Tuesday, April 16, 2002
Because the telephone would not stop ringing, I've fled the office and am hiding out in my favorite corner of the Birmingham Public Library, in the Southern History Department, beneath the murals described briefly in Chapter Two of Threshold. Shahryar and Shahrazad are looking over my shoulder, and Krishna is to my left. To my right are the tall gallery windows and I can see the green trees, which I very much missed in winter-bound, rust-and-concrete-colored Chicagoland. It's about 3:30 p.m. and I suppose I should try to write out some account of the past few days, the convention, but I'm really an abysmal reporter. My head fills up with impressions and loses the more photographic objectivity of actual events and truer chronologies. Then again, Ursula LeGuin (see her essays in The Language of the Night) would probably say that my impressions are "true," and more objective reporting is merely "factual." And who am I to argue with Ursula LeGuin?
So. Where does it begin again. Lafayette. The two hour drive across the flatlands of northern Indiana. An almost total absence of topography that put me in mind of Kansas and the Dakotas, that drained sea floor sort of flatness. The whole wide world weighted down by a swollen, blue sky. I've never liked the plains. They always make me want to lie down in a ditch and hold on, for fear that I might tumble up and into space.
We found the end of I-65 about 2:00 Thursday afternoon, the unremarkable source of that long asphalt river, and proceeded through the industrial wastes of Gary and East Chicago and Whiting, past 20th-century squalor and the hulking ruins of late 19th-century factories and mills, deeper and deeper into the city. Farther north, Lake Michigan lay like a vast turquoise gem lapping at the shores of Mordor. It's very strange for me, going north and finding seagulls. We passed miles of housing projects, most of which seemed abandoned, the steeples of churches, the domes of synagogues and mosques, the Morton Salt factory.
We're never going to get anywhere at this rate. How about I abandon any pretext at a proper travelogue and just go for the highlights? Yeah, I like that idea, too.
Nothing particularly remarkable about the remainder of Thursday. We got to the con. There's a lot I will admit to not understanding about conventions, but I don't see why it's so often necessary to strand people literally at the ends of airport runways (or other, similarly bleak, environs) in the dead center of nowhere. We spent a few hours in the hotel, which was a bizarre affair itself — twelve floors, and yet there was no portion of this great monument to cement and beige paint that managed to be more than four or five stories tall! Inside, the temperature seemed to vary, randomly, between Saharan and Arctic, often within the space of only a few feet. The woman at the check-in counter sent us to a room full of someone else's luggage and we had to start all over again.
Thursday night we were all bused out to Evanston (???) for a "cocktail party" at a bookshop where one was offered a choice of either yellow wine or purple wine. I had a Coke. Actually, we drove the van to Evanston, which was good because the buses all got lost or misdirected or something of that sort and almost didn't show up at all. The bookshop (Something Wicked on Church St.) didn't carry any of my books, but they did have a lot of action figures. I got Rygel (you know, the deposed Hynerian dominar from Farscape, which I'd not been able to find in either Birmingham or Atlanta). After the buses finally arrived, we walked a couple of blocks to the Evanston Public Library where we all watched Neil sign for the multitudes. I think he should begin leasing his fans to the rest of us. I promise I would be gentle.
On Friday, I'd intended to spend the day at the Field Museum and the Shedd Aquarium, but ended up attending to various business and social responsibilities instead. By the time I was free, it was too late to bother with yet another drive from jet-addled Rosemont into Chicago proper. To console myself, I bought a bunch of Arkham House editions in the dealers' room, spending money on books I'd promised myself I wasn't going to spend. But there you go. That evening, after the mass autographing, Jennifer and I had a very fine dinner at Harry Carey's with Neil, Peter Straub, Gary Wolfe, and Charlie Brown. It was the sort of restaurant you imagine the Rat Pack frequenting. Meat came in very large chunks and everything came with pasta. This would be the only decent meal I would have during the entire convention. We got back to the con hotel late, spent some time at one of the publishers' or booksellers' parties (I honestly can't recall which one), before retiring to Peter's quarters with our roommate Darren McKeeman (he of Gothic.net; go forth and subscribe), where we were mildly merry far into the night.
