Apollocon recap

No writing done last night. Lots of mundane reasons why not, but the long and short of it is that I collapsed in bed, exhausted, before I even got around to checking email. I can assure you, my frustration at this is immense.

I also haven't had a chance to upload any of the photos taken during Apollocon over the weekend, save yesterday's Peter Beagle portrait. Which means I don't have illustrations yet. But the con itself was good fun. I managed to get there in time for opening ceremonies despite a late start from home and hellacious traffic--bad even for Houston--which prompted my car to try and overheat. Not fun, that.

Unfortunately, I found out right away that Brad Denton had cancelled out because of illness. Brad always brings a good boost to conventions as well as conversations, so that was a disappointment. I got to see a lot of folks who are always a lot of fun, including Martha Wells, Selina Rosen, Alexis Glynn Latner, Lee Martindale, M.T. Reiten and Chris Nakashima-Brown, but the weekend was such a whirlwind that I never got a chance to sit down and talk shop with anyone for any extended period of time. Since Denton wasn't at the con, my half-hour reading slot expanded to a full hour. Unfortunately, I'd only brought a half-hour's worth of Wetsilver novel excerpt. It seemed to go over well, in any event.

One particular disappointment for me was that Nakashima-Brown and I never had any real opportunity to do writer talking stuff. Our schedules kept us in conflict, and when they didn't conflict, some moron in the gaming room shot Chris' son in the eye with a laser pointer which necessitated the invocation of a parental crisis management plan (all ocular organs have since recovered, I'm happy to report). I did manage to catch Chris reading from his story "The Bunker of the Tikriti" which is a retelling of the Robert E. Howard classic "The Tower of the Elephant" relocated to a near-future Iraq. It's great--edgy and filled with knowing detail as you'd expect from a Nakashima-Brown story. It'll be coming out during this year's World Fantasy Convention in the Robert E. Howard Centennial anthology, and I can assure all of you future readers that you're in for a treat.

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