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.

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I know I worried in my previous post that I’d used up all the serendipity I was allowed for 2011 last Saturday, but it seems I had a little more left Thursday morning, because as I waited for my 8:20 a.m. United flight out of Dulles, who should appear at the gate but Daryl Gregory. Unlike the old days when I could hang out in the aisle and have conversations with friends in different parts of the plane other than in my own seat, we couldn’t talk our way to San Diego, but it still made it feel as if the con had started on the East Coast rather than the West.

The oddest thing about arriving in San Diego is that except for a brief visit back in 1984, every trip I’ve taken there has been during Comic-Con, when the city has been packed with con attendees, some more obvious than others. World Fantasy is small, and so doesn’t have that affect on the place. Who were all these normies I was surrounded by? Give me back my cosplayers!

I picked up my rental car and headed over to the WFC, where I grabbed lunch in the con suite, which so far has seemed both well stocked and well run. Then a quick tour of the dealers room, a blur of schmoozing, and it was off to the opening ceremonies, which if you missed, you can watch below. (more…)

Saturday’s run into Manhattan from New Jersey—where Irene was attending the annual NJ Romance Writers conference—began with everything going my way. When I hit the lobby, the hotel shuttle was waiting with an open door about to head to NJ Transit, and when we got to the Metropark station, the next train to New York (they were running every 30 minutes) arrived almost immediately. But that wasn’t all the serendipity Saturday had in store for me.

When I stepped up from my track in NY and into Penn Station, a voice called out behind me, “Scott! Scott!” It was Chris Kalb, the art director who’d made Sci-Fi Entertainment and then SCI FI magazine look so pretty during the eight years I edited it for Syfy. We’d had no plans to meet that day. He just happened to miss his train out of NY to an old-time radio convention in New Jersey, and if he’d made it, he’d have been gone before I arrived. We chatted until his next train, talking about (among other things) old pulps and the editing of James Schmitz reissues (which was discussed on a World Fantasy panel of mine, “The Moral Distance Between the Author and the Work,” last year—check out this video starting at 11:52).

You’d think that was all the serendipity I deserved in a single day, But no, there was to be more. A lot more. (more…)

I’ll be heading off to Dulles in about 20 hours to fly to San Diego for World Fantasy Con, and I realize I haven’t yet told you where you’ll be able to find me. (Well, aside from all those Man v. Food restaurants, anyway.) So here’s my official schedule.

You’ll note I only have one panel. That’s because WFC has the highest ratio of writers, editors, artists, and critics of any convention, and so unless you’re one of the Guests of Honor, you only get one slot—you’re allowed to choose a panel or a reading, but not both.

Here’s what I’ve been assigned:

Metafiction
Saturday, October 29, 10:00 p.m., Pacific 2/3
Taking literature to the next level, metafiction exposes the fictional illusion and openly addresses the devices of fiction. It takes many forms: stories within stories, footnotes that continue the story, characters aware that they are characters, and authors commenting on and even entering their own stories. Going back at least as far at the Canterbury Tales, these devices are particularly popular of late. What do they add to the reading (and writing) experience? Is the trend just self-indulgence?
with Victoria Schwab, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Rick Wilber (moderator)

Unofficially, of course, you’ll find me many other places, such as listening to Nalo Hopkinson, Robert Shearman, Eileen Gunn and others read, and the panels on “How to Survive the Coming Zombie War” (how could I not?) and “Founders of Steampunk,” and the conversation between Neil Gaiman and Connie Willis …

… and then there’s the bar.

See you there!

When I dashed early Friday morning from the Renaissance Woodbridge where Irene was attending the annual conference of the New Jersey Romance Writers and headed for the Metropark New Jersey Transit station, what was uppermost in my mind wasn’t how much fun I’d have catching up with friends, or the restaurants I’d hit, or the sights I’d see while wandering Manhattan. No, what I couldn’t stop thinking about was a mission I had to complete, a mission the details of which I dared not share until it was completed.

What can I say? I guess I was being superstitious about the task and didn’t want to jinx it.

Many of you thought, when I hinted at my mysterious goal for the day on Twitter and Facebook, that I was in town to interview for a new job or freelance gig, but it wasn’t anything like that. Instead, one of the things I needed to do while I was in town was deliver the package in the photo below, and until I put it in the hands of its intended recipient, I was going to be extremely nervous.

Any guesses, before you look below and see the contents revealed, what was inside? (Those of you who were following along at the time are, of course, exempt.)

But before I could be relieved of my burden, I had a brunch date with my boss Craig Engler at (where else?) Shopsins, which has my favorite restaurant menu ever. After walking down from Penn Station to the Essex Street Market to meet him at around 10:15, I had a Happy Breakfast Tray made up of bread pudding French toast, raspberry pancakes, and cheddar corn cakes. Everything was, of course, excellent. As far as I’m concerned, a visit to New York isn’t a visit to New York without a visit to Shopsins. (more…)

As Irene and I have done for quite a few years, we used her attendance at the New Jersey Romance Writers annual conference to swoop down on Marie Severin, the nicest lady in comics, with whom we worked at Marvel during the ’70s.

She was back then, and continues to be now, a hoot.

We swung by Thursday and took her out for Italian, plying her with wine and swapping stories of the old days. As usual, we filled her in on news of all our old friends (and all our old non-friends, too).

She asked after Stan Lee, and was tickled to hear he now had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We tried to figure out who the oldest surviving comics creator was, and thought that it had to be Joe Simon, who just turned 98. (You’ll tell me if I’m wrong, right?) We got her talking about the old EC days, which I don’t think we’d ever done before, and she told us what a good boss Bill Gaines had been to her.

But in addition to the comics gossip—unavoidable when we get together—we of course caught up on life in general, with much laughter. (There’s GOT to be laughter when you’re around Mirthful Marie.)

And here’s the lady herself, looking 82 years young.

We’ll continue talking by phone often, but I hope we won’t have to wait until next November to see her again in the flesh.

We love you, Marie!