Epistles from Readercon 2014

Highlights of Readercon Day 2: too many to list, actually. Talking situations you don't want to be in in places you never want to leave on the teaching-ghost-story-writing panel with Michael Dirda and Gemma Files and Jack M. Haringa and Erik Amundsen. Getting to chat Holocaust ghost stories and digital piracy and Weird Wisconsin with Mary Rickert and Rebecca Brown and the delightful Craig D.B. Patton (thanks for driving all the way up just for this, Craig) at a "Kaffeeklatsch," Hearing Paul Tremblay read the least erotic thing I've ever heard about tongues. Watching Gemma deliver a Sumerian curse at the end of her reading, glance up, and offer the least reassuring grin this side of Paul Tremblay's. John Langan stopping smiling just long enough to close the Fearful Symmetries: An Anthology of Horror reading...fearfully. Meeting the lovely Chizine people (even if they didn't actually pay for dinner). Stopping by the t-shirt shop to get my Michael KellySimon StrantzasIan Rogers boy-band

top made for my Toronto readings next week (just wanted to see if you were paying attention, gents; would it be better if I said it was Michael Rowe's idea?). Michael Cisco hurling himself into a startlingly funny performance of a typically literate, challenging, beautiful new blizzard of language about (un)language. Delightful Thai dinner



(far, far from the hotel with and its carefully crafted mass starvation-diet experiment). My books selling out less than an hour after the dealer room opened (which, yeah, could be read one of two ways, but I'm choosing the upbeat one).

Lowlight: The return from the Thai restaurant to the hotel. In Paul Tremblay's trunk.

Photo of that, sadly, to follow...