Sorry for the silence here, folks. Blame the ukulele.

For pretty much every waking moment of Saturday through Tuesday, and for most of Wednesday, I took part in UkeFest 2013 over at the Strathmore Music Center in Maryland.

There were multiple tracks of programming, so it was of course impossible for me to attend everything, but in the classes I got to, Marcy Marxer taught us how to play “Rockin’ the Uke” a la Roy Smeck, Gerald Ross showed us chorded melodies and how to “take it” during a jam, Lil’ Rev (with whom I’m posing below) shared roll strokes, triples, fans, and zig-zag strums, Stu Fuchs went through rockabilly fingering, Cathy Fink took us through the best way to practice so that we’d actually get better … and much, much more.

Now when I say that these instructors taught me all these things, that’s not to say I actually learned any of them on the spot. (So don’t go expecting miracles the next time you see me with a uke.) Because while I understood on an intellectual level everything I was shown, I didn’t necessarily have the dexterity to perform many of the complicated moves.

But that’s OK. I didn’t expect I’d always be able to keep up. But I’m not disappointed, because I know that will come, as muscle memory slowly starts to take over from my natural fumbling.

If you’d like to see more of what this year was like, head on over to Flickr to check out more UkeFest photos.

Can’t wait until UkeFest 2014!

Remember that 5-page Thanos story I wrote way back when dinosaurs still walked the Earth? The one that, surprisingly, ended up being part of Marvel’s Free Comic Book Day promotion last April?

Well, a digital copy is available as a free download right now through both the Marvel app (if you’ve got it) or simply via the company’s site.

I have no idea how long the offer will last, so if you want to check out the sort of thing I was writing in 1977, without having to haunt comics shops in search of a copy of Logan’s Run #6, then now’s your chance.

Back home from my second time experiencing Next restaurant’s Vegan menu, and what do I find? A sneak peek at what the restaurant has planned for us once it switches over to Bocuse d’or, which will run from August 31 to December 31.

Jenner Tomaska, Sous Chef at Next, tweeted (and Chef Dave Beran retweeted) a pic simply captioned, “Bocuse menu testing.” In case you missed it, here it is.

I’ve only been home a couple of hours, and now I can’t wait to get back to Chicago again!

During Readercon a few weeks back, I was interviewed by Gil Roth for his Virtual Memories Show podcast. Gil brought the episode live last week, but it wasn’t until today that I found the time to give it a listen, make sure the resulting interview didn’t cause me to wince, and share it with you.

And so here I am below, starting at 51:20, after the far more erudite John Crowley.

The one thing I learned from listening to my blather is that I sure do say the phrase “and so forth” a lot.

If you decide to listen, I hope your takeaway will be something more than that.

I’ve attended every Readercon since it began in 1987 (well, except for the one I was regrettably forced to miss, about which the less said the better), and have tended not to wander out on my usual foodie jaunts during that con. That’s because Readercon’s programming has always been so dense and intense that I’ve never been able to make time for much more than con suite food (or durian and jackfruit) between rushing from panel to reading to kaffeeklatsch to panel.

But David Shaw was tired of that excuse, seeing it as an insult to the culinary arts of his beloved city, and insisted we finally pay a visit to his favorite local restaurant, Journeyman. So we snuck away the Saturday night of the convention (along with Diane Martin, Cecilia Tan, and Corwin) to Union Square in Somerville, where I had what ended up being one of the best meals of my life.

Before starting our seven-course meal, I began with a delicious melon thyme mocktail …

… which was a wonderful preview for the six non-alcoholic beverage pairings which would accompany my meal. As impressed as I was by the food, I was even more impressed by the pairings. It’s no exaggeration to say that when considered in their totality, Journeyman’s non-alcoholic beverage pairings exceeded in imagination and execution those I’ve experienced at any other restaurant.

As we sipped those initial beverages, we were given a choice—did we want to look at the descriptions of the tasting menus, or did we want what arrived to be a surprise? (more…)

Earlier this month, I shared with you a bunch of typewriters you could have bought in 1893. So let’s say you had bought one of them … what then?

Well, if you were a writer, surely you didn’t expect to publish your stories without a little editorial supervision. That’s where Dr. Titus M. Coan’s New York Bureau of Revision came in. His advertisement in the January 1893 issue of The Cosmopolitan promised that he’d provide “unbiased criticism of prose and verse.”

Would love to know exactly which “leading authors” endorsed his services, though.

