Capclave for its opening night next weekend, since I’ll be heading off to Manhattan the next morning to attend a memorial for Tom Disch.

But if you’re in Rockville, Maryland, on Friday the 17th, this is where you’ll be able to find me pontificating:

5:00pm: Eureka, Battlestars, and other new television

8:00pm: SF Generation gap
Writers used to believe that most of their audience had read the classics and so had a shared background and that understood Asimov’s robots, Wells’ time travel, Zelazny’s alternate universes etc. Does that common background still hold? And if so, from where—television? Movies? How do you write for audiences, some of whom understand the basic tropes, while others are new?

I hope to see some of you there!

That being said, I’m having trouble finding an affordable hotel room in New York for the night of the 18th. My usual haunts are all booked, and I can’t find anything else under $325 a night. Is that the going rate these days?

Does anyone know of anything less expensive out there, or do I just have to bite the bullet?

You may have turned 58 today, and have gone all Hollywood, writing scripts for such TV shows as Earth: Final Conflict, Mutant X, and Viper, but once upon a time you were a comic-book newcomer.

Back in 1972, when you were 21 and I was 17, we huddled in a corner near the elevators on the 18th floor of the Statler Hilton Hotel at one of Phil Seuling’s July 4th weekend comic-book conventions, and you drew this picture of your Iron-Wolf character in my sketchbook.

Well … at least I think it was 1972. It might have been as early as Phil’s 1971 con or as late as the 1973 one. But whichever it was, let this drawing be a reminder that tempus fugit … and also that my memory isn’t what it once was.

Here’s wishing you a birthday wish that the decades have left fewer holes in your memory.

As you can see by the photo below, I’ve decided to change my profession.

After all, there’s nothing like a captive audience, and I’m sure that you’ll be availing yourselves of my services eventually …

My high school friend turned bestselling author Donna Grant and her writing partner Virginia DeBerry have come up with a novel way to raise funds for Barack Obama, and I thought it was important to pass on their pitch while there’s still time for it to matter:

It’s no secret we are Obama women. We are committed to Barack Obama’s vision for America. We are committed to being a part of the process—or as we used to say ‘back in the day’ of protest marches and sit-ins—”If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

We had the amazing good fortune to meet Barack a year ago at the Barack on Broadway fundraiser in New York. Not just look at him from afar and cheer with the rest of the crowd—we actually had an up close, have a conversation meeting. OK, it wasn’t more than 5 minutes, but it was real. We were there! And although that encounter was brief, it left us even more convinced that he was the right person to lead our country in a new and brighter direction.

As part of that event, we had our picture taken with Barack, and we have proudly displayed it everywhere we could. We have seen many of you in person as we have toured with Gotta Keep on Tryin’ over the past year and have, without shame and with very little provocation, whipped out our cell phone copy of the photo. It’s on our MySpace and Facebook pages as well as our blog. Virginia’s mom carries her framed copy with her just in case someone hasn’t seen it yet.

We know that many of you are as committed as we are to electing Senator Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America. We wanted to find something concrete to do, and the one thing the campaign can use, in addition to our votes, is the money to continue both the grassroots and media outreach necessary to get people to the voting booths on November 4th, because that’s what really matters.

So in conjunction with Brett Deutsch, http://deutschphoto.com, the photographer who took the picture (and we fully admit right here that this was HIS idea) we have arranged to send you an 8X10 copy of the photo that has made our mamas proud, our photo with Barack Obama. It will be autographed by us—sorry, we don’t know Barack that well—yet. All for a campaign donation of $50.00.