hrj

Started out the con Friday mid-day by hanging out in the lobby working on worky type stuff on the laptop and chatting with people. (Several people got more of an explanation of alpha-galactose trends than they had any reason to believe they would have enjoyed.) My first panel was Sequels without end: when do you know it's time to retire a series or character? Since I had an example to hand in my decision to tie up the skin-singer stories, I felt a bit more able to contribute usefully than I did for this morning's panel Mining the Bible for stories and characters, for which I contributed on a much more theoretical basis. For dinner Friday night I inserted myself into a crowd of Atlantian heralds going out for Indian food. With slightly over a dozen people, we ordered "family style" and managed to get almost exactly the right amount of food ... except that there was no room for dessert. So we went into the associated Indian grocery next door afterwards and I picked up a package of assorted milk-sweets to go into the assorted munchie stash in the room.

Poison Pen Press got their usual chunk of cash from me for several costuming and cookery books. (Nothing particularly fascinating for cookery -- mostly replacing some old photocopies with real books.)

Oh, backing up to Thursday evening, I spent dinner next to a nice young woman who's a librarian at Texas A&M who is starting research on a definitive biography of Marion Zimmer Bradley and came to Darkovercon to interview all manner of people who knew her to varying degrees. So I got to be her first interview subject and we spent something over an hour chatting on tape and maybe another hour off tape. It's probably about time that a project of that sort was done and it'll be interesting to see what comes of it.