I met Peter David at Jekyll & Hyde in New York City in 2006. I was in the city on a family vacation. One of our few pre-scheduled events was a trip to Radio City Music Hall for “Harry, Carrie and Garp.” A group of us, including Peter, his daughter, Jae Lee, Robin Furth and others, had dinner together prior to the event. I’ve never been a huge comics reader, not since childhood at least, so I didn’t really know much about Peter or Jae, and I’m not even sure I knew at the time that they were working on the graphic novel adaptation of the Dark Tower series at the time.
I interviewed Peter about his work on the graphic novels last year for The Dark Tower Companion. One thing that rang through louder than just about anything else is the fact that he was doing his work for an audience of one: Stephen King. He told a great story about meeting King for the first time backstage at New York Comic-Con. It’s a terrific anecdote, one that a person could whip out at dinner or on panel sessions and be assured of getting a belly laugh from people. I won’t spoil it here—I’ll let people read for themselves when the book comes out.
Peter had a stroke while on vacation in the closing days of 2012. Amazingly, he took to twitter and his blog to post a short message to that effect the following day. However, he’s now on the road to recovery, which could be a long and expensive process, even though he has insurance. His wife has been posting daily updates on his blog and today she wrote about how people can help out. The most direct way is to buy copies of his books from Crazy 8 Press. During my interview with him he described his Hidden Earth series as having the epic scope of the Dark Tower series and The Camelot Papers as a revisionist version of the King Arthur legend. Check ’em out, if you feel so inspired.
I’ve been going to Necon off and on for a decade. Necon is the name for the Northeastern Writers’ Conference, one of the most enjoyable and unique conferences I’ve attended. People call it Camp Necon, and because there’s a hard cap on the number of attendees and because it is somewhat informal, many of the same people go year after year after year. Going to Necon is the next best thing to going on vacation. I’ve made some very good friends at Necon over the years. Bob Booth was the chairman of the conference for decades. By the time I started going, he had turned over the reins to his son, Dan, but he and the rest of the Booths are always a strong presence, no matter who’s chairing. To us, Bob is Papa Necon.
I can’t say that I know Bob really well, but I’m a morning person and so, apparently, is he (at least at Necon), so I would often run into him in the courtyard outside the dorms in the hours before most of the other campers rolled out of bed. We’ve had some nice chats over coffee and donuts. A few years ago, he told me about working with Donald M. Grant (who was part of establishing Necon), laying out the text of the first hardcover edition of The Gunslinger by hand.
Alas, the news concerning Papa Necon is not good these days and the family (by which I mean his family and the Necon family) are asking for good wishes to be conveyed. Check out the link at the beginning of this paragraphs for addresses to which cards and letters can be sent, or leave a post for him on that message board.
