Author Archives: Mark R. Kelly

Today was cool and overcast. I walked down the street to the same coffee shop as the other day for coffee, OJ, and scone, then headed further down to check out a notable used bookstore people at the con had been talking about, only to find it not yet open. I strolled further along the sidestreets, past various restaurants and clubs, the town library, the police station, a garden sculpture shop…

At noon I listened to a panel on the writer Robert Aickman, whose particular brand of ghost story is apparently quite distinctive and not to everyone’s taste. (I think I must have read an Aickman story or two long ago, but don’t remember them.) To Peter Straub and Lisa Tuttle, the lack of clear explanations in Aickman’s stories make them akin to dreams; in contrast, Kathryn Cramer offered theories more aligned with M.C. Escher’s paradoxical but carefully planned etchings, and the mathematics of someone named Lackoff (sp?). The panelists describes their favorite Aickman stories, and later cited other writers who exhibit some of his qualities: Kelly Link, W.G. Sebold, M. Rickert.

After that I joined Amelia Beamer and Gary Wolfe and Peter Straub and Rick Wilbur and three others whose names I didn’t catch (one of whom is a curator a nearby university special collections library), wandering the side streets for a place for lunch. We ended up at an Irish pub, Parting Glass, drinking Guiness and eating Veggie burgers and (mine) an O’Reilly sandwich.

Later I did some more shopping in the dealers room, then took a break in my room for an hour or two, reading the first 70 pages of Christopher Barzak’s novel.

At 4 p.m. was a “Year in Review” panel with Stephen Jones, Paula Guran, Ellen Datlow, Jonathan Strahan, and Charles N. Brown. They discussed trends, often from diametrically opposite perspectives; Jones detailed concerns about the shifting publisher scene, what with the firings at the SFBC and cancellation of imprints by the Perseus Group, while Charles Brown said none of that matters, it’s been like that for 50 years, and the good books still get published — more of them than any one has time to read. Then they named their own favorites of 2007 in various categories — novels, collections, etc. Frequently cited titles included Kay’s YSABEL, Hill’s HEART-SHAPED BOX, Chabon’s THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION, Lake’s MAINSPRING, Elliott’s THE PILO FAMILY CIRCUS, and Datlow’s anthology INFERNO; I didn’t try to write down the complete list…

After that was a launch party for the new US version of Orbit Books, held at a nearby restaurant called Tiznow, with the publishers and editors of Orbit US present along with several of the authors of the debut books. Like such parties at other cons, it was nominally an invite-only affair, but after a while no one was checking names at the door, and anyone who knew anyone else who knew about the party managed to drift in. There were munchies and an open bar.

After that was the classic con experience of trying to gather a group to go to dinner. I had been chatting with Rome Quezada and Trevor Stafford; the latter had plans with a larger group so we all joined them; some nine of us then walked a couple blocks to a likely restaurant only to find the wait 45 minutes. OK, try this other one on the next block. Well, then, how about that one on the side street. Still a wait. Well, we could split up. Several in the group gave up and decided to check out the con suite. Eventually there were only four of us left — me, Rome, Trevor, and Ron Drummond (of Incunabula Books) — at the Sushi Thai Garden Restaurant.

Later were parties, including a big one hosted by Tor Books in the con suite, with munchies and drinks (soda, wine, beer). It wasn’t as crowded as the party there the other night, but was quite warm inside, so eventually I went down to the bar and hung out there for a while, before coming back to my room….

Today was a brisk, sunny day in Saratoga Springs. I dashed across the street first thing this morning to buy OJ at the gas station mini-mart before attending this year’s Locus Foundation board meeting, where Charles and Jonathan and Gary and Liza and Amelia and I discussed various matters pertaining to the future of Locus Magazine, including succession planning and new ways to market the magazine and attract subscribers… to a large extent, the same issues every year. That dragged on most of the morning, so that I caught only the end of an interesting-sounding panel, “The Author as Legend”, with George Scithers, Gary Wolfe, and others, about the extent to which an author’s persona dominates our view of their work, with Lovecraft and PKD as examples, and Joe Hill as a counter-example in the sense that he tried, with some success, to get his work reviewed for itself before the identity of his famous father was revealed.

I wandered around the dealers room a while, then hooked up with John O’Neill (of Black Gate) and Gordon Van Gelder for lunch; we walked down Broadway to a tiny sandwich shop, and talked about the future of magazines, how or if short fiction is changing, and Google search-word advertising. More things to think about, to check out.

