Back from a long weekend at World Fantasy Convention in Madison, Wisconsin, where a good time was had talking to folks I knew, folks I didn’t, and folks I’d met online but never in person. If I start listing names I’ll leave people out, but I enjoyed talking with/meeting you all.
Read the opening scene of “Practical Villainy” (my story in Say … Have You Heard This One?) at Broad Universe’s Rapid Fire reading Friday. The story has one of my favorite of my own opening lines — “The first thing I wanted to know is, I drowned those kittens for a reason” — and for the rest of the weekend folks walked up and asked if I was the “kitten woman,” which was lots of fun. Many thanks to everyone who told me they enjoyed the reading! (Necessary disclaimer: for those who weren’t at the reading, and are wondering what sort of terrible person would be in favor of drowning kittens, the actual story is not an endorsement of kitten drowning, honest! 🙂
And courtesy of Merglenn Studios, I finally found a print of a wistful man that I wanted on my walls. We have several lovely prints of wistful women, and I’ve for several years now wanted a print of a wistful man to go with them. But good paintings of men are, frustratingly, harder to come by than paintings of women–and the majority feature either muscle clad barbarians or wise-looking wizards. Or else have faces that don’t ring true–but that’s a problem for art depicting women, too.
Have spent most of today staring at walls and thinking I should take a nap. I do have some WFC-inspired thoughts on writing as solitary and group endeavor, which I mention here to remind myself to expand on them in another post later.