Thursday, May 21, 2009

I've Hit the Ground Running

I may be operating on an hour and a half of sleep, but I'm in Madison and have delivered a stack of What Remains (the GoH book by Ellen Klages and Geoff Ryman) to A Room of One's Own bookstore for this evening's reading and am feeling very happy to be here. Need I say that before I left the bookstore, I had assembled a stack of books of about comparable bulk that I just had to buy? & what a lift it gave me to find, as I browsed, all five volumes of the Marq'ssan on the shelf (taking up a hell of a lot of space in the science fiction section). Room, you see, is not just any bookstore. I fell in love with the place when I first discovered it in 1996. And so I get a thrill, finding my work stocked there.

I began bumping into WisCon people long before reaching the hotel, of course. The gate in the Minneapolis airport for the early afternoon flight to Madison fairly teemed with familiar folks, including Cynthia Gonsalves (who was fascinated to see the new volume of the WisCon Chronicles, which I'd been reading on the plane) and Bill Humphries. And on arrival in Madison, I discovered that Eileen Gunn and John Berry had been on the same plane out of Seattle with me, only I never noticed because they were seated way in the back, surrounded by a youth choral group and a high school champion volley ball team who were, even at 7 a.m., in high spirits. Eileen's still in a cast (she claimed she broke her finger skateboarding, but then admitted that she got so carried away looking at the cherry blossoms that she tripped and went sprawling). From her description of her accident, it sounds like the sort of thing that could happen to me.

So many people kept arriving at the airport that the hotel shuttles were unable to keep up with the demand. Oyceter, by the way, was among those riding sharing the shuttle with me; she entertained us all by describing a fantasy book that included every fantastical creature the author could thing of. "With her," Oyce said of the author (whose name I didn't catch), "More is more."

Next on the agenda, the reception at Room.

Do I sound as though I'm manic? Let's just say I'm a little excited.

PS Someone told me that Nisi is here, but I haven't seen her yet.

3 comments:

Josh said...

Ninety minutes of sleep is a lot for you though, innit? I remember that the great insomniac artists of history include Nietzsche, Borges, and Duchamp.

Liz said...

I'm in the middle of reading Tiger Eye, the first book in the series Oyceter was describing to you on the shuttle! Naamen recommended it to me too. It's the Dirk & Steele series by Marjorie M. Liu. More *is* more! I spent the entire plane ride home laughing with pleasure at Liu's audacity.

Victoria Janssen said...

Marjorie Liu is one of my favorite romance authors.