I spent the weekend at the Baltimore Book Festival (combined with multiple visits to Baltimore Comic-Con, about which more later), where the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America hosted a tent featuring panels and readings from Friday through Sunday. That’s me to the left on the event’s homepage below, where I appeared for a few seconds at a time in rotation with the many other featured writers.

I was programmed for two items Sunday, but spent many additional hours beyond that at SFWA’s tent as well, enjoying (among other things) the Dangerous Voices Variety Hour gameshow, which put both authors and audience on the spot in amusing ways. You can check out my photos from the weekend over on Flickr.

Unfortunately, I forgot to hand my camera over to anyone to snap any pics of me, but luckily, the Internet provides …

Fran Wilde tweeted this shot of me giving a reading, while Sarah Pinsker, Bud Sparhawk, Carmen Maria Machado, and Ann Chatham awaited their turns at the podium.

I announced at this reading that I was about to do something I’d never done before—I would read all of the stories from two of my collections, What We Still Talk About and These Words Are Haunted. And I then proceeded to flip through each book and read the final sentence of every short story, accompanied by commentary which the audience seemed to find amusing. Next year, if given the chance, perhaps I’ll read the opening sentences of every story.

This was followed by the panel “Short Stories: Why They Rock Science Fiction and Fantasy,” and you can see me below with Sarah Pinsker, Bill Campbell, Bud Sparhawk, Carmen Maria Machado, and Ann Chatham in a photo tweeted by Kelly Szpara.

Among other things, I related an anecdote I misattributed to Christopher Priest, but which an audience member corrected me as having originated with Lew Shiner. It recommended that writers look at their annual output, then at an actuarial table, so they’ll then know how many more words they’ll get a chance to write in their lifetimes.

I was trying to stress the importance of making sure each story or novel counts, and is truly the one on which you want to spend your time, but instead, I seemed to harsh everybody’s mellow. Me, I’ve always found that story to be motivating, but … oh, well.

Not all the fun of the Baltimore Book Festival took place at the festival, as this image captured by Tobias Buckell proves.

Saturday night, after SFWA’s Meet the Author Social and subsequent dinner, Toby was still jonesing for dessert, and on the advice of Sarah Pinkser, we headed over to Vaccaro’s Italian Pastry Shop in Little Italy, which we were told would be open until midnight. And so the two of us took off on a quest, and as you can see above, ended up with rum cake, cream puffs, and a cannoli between us.

And they were GOOD.

So even though my days were split between two events, my time at the Baltimore Book Festival was still rewarding. I caught up with old friends, made new ones, and enjoyed learning a thing or two from intelligent panelists. And what could be better than that?