I woke up yesterday at 3:00 a.m., and my head didn’t hit the pillow again until 12:40 a.m. Here’s a little bit of what happened in between.

I left the house in West Virginia, heading for BWI Airport, by 4:00 a.m. I was alone, but as it turned out, I was not without friends. Tuning to the local NPR station as I drove, I listened to the BBC, because that’s what airs on that station so early in the morning. Suddenly, I heard a friend of mine being introduced—writer and critic Kim Newman, whom I first met (if my memory is functioning the morning after my first day of Readercon) at a World Horror Con in the early ’90s. He was brought on to discuss Bruno, which he didn’t seem to like much, though he was impressed by the hours of work necessary to get each of the tiny clips which made it up. Hearing his voice, I felt as if Readercon had already begun!

That wasn’t the first time that had happened. I was once driving back from a Springfield Boskone to Framingham (when I lived there in the mid-’80s) and had Ted Klein unexpectedly and serendipitously accompanying me for a full hour on the radio.

I arrived in Providence at 8:50, where I was met by Paul Di Filippo, just as I’ve been each year for at least a decade, ever since I decided to fly there instead of to Boston for Readercon, plus Michael Bishop. Mike and his wife Jeri have been staying with Paul and Deb Newton for several days of touring before the con. We headed back to the Di Filippo/Newton manse, where we admired the book collection, discussing some of our favorites, including a novel which had made an early impression on Mike, We All Died at Breakaway Station by Richard C. Meredith, whom we hadn’t realized had died so young.

We had plenty of time before the first of the next two were due to arrive at the Providence airport, so we headed over to an Italian restaurant on Hope street for lunch. As usual with any gathering of SF writers, however small, the conversation inevitably gets around to Harlan Ellison, so while some of us had souvlaki and others chicken parmigiana, pasta, and/or salad, we each told the stories of our first meetings. (Don’t worry—Harlan didn’t monopolize the meal.) Then it was off to pick up Howard Waldrop, who arrived around 1:30. On the way back to Poplar Street, Paul pointed out those places which Lovecraft would have seen, including the cemetery where grave-robbing had taken place in the story “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” (Which wasn’t the same cemetery at which Lovecraft ended up being buried.)

After Mike, Paul and I delivered Howard to Poplar Street, Paul and immediately turned around to head back to the airport to pick up Michael Dirda, whose plane was to land at 2:30. (Don’t worry, Providence is small, and the airport wasn’t that far away, so even though I was going to be there for the third time that day, it wasn’t onerous.) Driving back with Mike, we discussed, among other things, the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie starring Robert Downey, Jr. Since Mike is a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, I asked him what he thought of it. He told us that he felt it would bear the same relationship to the works of Arthur Conan Doyle as the James Bond movies do to the books. Make of that what you will.

Here are the guys (Howard, Michael Dirda, Paul, me, and Michael Bishop) back in Paul and Deb’s dining room, having a drink before hitting the road for Readercon:

And please—don’t blame me for the level of testosterone in this image, or in the one I shared last night. We tried to get either Deb or Jeri into the shot while the others took the picture, but they’re the ones who chose not to be in it, not us!

Then we climbed into the car and headed to the con—but not without stopping at Lovecraft’s grave, as I reported last night when I was too weary to write about much else. After that, it was straight on to Readercon. Poor Paul, who’d already done those three round-trips to the airport, held up well driving the seven-person van to Burlington through rush-hour traffic.

As we pulled up, the first person I spotted was Jeffrey Ford, out in front of the hotel for a smoke, so of course I had to greet him with the lame, “Oh, I see they’ll let anyone come here” line …

And then, after all of this prologue, the real Readercon finally began!