it made it so that I could attend no programming that wasn't mine—I couldn't even make the PMRP show on Saturday night because by Saturday night, despite a sandwich at the bar with Schreiber' and child, Nine, and Matthew Timmins, I was in no shape to do anything but go home and implode. Three panels in a row, I can manage; that was this afternoon. Four, I am going to ask Arisia programming never to schedule me for again, no matter who wants me on what. The results were not worth it.

Tomorrow is Rob's birthday and also our local Burns Supper, which feels awkwardly close to an extra day of Arisia: it means more people and more performing, although one of the performances will be Rob reciting McGonagall's "The Tay Bridge Disaster," which I figure should give Cats a run for its money. I expect I will enjoy it. Nonetheless, on Wednesday I may see what I can do about evaporating.