Dispatch from Gormenghast-on-the-River

Worldcon, Day 2. I’ve been in this hotel before. I’ve wandered through its subterranean halls, furiously poking bits into my wetware geolocation memory register, without much useful success. I feel like a cat looking for his litterbox in Gormenghast…along with a thousand other cats. It’s the most chaotic Worldcon venue I’ve ever experienced. It’s about as orthagonal as the Intel x86 architecture. It’s as…

Ok, ok, I’ll stop bitching. Much looking at maps allowed me to get to a lot of places and get a fair bit done. 10 out of 13 students from my 2011 Taos Toolbox workshop are at the convention (as are instructors Walter Jon Williams and Nancy Kress) and we actually held a brief critique session at Carole Moleti’s kaffeeklatsch noonish. I sat in a couple of readings and spoke at length with a great many people I don’t see very often. Over lunch I tried to get the K9 email client for Android running on my Transformer Prime, without complete success. I would try again but I had free Wi-Fi at The Corner Bakery. Here in my room at the Sheraton, it would be another $13.95 for a day, on top of the $13.95 I’m already paying for my laptop’s connection.

The discussion topic of the house seems to be, “W(h)ither zombies?” Are they past their expiration date? Is there any more meat to be chewed on that bone? Is the corpse still twitching?

Consensus seems to be, Yes–but ya gotta have a twist. I had a moment to think about twists this afternoon, and if I wanted to do a zombie novel I think I have a good one. I won’t bore you with it right now, but I’ll offer a clue: It’s a straightforward extension of something I’ve written about before in an SF story.

David Brin asked me what time it was. I answered, “4:22.”

In loose moments I’m reading The Quantum Dot by Richard Turton. Nice item, a little dry, but the best summary I’ve seen so far.

A filk popped into my head this morning. I’ll quote the refrain. If you know music at all you’ll get the joke:

Seven ugly shelves, made out of wood;
Tall and thin they were.
Into the writer’s house they went;
His paperbacks to bear.

There’s more, but I need to work on the rhyme.

And I’m about out of time this evening. Supper looms. Not sure where it looms, but it’s making loom noises. Or maybe that’s my stomach. I’ll find out shortly.