I took a break in my room for a while, did some reading, then returned to the con floor for some book shopping and review copy gathering. The bar area of the hotel’s fancy restaurant has become, of course, the central gathering spot of the convention, and I moseyed around there a while before hooking up with Gary Wolfe for dinner; he’d discovered that Betty Ballantine had no dinner plans, and made reservations at said fancy restaurant, for a changing group that ended up including Jane Yolen, Mary Rickert, and me. I had the rabbit soup, which was not as interesting as I’d hoped, and of course we listened to Betty tell stories about the early days of paperback publishing and her own childhood in India.

Friday evenings at World Fantasy Con are traditionally dominated by the mass autographing session, and this was was more crowded than usual, given the unusually large membership of this year’s con. I actually brought books by four writers — or three writers and an artist, Shaun Tan — and though they weren’t all in the room to begin with, I managed to track them all down by the end of the evening.

There were parties on the upper floors, including one for the Pirate issue of Shimmer magazine, another for a forthcoming anthology of urban fantasy called Paper Cities, published by Senses Five Press and due next April. The con suite had lots of food — big trays of some sort of rice dish, something that looked like pot-stickers, etc. — and wine. I attended a reading by Christopher Barzak, whose first novel One for Sorrow is getting good notices (including Gary Wolfe’s in the new issue of Locus), and who’d been interviewed by Locus earlier in the day. Then more hanging out at the bar, with Amelia and Ted and someone named Al Robertson, who apparently has done a lot of work in the film industry and who is just now beginning to published stories; we talked about film writers and editors and Al recommended a bunch of films I’d never heard of but which he assured me would change my life. I had him write them down.

Then back to my room to write this up.

OK, so the hotel isn’t so bad; I was irritated the other night with the check-in confusion and the wifi difficulties. Still, the hotel emphasizes chic over practicality and usability; the designers must never have read Donald Norman… I could belabor examples, but I’ll spare you.

This year’s World Fantasy Con is sold out — for the first time I can remember, attending these cons almost every year for the past decade, there are no memberships available at the door. They filled up with 1140 some memberships and stopped selling new ones a month or so ago; I myself only got in by the skin of my teeth (though I’d reserved a room at the main hotel back in March, somehow I hadn’t finalized my membership) and the kindness of the con committee, and even so was unable to buy a banquet ticket — it too is sold out. It’s understandable why this has happened — the World SF Con was in Japan, so that many professionals and fans skipped that expense and came here instead; and the proximity to New York City allowed many publishers and editors to take the train to Saratoga Springs, who otherwise might not attend a WFC.

So– the hotel/conference center is pleasant enough, the function rooms and art show and dealers’ room all in close proximity. The conference center is at the end of the town’s main street, Broadway, which is lined with shops and restaurants and business offices, along wide sidewalks, the whole ambiance an iconic small East Coast city downtown, brick buildings on a tree-lined street, with hardly any chain stores or restaurants — the glaring exception being a Borders Bookstore about 3 blocks down.

The hotel/conference center has a 4-star restaurant, Chez Sophie, which looks very good but is pricey, not the place to drop in for a casual lunch or dinner. I had a $20 breakfast there yesterday. Unfortunately, there isn’t anywhere else in the center to buy food or drink, not even a Starbucks stand, though the convention’s Con Suite has reportedly set up food for con members. Stepping out onto Broadway, however, there are several restaurants and coffee shops within a short block or two; I found a Starbucks clone this morning for coffee, OJ, and blueberry muffin ($6), though the closest place for off-site coffee appears to be the gas station across the street…

The convention program got underway this afternoon at 3, with readings. I attended a panel at 4 about “collectable ephemera” with Greg Ketter, Irene Harrison, Bob Brown, and Rebekah Brown. They talked about the stuff that heirs are apt to overlook — stuff in drawers; postcards, letters, posters. By definition, ephemera refers to the stuff most likely to be thrown away — so their dictum was, whatever it is you’re most likely to discard is exactly the stuff most likely to become valuable. They gave copious examples — including one concerning TV Guides and eBay that made me take special note.

After that I hooked up with Beth Gwinn for dinner; she snagged Joe and Gay Haldeman, who were just checking in and who had no other dinner plans, and so the four of us walked across the street to Forno Bistro, a Tuscan Italian restaurant with excellent pasta and pizza and wine, where we talked about travling in Italy and teaching MIT students how to write.

At 8 p.m. was the official Opening Ceremony, with Master of Ceremonies Guy Gavriel Kay introducing the convention’s Guests of Honor — Carol Emshwiller, Kim Newman, Lisa Tuttle, Jean Giraud/Mobius, plus various special guests and con committee members — while 50 or so audience members stood (no chairs) watching. An ice-cream social was staged out in the concourse, with long lines.

