As news of Anne McCaffrey’s death at 85 started coming out this afternoon and bouncing around Facebook and Twitter, most commented on her work, on the words on the page, but what first popped into my mind, even though, yes, the stories were wonderful, was instead a moment at the 2005 Nebula Awards weekend in Chicago.

Because of the ocean that stretched between us during our fannish and professional lives, even though I’ve attended hundreds of conventions over the years, I only got to chat with Anne McCaffrey a handful of times. But among those times were some of my favorite con experiences.

One took place that Chicago weekend, which included a moment with me, Anne, and Joe Haldeman that was captured below.

She’d been named a SFWA Grand Master that weekend, and was in high spirits. Even though I’m no longer sure exactly what led up to me and Joe each giving her a smooch, I do very much recall her smiling, laughing, joyful.

Another encounter I remember fondly took place back in 1994 when I was editing Science Fiction Age and had been contacted by the Make-A-Wish Foundation to help a young boy’s dream come true. He wanted to meet his science fiction idols, chief among them Anne. I reached out to her, and even though she had many demands on her time that weekend, she spent a couple of hours with the boy answering his questions and giving him writing advice.

It’s times like those I choose to spend my time thinking about tonight. There’ll be plenty of time for mourning later.

It’s been far too long since I last gave you an opportunity to feel some healthy schadenfreude by letting you lord it over a magazine that’s no longer with us. So here’s a new installment in my series of rejection slips from dead magazines, focused on a title from an editor whose name has become somewhat infamous since this slip was sent to me twenty years ago.

Back in 1991, I sent off a story titled “Apartment 6-D” to The Quarterly, edited by Gordon Lish. (Yes, Gordon Lish.) I haven’t reread that story in years, but as I think back on it, it seems from this vantage point that Lish was entirely right to reject it, showing far better judgment than the editor who eventually published it.

At the time, I was unaware (we were all unaware) of Lish’s heavy-handed editing of the early works of Raymond Carver. Now that the details are out, I’m no longer quite the fan I once was.

This remains, however, a masterful rejection slip.

I’ve been working so hard all week (and this weekend, too) that I’ve been forced into silence here since Saturday. But since three things equal a post, how about we let these pics stand in for my week?

First, a lovely pic Irene snapped of me with Geoff Landis and Mary Turzillo at my favorite local dim sum restaurant, New Fortune. While on their way to Maryland for a scientific conference, Geoff and Mary swung through West Virginia Saturday night and had dinner at the Edelman-Vartanoff homestead, followed the next day by shumai over in Maryland, which Irene and I ran over to share.

It was good to play catch-up outside of the madness of a convention.

Next up, a pic of that shows old Marvel pal Bill Mantlo, whose medical woes were recently reported on at length, in far happier times. I published it in the December 1974 issue of Marvel’s official fan magazine, FOOM. It was part of a strange idea I had of running baby pictures of artists and writers, and while everyone else turned in the real thing, Bill came up with this.

And that’s how I’d rather remember him. (more…)

October was a rather light month in terms of my dream life—or should I say, my remembered dream life—because I’ve always understood that we all have dreams whether we remember them or not. In any case, three consecutive weekends of travel—Capclave, followed by a trip with Irene to her NJ Romance Writers Convention, after which I headed to San Diego for World Fantasy Con—meant there were an awful lot of mornings during which, when I’d wake, I could feel the dreams slip away.

Here’s what remained.

Special guests this month include Martin Scorsese, Rick Grimes, Andy Rooney, Sean McNamara, Paul Di Filippo—and maybe you.

October 2011 Dream Tweets

I dreamt I lived in the rental apartment at which our landlord insisted we no longer use our lawnmower on the carpets. So I broke the lease. 31 Oct

I dreamt Cap’n Crunch fell from a great height, and I stood over his lifeless form crying for him to get up. But the Cap’n was dead. 29 Oct

I dreamt I attended a wedding ceremony performed entirely in Hebrew, understood nothing, and felt like a bad Jew. Well, until the food came. 28 Oct

I dreamt The Office’s Dwight Schrute gave me relationship advice on how best to get along with Irene, and I was wise enough to ignore it. 28 Oct

I dreamt I was hanging around a humongous BBQ grill with The Walking Dead’s Rick Grimes and chatting about how life used to be. 28 Oct

I dreamt I returned from a visit to an alternate universe and was desperately trying to blow up the portal before anyone could follow me. 26 Oct

I dreamt that during a banquet at Irene’s romance writer conference I tried to help our waitress clear the table and only made things worse. 25 Oct

I dreamt I messed up telling Richard Lupoff how much I looked forward to his new novel by misdescribing the ending of his previous book. 25 Oct

I dreamt my son wouldn’t move to a rural area because it would be difficult without a car to carry soda. I said I’d ship him all he needed. 25 Oct

I dreamt I read a letter in the local paper from a woman advocating a ban on synagogues. Irene told me it’d never pass, but I still worried. 25 Oct (more…)

I’ve never thought of myself as an oblivious kind of guy, but I guess I must be, as the following anecdote will prove …

I was traveling home from last weekend’s World Fantasy Convention, and as I passed through the San Diego International Airport skybridge that connects the rental car shuttle drop-off island and the terminals, I noticed a life-sized Steve Canyon (alongside other cartoon characters) decal on the glass. Nearby was a stand stuffed with double-sided cards promoting an ongoing exhibit of cartoonists celebrating flight. I picked up one of the cards you see below, and then, since I was a couple of hours early for my flight, tried to track the thing down.

