The 2008 Nebula Awards weekend began for me in Baltimore rather than Austin, because I ran into Peter Heck and Jane Jewell at BWI. We were all taking the same Southwest flight, and since that airline has no assigned seating, we were able to commandeer a row and entertain each other along the way, sometimes by chatting, but mostly by snoring, since we’d all had to get up around 4:00 in the morning to make our unexpectedly shared flight.

We also shared a cab to the Omni Austin Downtown, and we arrived there ravenous. We took the concierge’s recommendation for a good Tex-Mex restaurant, the Iron Cactus. Since I don’t drink, I wasn’t able to appreciate the range of tequilas they had—almost 100 different varieties—but the red snapper was worth the walk.

Since the opening events for the weekend wouldn’t start until later in the day, I decided to spend the afternoon wandering Austin, something I hadn’t managed to do at all when I was here for the 2006 World Fantasy Convention. My first stop—the O. Henry Museum.

O. Henry lived in Austin for 16 years, and in this house from 1893 to 1898. Austin was where he became known for his embezzlement rather than for his writing, and was sentenced to five years in a federal prison. Which basically means that this was the place where he decided that since he was unlikely to ever get rehired at a bank, he’d might as well head off and give writing his all.

As I wandered the small home, I kept comparing it with Thomas Wolfe’s home, which I’d visited in Asheville, North Carolina, and Jack London’s home, which I’d visited in Glen Ellen, California. While there was no “aha!” moment there Thursday, the way there had been when I’d looked at London’s many rejection slips or hit my head in the doorways of Wolfe’s home and realized that since we were both 6’4″ there was a reason he didn’t want to go home again, I still felt the presence of the man who wrote “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Ransom of Red Chief” as I looked at his original writing desk and imagined myself sitting there.

I then stopped at the Arthouse at Jones Center, which had an exhibit of drawings, costumes, and set designs from the collaborative work “Cult of Color: Call to Color,” created by artist Trenton Doyle Hancock, choreographer Stephen Mills, and composer Graham Reynolds. The piece was very science-fictional, full of alien races and concepts, and I wish that I’d been able to see an actual performance. But if you take a look at me next to one of the costumes, you’ll get an idea of the weirdness of it all.

I got back to the hotel when registration opened at 6:00, and picked up my badge and two bags of freebie books. Joe and Gay Haldeman were doing the same, and a little later I tagged along with them and with Liza Groen Trombi to try to see Austin’s famous bats. But it turned out to be too early in the season, and though we waited for more than 90 minutes at one of the official viewing areas, we only saw 2-3 forlorn and lonely bats, and not the million or promised in August.

After we abandoned our vigil on one side of Ann Richards Lake, we met up with Sheila Williams, who had been watching for bats from the other side of the bridge. We poked our heads into a number of likely looking restaurants until we settled on Kyoto Japanese restaurant. I had the teriyaki eel on a bed of rice. (Thank last year’s trip to Japan for making me a more adventurous eater!) As we ate, we discussed the short story form vs. the novel, books about talking animals (I won’t tell you which one of us hates them), and Nero Wolfe.

Back at the hotel, I hung out in the hospitality suite for awhile, where I lost a game of nine-ball to Liza Groen Trombi. Good thing there was no money on the line, because she’s a pool shark! After chatting briefly with other early arrivals, I decided to save my energy for the more intense schmoozing still to come and headed back to my room around midnight to crash.

Keep checking back here for further photos from the weekend.