After that I checked in on “The Evolution of a Drawing”, in which Shaun Tan, Bob Eggleton, and Donato Giancola stood in front creating original sketches while the audience watched; the artists commented on their techniques as audience members asked questions. Bob drew a dragon, Donato an elegant lady, Shaun an imaginary marsupial holding a one-eyed pup.

At 9 p.m. the next room over staged the announcement of the International Horror Guild Awards, hosted by Paula Guran and Master of Ceremonied by John Picacio, whose efficient style was somewhat undermined by a long acceptance letter from Glen Hirshberg (read by Barbara Roden) and a long, extemporaneous acceptance speech by Ramsey Campbell, which ranged from his visit to the Borders down the street where he asked if they had any books by Ramsey Campbell (“is he an author?” was the response) to his dramatic recitation of the opening of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, a formative reading experience of his childhood.

And then there were parties, especially the Australia-hosted party in the Con Suite, with copious bottles of wine, but which was so crowded and over-heated it could not be long endured.

More tomorrow.

First tonight, let me close off my travel diary; after staying at a charming bed & breakfast in southern Vermont on Monday night, my partner and I drove northward on Tuesday, several people having told us that Route 100 was the place to go for the best scenic views. And so Chester to Londonderry and then north, through Plymouth and then Killington, past hills — er, mountains — with ski resorts, alongside charming lakes, like the narrow ever-winding Echo Lake, lined with picturesque vacation homes and resorts. But alas, the further north we drove, the browner and barer the hillsides became. The fall colors were actually best further south. A few days or a week makes all the difference, but so does the latitude. We reached a charming town called Rochester, with a town square and shops with angled parking in front, had a light lunch, bought some maple syrup and other maple souvenirs, then crossed the mountains to US 7 along their western edge, and headed back south. Through Bennington with an amazing obelisk of some sort on a hill, across into New York State and to Albany, where Yeong was flying home; we circled downtown, which has some peculiar structure at its center, like a cross between a UFO and a football, then — as ever surrendering ourselves to the directions of the rental car’s ‘NeverLost’ GPS navigation system — headed out to the airport, where he had a 7 p.m. flight back to LA. From there I drove north 30 miles or so to Saratoga Springs, where my difficulties checking in and setting up were documented in the previous post…

Arrived Saratoga Springs, and uncharmed by the hotel, which does its best to be invisible — from the street, hidden inside a bland ‘conference center’; as you enter from the front, trying to find reception, an unmarked counter; as you enter from the open parking lot in back, trying to find the elevators, which are in an inconspicuous corner by a door marked ‘no exit’. It took registration three times to get me into a room whose door worked and which wasn’t already occupied. And the wifi doesn’t work in my room; after two calls to their help desk (a hotel online provider called ‘stayonline’), they have no idea when they will get around to getting it fixed. Something about having to power cycle one of the access ports. So now I’m sitting in the hotel business center, while a janitor squirts windex on the table tops around me and, oops, on my glasses.

Oh, and my room has the world’s noisiest air conditioner.

Will try to answer urgent emails tonight, but no time for routines ones, or blink posts, etc. Tomorrow maybe, hopefully.

(Note that these posts from the East Coast are written, local time, three hours later than the timestamps you see, which are set to PDT.)

Update Wednesday morning: wifi seems OK today. More later.

Yesterday we spent in Provincetown, fortunate that the weather cleared leaving a brisk, breezy, sunny day. We drove along the National Seashore, climbed the Pilgrim Monument — the tallest all-granite structure in the US, it claims; from the top one can see the towers of Boston, 42 miles to the northwest — and shopped the shops and galleries of Commercial Street. Today was a drive through New England countryside: back around the Cape, up through Massachusetts with a layover hike around Walden Pond, then into New Hampshire a ways before crossing on route 101 through Keene into Vermont, where we landed at a homey bed & breakfast near Chester. The good weather is persisting, and several people have remarked that the foliage color shift is actually a bit late this year, so rather than being 2 or 3 weeks late to see it, we’re fortuitously right about on time. Tomorrow we plan more driving through Vermont, then down to the Berkshires back in Massachusetts, a stop in Albany to send my partner on a flight home (he has to be back for work and then a family trip to China next weekend), before I arrive in Saratoga Springs Tuesday night.

I’m in Provincetown, MA, this evening, after taking a red-eye flight from LA late Friday to Boston, landing in pre-dawn rain, then driving a rental car south and east and northward (the installed GPS navigation system was fun), via Plymouth Rock and the seaside villages of Dennis and Harwich and Chatham and Orleans, to this remote resort town, where by lucky chance I seem to have booked a room in the hotel with the best restaurant in town, the Crowne Point Inn. Between lunch and dinner we’ve eaten oysters, clam chowder, lobster, and other local delicacies. Over the next few days we’ll be winding our way across New England, to arrive in Sarasota Springs on Tuesday, to attend the World Fantasy Con. I have only a couple appointments or commitments for that weekend, so for the rest I’ll be playing it by ear. For those who will be there, I’ll see you then.

