I pulled out of my driveway at around 4:00 a.m. EST this morning and didn’t arrive at the Marriott Airport Burbank Hotel until around 2:00 p.m. PST this afternoon, with my connecting flight through San Francisco so delayed that Gene O’Neill and Gord Rollo, with whom I’d planned to have lunch, gave up and went off without me. But kind and generous souls that they were, once I arrived they accompanied me and watched as I ate a falafel at George’s Greek Cuisine across the way. We caught up on the year since we’d last seen each other, which was at the Salt Lake City Stoker World Horror Convention.

Back at the hotel we ran into a woman who asked if we were there for “the pitches,” which we took to mean the agent and editor pitches set up by the Horror Writers Association for its members as part of the Stoker Awards weekend. But it turned out that she was in the Marriott for a completely different writerly event taking place this weekend—PitchFest 2009, in which screenwriters speed-date with agents and development execs.

She told us that coincidentally, she had been eating earlier in the same restaurant, and had turned to her husband to say that I (in the middle below) looked like Glenn Frey and Gene (to the right) looked like Malcolm McDowell. (Do we? I tend to think that the woman may have had too much ouzo.)

“So who does Gord looked like?” I asked.

“Oh, we decided he just looked like a regular Joe,” she said.

Sorry, Gordo!

After wishing the woman well with her pitching, we all went to our rooms to nap in preparation for the book signing tonight at Dark Delicacies. But you know me—I had to do my twittering, blogging, flickring, and facebooking first!

Only now I can take a nap!