So I went to an information booth and asked where I could find the exhibit referred to on the card and advertised on the decals. Clueless volunteers sent me from one terminal to another in search of an alcove where the exhibit was purported to be, until someone finally figured out that those initial decals I saw weren’t an ad—they WERE the exhibit.

For those who won’t be passing through the San Diego Airport, here’s how the six panels looked from ground level.

You can find photos of the individual panels—featuring Canyon, Snoopy as the Red Baron, Comic-Con cofounder Shel Dorf, and more—over on Flickr.

So where does my obliviousness come in? Evidently, the passageway was decorated like that prior to Comic-Con, and so I would have passed by it back in July both coming and going … and never noticed it!

It’s hump day (though can it ever truly be considered hump day when you work seven days a week?), which means that Sunday in San Diego seems very far away. And yet I don’t want to leave you hanging as to the end of World Fantasy Con.

I didn’t have much of a Sunday morning. With the pre-banquet cocktail party beginning at noon, and me having both stayed up and slept late the night before, there was neither point nor time to have a full breakfast. So I grabbed some nibbles in the con suite (which I’ll say again, was well-stocked and well-run), sold a few more copies of What Will Come After out front of the dealers room to some attendees who’d let me know in advance that they’d wanted them, did some minimal schmoozing, and then headed back to my room to get suited up.

While hanging out at the bar, I was stunned to discover when the ballroom doors opened that the best table in the house, directly in front of the podium, hadn’t been reserved for a publisher, and was therefore free for unaffiliated attendees like me to grab. Which I did, resulting in a good angle for me to record the entire proceedings, which you can see below.

Also at my table were Karen and Charlie Newton, Mark Kelly, Terry Weyna, and a few others I was meeting for the first time, and whose names unfortunately didn’t stick. If one of those names happens to be yours, feel free to slap me around the next time you see me. (more…)

I woke Saturday morning at World Fantasy to a city in which I’d already eaten at every Man v. Food restaurant. What to do? Luckily, the locals had all raved about a place called Hash House a Go Go, which supposedly prepared amazing breakfasts—well, amazing everything—so that’s where I headed to start the day with Bill Shunn, Laura Chavoen, and Eileen Gunn.

But everything good comes with a price—and the price was that there was a 90-minute wait before we could be seated. Since it sounded like the food would be worth it, Bill and Laura were up for it. But Eileen had to be back by 12:30. So I returned her to the hotel (which apparently had a major problem I didn’t hear about until today) and got back to the restaurant with plenty of time still remaining to chat with Bill and Laura in the warm California sun while trying not to feel too guilty that my wife was back in the West Virginia snow.

I ordered the pancake of the day—banana coconut—which surprised me by coming with a few pecans, too. It also surprised by BEING THE SIZE OF A HUBCAP!

I assure you that I did NOT eat the entire thing. I was thinking of taking it back to the con suite, but pancakes do not travel well, and besides, we wanted to have a postprandial walk around the neighborhood, and so didn’t box up any leftovers. It was a good thing we took that walk, too, because it allowed Laura to see her first Bird of Paradise in the wild. (more…)

Back in August, I announced a competition inviting people to create movies of at least three minutes in length from any section of my Shakespearean zombie play “A Plague on Both Your Houses.” The clip could be in any style—live action, claymation, puppets, whatever. The winner of the Blow the Top of Scott Edelman’s Head Off Really Cool Zombie Filmmaking Competition would get $200, plus a signed hardcover copy of my zombie collection What Will Come After.

I’d planned to announce the winner during the World Fantasy Convention, but the all day/all night schmoozing took so much out of me that I didn’t have the brain left to draft this announcement. Now that I’ve recovered (sort of), I’m pleased to share the news that the winning entry was submitted by Drake Tucker of Phase2Films.

That entry, embedded below, was far more ambitious than I expected. Tucker and gang chose to film a populous and complex scene—the masked ball at which Carlo, the living son of the Mayor of New York City, first meets Dolores, the daughter of the King of the Zombies. The submitted piece has a post-apocalyptic Road Warrior vibe to it, yet also made me laugh in places. Plus I loved the choice of how they conveyed Dolores’ undead manner of speaking.

My hat—or should I say, the top of my head—is off to you! Congrats!

The latest Back Issue magazine takes a look at DC’s anthology horror comics, with a special focus on horror hosts. Since I wrote the fifth issue of Doorway to Nightmare, the magazine not only features my rather scattered memories (hey, I wrote the thing more than thirty years ago!) of Madame Xanadu, but also a pic of me holding the original cover art during San Diego Comic-Con just last year.

You can order the latest Back Issue and discover what I and all the other ancient comics mavens had to say right here.

I started off my second day at the World Fantasy Convention with my second visit to a San Diego Man v. Food restaurant. Karen and Charlie Newton joined me at the Broken Yolk Cafe, where Adam Richman attempted the Iron Man Challenge.

What’s the Iron Man Challenge? Read it off the menu and weep.

There was no way I was going to attempt this (or any other) Man v. Food challenge, though I do sometimes order the meal in question just to see what it looks like in 3-D under my nose, and return with the uneaten portion and give it away in the con suite to a hungry fan. But since I didn’t think an omelet was likely to travel well, I went with the blueberry pancakes instead.

Back at the con, I found I very rarely ended up where I intended to go. I kept bumping into friends, getting swept up in their magnetic fields, and not making it to readings or panels I’d originally planned. I had a nice chat with Pat Murphy and Eileen Gunn about Joanna Russ and other things out in the warm San Diego sun, bumped into my old Marvel boss Len Wein, and more. I chose people over programming. The only official event I ended up at was Kathleen Ann Goonan’s 4:30 p.m. reading, which you can of course catch right here.

(more…)