I woke up Saturday morning feeling slightly out-of-sorts, which I wrote off as too much rich food and alcohol the night before. For breakfast, I had something like a stale hamburger bun with a hole punched in the center, which the hotel was trying to pass off as a bagel. As I chewed, and chewed, and chewed, I tried to convince myself that the out-of-sortsness was only a very mild hangover. I had a 10 a.m. panel (something about childhood experiences with horror novels), so I hurriedly dressed and went downstairs. But by the time the panel started I was feeling decidedly green and beginning to wonder if perhaps there wasn't something more serious going on in my guts than the legacy of the previous night's (and morning's) over-indulgences. I had another panel at noon, "Fox Women and Shark Gods," where we were supposed to discuss ignored monsters. I was sitting at the Gothic.net booth, waiting for the nausea to subside, when Jennifer reminded me that I was not only on the panel, but moderating it. I groaned, pulled out my notebook, and began trying to think of interesting questions. Jennifer worriedly started asking passersby for help. Fortunately, Jill Thompson was also on the panel and managed to be far more entertaining and insightful than me. When the panel was done, Jennifer and Darren convinced me that perhaps I only needed to eat something, so we went to the hotel restaurant (which always seemed to smell like boiled ketchup) and I ordered a sandwich, the blandest thing I could find on the menu. Neil showed up with his daughter, Maddy, who'd been busy teaching Rain Graves dance steps. Shortly after Neil sat down, after my lunch had come and I'd nibbled reluctantly at it, I abruptly excused myself and rushed back to the room.
Bad Things happened.
I spent the next several hours in the room, swigging Maalox, chewing Tums, cursing my innards, and watching the clock. My reading was at 5:30 and I was determined I wasn't going to have driven (well, ridden) all the way to Chicago (well, Rosemont) to miss my own reading. I became very familiar with the tile on the bathroom floor and, as the day slipped past, slowly began to feel better. To my surprise, by five I was feeling just barely well enough to leave the room. Despite being sick and the reading being located in one of the Saharan zones, things went very well. The room was packed and I read from Chapter Three of Low Red Moon. I was slightly annoyed that someone had seen fit to bring along her young son, as the chapter is anything but the sort of material that I'm comfortable reading to an eight or nine-year-old, but, otherwise, it was a good reading.
When it was finished, we went back up to the room and I started changing clothes for the IHG (International Horror Guild) awards ceremony at 6:30 p.m. I'd brought a particular outfit for the ceremony, including a custom-made corset by Diana DiNoble; considering that I was still feeling quite ill, Jennifer tried to persuade me to wear something else. But I was determined that the evening was going to go exactly as planned, Bad Things or no Bad Things, and I squeezed myself into the corset. As a concession, I did let Jennifer leave the laces fairly loose. I drank a lot more Maalox and we went downstairs again.
Oh, and I won two awards. "Onion" (from Wrong Things) won for Best Short Story of 2001 and Threshold received the award for Best Novel (for a complete listing of this year's IHG nominees and winners, go to the IHG homepage). Needless to say, I was delighted. Sick and oxygen-deprived (the corset, remember), but very pleased all the same. Below is a link to a photo of me accepting one of the awards (the balloon is not the award).
picture
The ceremony ended and, instead of sensibly going back to my room and lying down, which was more than I felt like doing, I told myself I deserved to celebrate, so I went first to the Gothic.net party, then to the Fedogren and Bremer party. The latter was much quieter and not so smoky, and I sat sipping ginger ale while everyone else indulged in sidecars, the specialty of the party's bartender. Slowly, I began to feel better. For hours, I talked about movies and Tolkien and Lovecraft with a circle of people I rarely get to see. Byron White confessed to me his theory that the most frightening thing in the universe was monkeys, and Jim Shimkus told of a harrowing, drunken midnight journey through a storm drain in Athens, GA, which carried him beneath the UGA stadium and an adjacent cemetery, through a tunnel graffitied with eldritch symbols and the names of forbidden deities. By one or two a.m., I was starting to feel slightly human again. Eventually, Jennifer, Jim, Byron and I went back to my room and talked until about three in the morning, though I don't think anything quite as inspired as the Horror of Monkeys ("Think of the monkeys, man!") or as terrifying as preternatural storm drains was mentioned.
Damn. It's almost 6 p.m. and I haven't even gotten to the Ballad of Spooky Kitten Girl and the Cheddar Curtain, which Neil has promised I would tell. But I have things to do, so tales of elusive sushi will have to wait until later this evening. Time to pack things up and head back home. Oh, thanks to Jada for taping Farscape for me! What the frell would I do without you.
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