After leaving the Hyatt bar, John Kessel, Sheila Williams, and I wandered over to 16th Street for lunch and ended up at the Appaloosa Grill, where I ate bison for the third time this trip. Before the meal began, John and I
cracked open our laptops, and we attempted to transfer a multi-gigabyte video I had made of him performing in one of Jim Kelly’s plays at Readercon.

We failed miserably.

No matter what we did, the computers wouldn’t talk to each other. (Never send a Humanist to do an Analog writer’s job.) What we needed, we decided, was a Stross, or someone like him. So we shut down our computers and stopped torturing poor Sheila with our ineptness.

After an hour or so of chatting about short stories, internet flame wars, and the trials of international submissions, John and I headed back to the convention center in search of a Hard SF writer who could solve our problem. Along the way, we bumped into Stephen Baxter heading the opposite direction on California Street. Surely he would be able to link up our laptops! Alas, he knew better than to even try.

His solution? Find Stross.

John and I continued on to the Green Room, hoping that we’d find someone with enough tech knowledge to help us, but no one there was suitable. We were about to give up and return our laptops to our hotel rooms for want of a Stross, when who should walk by but—Charles Stross!

We nearly tackled him, and threw ourselves on his mercy. We assumed that the process would work instantaneously for him, and were relieved to discover that he initially found the process as difficult as we had, which made us both feel a little less moronic. (Yes, I know, the delay was the fault of our antique equipment, but we took some solace in learning that Stross is not a god.) Eventually, however, the virtual john Kessel leapt from laptop to laptop.

Freed from the bondage of lugging a computer around, I changed my clothes and headed off for the EOS 10th anniversary party, which was held at Lodo’s Bar and Grill over on Market Street. There was quite a spread, and plenty of good conversation, with friends such as Liza Groen Trombi and Amelia Beamer (below).

Once there, I put a face to Jeremy Tolbert for the first time, and we continued talking about the magazine market-share panel I’d been on that morning. I talked with Lee Whiteside and Anna Caggiano about the upcoming Terry Pratchett convention.

I spoke with Alan Beatts, who asked me about David Louis Edelman, and queried me about a third Edelman, whom he was fairly certain wrote a story titled “Botch” for an Arkham House anthology edited by Gerald Page called Nameless places. I was pretty sure that if there had been another Edelman, I’d have heard of him, and I turned out to be right—the story was by Scott Edelstein, who’d created the same kind of confusion for me in the ’70s and ’80s as David Louis Edelman is causing for me today. (And I for him.)

I talked with John Joseph Adams about zombies, demonstrated to Robert Silverberg how a Blackberry works, chatted with Kathy Morrow’s sister (who’s a local criminal prosecutor) about which writers deserved to be locked up, swapped story sales with Amelia Beamer, and explained my Schadenfreude Theory of Con-Going to Mark Kelly and Kirsten Gong-Wong. And much more, of course.

After a few hours, as the party ended, I went back to the Sheraton, and dove into the SFWA suite, which was far more crowded and a lot warmer than it had been Wednesday night. The conversation I had there with John Kessel and Connie Willis about the election and the current political scandals created even further heat.

Then it was up to the Tor party on the 8th floor, at which I spent a lot of time talking world travels with Craig Miller and Geoffrey Landis, including how I managed to make a completely legal trip to Cuba, and about opera and Jane Austen with John Kessel and my wife.

By then, I was growing tired, but I figured that a trip to the parties on the 22nd floor was mandatory. I found Mike Resnick and Eleanor Wood at the Pyr party, where we talked about Algis Budrys, and about the story Mike and I briefly considered writing, for which I assume all blame as the stumbling block.

But after waking up for a 7:30 breakfast with Bob Silverberg, partying until dawn was just beyond me, so I stumbled back to the Marriott. After uploading the rest of Friday’s photos, for a current total of 89, I crashed. I hope that the rest of you managed to see the sun rise without me.