The wind died to almost nothing today, which is good news since that removes the major cause of the fires’ spreading. But, as I drove home from work around 5 p.m., the radio traffic reporter noted in passing that “I’m getting reports of a new fire breaking out in Woodland Hills” — !!?! — “near Ventura Blvd and Shoup, no details yet” — ??!??

That would be about a mile and 1/2 northwest of me. I continued driving home examining the horizon for obvious plumes of smoke… nothing. I even drove up onto a ridge near my house to get a view to the west– nothing. At home, nothing on the news, or on the SigAlert traffic map, which might indicate a slowdown in the event of some major fire… nothing. Perhaps it was a small brush fire quickly contained? A car fire on along the Ventura Freeway? Don’t know. Enough to provide a bit of a scare, though. A prompt to actually do some disaster planning.

Earlier today I saw newsgroup posts to the effect that David Brin, who lives down near San Diego, I’m not sure exactly where, was in an evacuated area but has since returned home.

Meanwhile, the CI Host folks responded in a bit more detail this morning, to the effect that the problems with our e-mail service, due to the ‘var partition’ filling up, is due to the enormous volume of spam e-mail that’s coming in; it overwhelms the server. Mm-hmm. I’ve wondered for a while now if our explicit posting of e-mail address on the homepage of our site isn’t an increasingly foolish practice, *inviting* spammer robots to add us to their distribution lists… And so now I’ve started removing explicit e-mail links, and have updated the Contact page on the site with roundabout text descriptions of the e-mail addresses to use should anyone who hasn’t already dealt with us wish to do so… If that doesn’t work, we discontinue the locusmag.com e-mail accounts altogether, and switch to something else — that’s relatively secret.

The winds abated somewhat in my area today, though devastating fires continue to burn down in San Diego County and in the mountains around Lake Arrowhead to the east of me. The easing winds meant all the smoke isn’t blowing quite so rapidly out to sea; instead it spread a pall of brown overcast over the entire San Fernando Valley today.

So what’s the skiffy, utopian solution to this recurrent problem? Non-flammable, indestructible, houses? That are affordable? Most houses, at least in this part of the country, are still built with wood frames (bricks, obviously, are too prone to earthquake damage), as if inviting to be burned down, eventually.

In other news, Locus is having problems yet again with e-mail service, which keeps dropping out due, it keeps turning out, to some problem with the ‘var partition’ on our dedicated server at CI Host, that’s C I Host, to which I pay a handsome sum annually to maintain said server. These days, a phone number is impossible to find on their site, and their Live Chat never seems to be online, so I resort to posting ‘trouble tickets’ and sending email. Tell me what I can do if anything to keep this from happening again, I plead with them. They close the trouble tickets with a cheery “thank you!” and never answer my questions. And the intervals between recurrences of this problem are getting shorter and shorter.

Last night the Santa Ana winds kicked in around 2 a.m., shaking the house and howling around the eaves, and so it was no surprise that I woke up this morning and saw horrific fires erupting in Malibu and elsewhere. I’ve spent most of today working on the website, with the TV on across the room to watch the continuous, ongoing news, and it’s not getting any better; now fires in Canyon Country, 15 or 20 miles northeast of me, have reached edges of the suburbs and have started to consume homes. (Oddly, it hasn’t been hot — it hasn’t been much above 70 F all day, here — but it’s *dry*, following a record breaking drought year, and the winds, kicking up to 60 and 80 mph last night, caused power lines to arc and subsequently spread sparks.) Other fires have been erupting all day in various spots in southern California, from LA County down to San Diego, in seemingly preternatural coincidence, some dying down or quickly put down, others growing into treacherous firestorms. It’s something I’ve witnessed all my life, living here in SoCal, aware that a nearby conflagration could drop an ember onto my rooftop at any moment…

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to catch up on book listings before leaving next weekend for New England and the World Fantasy Convention. The reformatted homepage is posted; the Site Map now links this homepage capture from earlier today before the redesign went online. There’s been a curious debate among SMOFs about the difficulties with the yet-again-proposed Best Website Hugo Award, since websites constantly change; how can you vote on the website as it was in the year of eligibility? For what it’s worth, I’ve always kept archived captures of previous homepages, and every redesign, such as today’s, uses a new style sheet link, so older pages are never changed. It seems only the honest thing to do.