I drove to Austin a little less than a week ago to attend World Horror 2011. I got on the road around 9 a.m. because I had to pick up Guest of Honor Joe Hill at the Austin airport shortly after noon. I got no more than 10 miles before the low-tire-pressure light came on. I pulled over and checked all the pressures. Everything was okay. Reset the indicator and ten miles later it came on again. I played this game all the way to Austin (175 miles), but after a while I stopped checking, just reset the indicator. Joe’s flight was a little late coming in, so I had time to find free wireless in the airport and make my first tweet of the con. It was about the compelling subject of “throwback” Pepsi, which is made with real sugar. I’d forgotten what Pepsi was supposed to taste like.
Got Joe to the hotel without any false turns and met up with co-organizers Lee Thomas and Nate Southard in the lobby, along with Guest of Honor Sarah Langan and Grand Master Jack Ketchum, aka Dallas Mayr. Lee took us to a barbecue place in town for a late lunch and the rest of the day was spent banging around the lobby. That was the only place in the hotel that had free Wi-Fi, so I hung out there quite a bit during the convention, which was nice as it was a good place to meet up with people. Met up with my roommate, Nick Mamatas, upon his arrival. Our time schedules were offset by a couple of hours so I saw him conscious in our room only once. I was usually asleep by the time he got into the room each night, and I was up and gone before he arose.
In the late afternoon I took Dallas on a shopping run. After wandering the mall parking lot across the street for a while and getting some poorly understood directions, I made the wrong turn on Airport Blvd and ended up taking him on a merry ride, though ultimately a successful one. Gave us time to talk, which is always fun.
The convention didn’t start officially until Thursday evening. During the day, I helped Nate and Joe McKinney set up the Art Dealer’s Room and helped unload a U-Haul truck full of goody bags and souvenir books. Brian Keene brought me a thoughtful present: a couple of lumps of coal from Centralia in honor of my short story “Centralia is Still Burning.” That was really cool. He and some friends visited the site a while back.
Then I took Guest of Honor Steve Niles (30 Days of Night) on a shopping trip to buy a charger for his cell phone. Again, I misheard the directions and headed north on I-35 when I should have gone south, so the trip took a little longer than it should have. I hadn’t met Niles before, so we had time to get to know each other on the journey and ended up discussing, of all things, Scandinavian crime fiction by the time we got to Best Buy. That was a lot of fun.
Back at the hotel, I met up with old friends as they arrived. There were a lot of stories about misadventures along the way. Claude Lalumière, for example, meant to take the train all the way from Canada to Texas, but when he got to Chicago he found it the next leg was canceled because of flooding in the Mid-West.
I’m already having a hard time remembering what happened exactly when. My Twitter feed helps a little. Before the opening ceremonies, I had drinks in the bar with Brian Keene, Nate, Lee and the Deadite Press group. Afterward, we (the committee members) took the Guests of Honor to a nearby restaurant for dinner. Some people went in a hearse limousine, and I took others in my car. Three of the Guests of Honor (Brian Keene, Del Howison and Sarah Langan) had to get back in time for a 10 p.m. panel, so I took them. True to form, I made a wrong turn, but we realized my error pretty quickly so we didn’t go too far out of the way and I got them there safe and sound and on time! During the panel, these three, along with Yvonne Navarro and Rose O’Keefe, discussed how much money they made. No one shed any tears and many industry secrets were revealed.
On Friday, I got up in time to see the last kiss on the balcony at Buckingham Palace. Later, Nick Mamatas thanked me for not turning on the television at 3 a.m. to watch the Royal Wedding. He knew it was a Canadian imperative that I see it. I was sitting in the (very large) lobby reading my Facebook feed when I read that Scott Edelman had gone on a donut run and had dozens and dozens to give out at the registration desk. Which was only 15 feet behind me. If I’d turned around, I might have seen them. Isn’t technology great?
My next duty was to get Joe Hill together with Jim Argendeli from CNN.com for an interview. We used the convention suite, which wasn’t yet open to the public. Later, I attended a panel about the wisdom of writing short stories, or the lack thereof. (Joe Hill, Brad Sinor, Suzanne Church, Claude Lalumière, Molly Tanzer, Orrin Grey). Hung out in the lobby with Joe Hill and Simon Clark for a while before heading over to the next door Mexican restaurant, where I was invited to join Jeff Strand and his wife Lynn Hansen, Norman Prentiss and his partner and Chesya Burke for lunch. Had a margarita. Visited the Edge book launch in the con suite.
My main task of the day was to conduct Joe Hill’s guest of Honor interview in the afternoon. Earlier that day, he approached me and said he had a “terrible idea,” which was to let him read first and then ask only a few questions to prime the pump before opening the floor to questions. That suited me just fine.
Joe read a chapter from his new novel called NOS 4A2. You may have to say it out loud a few times to get it! The chapter was about a night watchman at a morgue who likes to take pictures of himself with corpses in various poses. On this occasion, the stiff in question was a serial killer who had been in a coma before dying. The chapter is funny as hell, until it turns very dark (literally) and frightening. Can’t wait to read the whole thing. I asked him a few questions about Locke and Key and the upcoming Fox adaptation and then we rolled along mostly with audience questions. Quite a few people complimented me on the way it went, but mostly I stayed the hell out of the way and let Joe talk. Maybe that’s the secret to a good interview. Whenever there was a lull, I’d ask something, but there weren’t many lulls.
After that, I went to Peter Straub’s reading. He chose an excerpt from a 16,000 word novella called “The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine,” which will appear in Conjunctions #56: Terra Incognita: The Voyage Issue, due out shortly. It was a fascinating, dreamlike snippet featuring the eponymous characters on a boat on the Amazon. They seem to enjoy torturing each other, and they are not allowed to see the boat’s crew. The food they eat is sumptuous but unidentifiable. Afterwards, I tweeted about the story. (More on this later.)
Then I went to Joe Lansdale’s reading. He did a bit from the Hap and Leonard novella “Hyenas” and then all of the accompanying short story “The Boy Who Became Invisible,” a poignant standalone story from Hap’s youth. The former had us roaring with laughter and the latter brought us back to reality with a bang. Lansdale said that he is Hap, more or less. He has an ongoing age-related banter with crime writer Bill Crider that was funny, too. It came up again and again over the weekend. Apparently it’s been going on for 30+ years.
During the interlude, I met John C. Farris, son of author John Farris (The Fury, All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By). I read a bunch of the elder Farris’s books back in the 1980s. Then it was off to the the Jack Ketchum interview, led by Wrath James White, and the Grand Master Award Presentation, which started with a tribute video put together by Lee Thomas. Dallas spoke eloquently on the subject of gravitas. After that there was a reception in the pre-function area outside the meeting rooms, where I noshed on chicken nuggets and drank beer while mixing with people too numerous to enumerate. Also went to the ChiZine book launch party in the con suite and picked up Paul Tremblay’s collection In the Mean Time.
To be continued…