And at the other end of the publishing food chain, readers need help, too. That’s what the Holloway Reading Stand and Dictionary Holder were all about.

Because reading a book while letting it rest in one’s lap is so old-fashioned!

Drew Friedman has posted many scans relating to “It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s SUPERMAN,” a 1966 Broadway musical I could have seen (hey, I was eleven and lived in New York) but never did. I’d never run across the souvenier program book before, but the instant I saw the cover posted there, I noticed something very odd.

If you’re as big a Silver Age comics fan as I am, you’ll notice it, too.

Take a look.

Did something inappropriate leap out at you? If you read comics back in 1966, you’d have immediately recognized that something was very, very wrong. And that is … (more…)

LoneStarCon3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention, is only five weeks away, and the committee has circulated a rough draft of the program. So if you’re heading to San Antonio, too, here’s where you’ll have a chance to see me (not counting any reading or kaffeeklatsch which may be assigned later).

Stories From the Bullpen
Friday, August 30, 15:00-16:00
The Marvel bullpen and the DC offices were magical places in the 1970s and 1980s, full of wisecracking pros, hardworking artists, and tale-spinning editors, if you believe the letters pages. But what was it really like? Get a peek behind the curtain with our panelists!
with Bob Wayne, Anthony Tollin, and Phil Foglio

Remembering Carmine Infantino
Friday, August 30, 20:00-21:00
One of the great artists and editors of DC comics passed away recently. Join us for a discussion of Infantino’s contributions to the science fiction comics and super hero comics of the 1960s and his stewardship as editor on such titles as Batman.
with Weldon Adams

Playing in Other People’s Sandboxes: Writing Comics that aren’t Your Own
Sunday, September 1, 15:00-16:00
Whether you’re writing Spider-Man, Jonah Hex, the Incredibles, or Fruit Ninja, you never get to really own these characters. But they sure are fun to play with! Hear some stories about what it’s like dealing with today’s corporate overlords.
with Alan J. Porter, Paul Benjamin, and Howard Tayler

Arouse Is Not the Past Tense of Arise
Monday, September 2, 12:00-13:00
Why do so many new writers have problems with grammar? How important is grammar? Has it lost relevancy in communicating with some portion of the reading public?
with Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Ginjer Buchanan, and Alberto Chimal

But there’s one other place you might see me—if you’re insane for BBQ, that is. (more…)

At noon on Sunday, July 14, 2013, Elizabeth Bear, John Benson, Andrea Hairston, Elizabeth Hand, Robert Killheffer and Scott Lynch came together at Readercon for the panel, “Pining for the Fnords: The New Nostalgia.”

What does that mean exactly? According to the program guide:

Well-received novels like John Scalzi’s Redshirts, Jo Walton’s Among Others, and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One pointedly allude to the SF of decades past. In a controversial review in the Los Angeles Review of Science Fiction, Paul Kincaid suggested that contemporary SF is suffering from a feeling of exhaustion; “the genre is now afraid to engage with what once made it novel, instead turning back to what was there before” or reverting “to older, more familiar futures.” Others view this type of SF as celebrating its heritage. What’s driving this backward-looking urge, and to what extent is it positive or problematic?

If you’re wondering why it’s taken this long for me to share this video, blame the bandwidth of my home Internet. Most people complain about the Internet speed they get at hotels, but not me—it’s rare that I’ll be at a hotel which has slower speeds than I experience at home. And so this video, which would have taken around two hours to upload at the Readercon hotel, would supposedly take 16 at home, and I couldn’t spare the bandwidth. So I had to wait until the following weekend, when I was once more at a hotel for a convention, to upload.

And now, after an explanation you probably neither wanted nor needed … enjoy!

Which is—I never get enough sleep at them.

I always knew I didn’t sleep well at cons, but when I say “knew,” it was more an anecdotal gut feeling than anything backed up by statistics. But as I look at what my Fitbit Flex reported about the quality of my four night’s sleep during San Diego Comic-Con (which for some reason is reflecting East Coast time, rather than West Coast time), all I could think was, man, you do get lousy sleep at cons.

Of course, my sleep in San Diego may have been poorer than usual, since I was trying to work, work, work as many waking moments as I could, on one day pounding away at my laptop nearly every waking moment from 6:00 a.m. until 10:45 p.m.

Whatever the reason, it’s good to be back in my own bed. Because another day of Comic-Con might have killed me. And you wouldn’t want that, would you?