My trip to Ad Astra began much too early yesterday. I’d set the alarm for 4:15 a.m. so I could make the 8:12 flight to Toronto out of Dulles, but I ended up waking at 4:03 and couldn’t get back to sleep. I guess the universe didn’t want me to get those extra 12 minutes for some reason!

I’d hoped to nap on the plane, but the guy sitting next to me proved talkative, which normally would have irked me, since I usually sleep through flights, but luckily, he turned out to be talkative in a good way. He was actually interesting! He was a Canadian who lives in Kuwait and works for the university system there, and we traded stories of our various world travels and what we’d learned of the differing cultures. How he got out of China after Tiananmen Square was a nail-biter. In an extremely rare move for me, we ended up exchanging contact info.

I was met at the airport by Heather King and Roxanne Learn, who got me to the con hotel where I met up with Ellen Datlow and Shawna McCarthy for our preplanned trip to Chinatown for dim sum. With all our overlapping programming, Friday before everything really got started seemed the only day for that kind of excursion. We ended up at Forestview Chinese Restaurant, which we loved—it was busy, crowded, and we were among the very few non-Chinese there, all of which is what I like to see—so I’m glad we hadn’t read the Yelp review first, because that might have scared us away. Because the food was good, and I’d return for more on a future trip to Toronto.

Then, after a visit to the Bata Shoe Museum, which wasn’t at all my suggestion, but proved not to be as dull as this non-Jimmy Choo-wearing guy imagined it would be, Shawna figured out the train system enough to get us to the stop closest to the hotel so we could grab as cheap a cab ride back as possible. (Well, it would have been cheap if not for a cabbie who kept taking wrong turns even with the use of a GPS.)

Back at the hotel, I hung in the bar for a bit, meeting Rio Youers and others for the first time, before going to the opening ceremonies, which was more formal than most because it featured an introduction by The Honourable David C. Onley, Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, and friend to Ad Astra.

Then, it was immediately off to two panels. First, “Using Conventions to Your Advantage,” with Ian Keeling and Justine Lewkowitz, during which I explained that what to do was the opposite of whatever I did when I first started out. (For example, I was so ethically rigid that I deliberately avoided meeting editors, because I wanted them to judge my stories based entirely on the words on the page, and not be influenced by any possible positive encounter with me. Kids, don’t do this at home!)

This was immediately followed by a panel on “Zombies: Rise to Popularity”, with Mandy Slater, Stephen Jones, and Karina Sumner-Smith. That’s me and Karina with Steve above, and the reason we’re bookending him like that is because I’ve got the first story in his upcoming Best New Horror anthology, while she’s got the last one. So we replicated in real life what Steve’s done with his book. It was a great panel, if for no other reason than I got to hear Steve rave about my writing multiple times through the course of it. Don’t know that the audience made of that, but I loved it!

After that, I spent several hours in the green room, but that early rising took its toll, so I went back to the room, uploaded all of my Ad Astra photos so far to Flickr, and then crashed. And now a new day begins. If you’re here, come to my panel about The Walking Dead at noon!