Irene and I will be heading off shortly to celebrate our 35th anniversary—which is officially the day after tomorrow—in the same location we spent our honeymoon in 1976. We’ll even be staying in the same hotel!

Where are we going? For now, my only answer will be to share these photos from that long-ago honeymoon.

Some of you will immediately be able to ID the background and guess where we’re going. As for the rest of you, you’ll just have to wait until tomorrow morning for some honeymoon pics which will DEFINITELY give it all away.

Irene and I will celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary the day after tomorrow after tomorrow, on September 4th. Here’s a photo from the day before yesterday before yesterday before a whole lot of other yesterdays, taken early on during our courtship.

Two questions.

Does anybody still use the word “courtship” anymore?

And—how is it that I’ve gotten older and she hasn’t changed a bit?

Sunday, September 4th, will be our 35th wedding anniversary, which Irene and I will celebrate at an undisclosed (for now) location. As you might expect, that’s made us a wee bit nostalgic, and sent us back to our photo albums to look at how all began.

So here are a couple of pics from when we were but tadpoles, back in the mid-’70s when we both worked in the Marvel Comics Bullpen and would have first met.

Can you believe that cutie ever took a second look at that doofus?

If you weren’t in Reno for Renovation, the 69th World Science Fiction Convention, you missed my reading of a new short story. Heck, even if you WERE in Reno for Renovation, you STILL probably missed it, because it was scheduled for the afternoon of Sunday, August 21, when many attendees were already packing up and getting ready to leave.

Whichever of those categories you might happen to fall under, I’ve got your solution right here.

Thanks to the video below, you can see me read my as-yet-unpublished short story “In a Strange City Lying Alone,” which is due to come out on 9/11/11 in the anthology Why New Yorkers Smoke from Nonstop Press.

The anthology is edited by Luis Ortiz, and contains short stories from Carol Emshwiller, Barry Malzberg, Paul Di Filippo, and a bunch of other writers before whose talent I fall back in awe.

Hope you enjoy it!

I shared my favorite Worldcon moments the other day, but I know what you foodies out there really wanted to hear about was which casino in Reno made the best Awful Awful.

What’s an Awful Awful? A humongous burger that’s been made by two competing casinos in Reno since back before the Big Mac existed.

As those of you who attend conventions with me know, I get most of my food tips from the TV show Man v. Food, but since Adam Richman has yet to hit Reno, I had to instead base my excursions out of the convention center on the show Food Wars. Here’s the recent episode of that latter show that alerted me to the existence of these legendary burgers.

Before I get into the burgers themselves, check out how the two joints tout them with posters inside their casinos. On the left, The Little Nugget, and on the right, John Ascuaga’s Nugget.

But posters are one thing. Let’s see what the real thing looks like. (more…)

If you’ve been wanting to read a new story of mine, but skipped my last four stories because, oh, I don’t know, you HATE zombies, it’s time for you to head over to Daily Science Fiction and read my fantasy, “How Amraphel, the Assistant to Dream, Became a Thief, Lost His Job, and Found His Way.”

It’s been live over there since last Friday, August 19, but I was too busy living Worldcon and then recovering from it to let you know that here. (See why Twitter is so valuable? You’d have learned about it immediately!)

Amazingly, this is my first publication in an online magazine. Which might also mean—since you can read it right now for free—that it could also be my most widely-read story to date.

So why not read it right now?

I arrived home from the Reno Worldcon late Monday night, and as you can tell by the absence of recent posts, I failed to live up to Edelman’s Schadenfreude Rule of Convention Reporting, which states that all blogging must occur while a con is still in progress, so you can see what you’re missing while it’s still going on. If you were following me on Twitter or Facebook, you got a taste of the action, but I was just having too much fun to pause to tell you about it here until my return.

Well, now I’m back, and it appears I still don’t (and won’t) have time for a lengthy con report, so these few highlights will have to stand in for the long weekend. Here are my 12 favorite Worldcon moments:

Singing along with Dr. Demento

I started listening to Dr. Demento’s warped radio show in the early ’80s, which is how I first learned about everything from “Fish Heads” to Weird Al. So I made sure to catch the opening night presentation of some of his most-requested songs, which he shared via audio and video clips. He also sang “Shaving Cream” live while hundreds of us in the audience sang along to the chorus, which, you’ll forgive me, had me a little giddy.

Never heard of “Shaving Cream”? Here’s Benny Bell’s original version of it from 1946. Now imagine 500-800 fen (I’m no good at counting crowds) singing along. If you weren’t there, you missed a good time.

Dinner with John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow

After yucking it up with Dr. Demento, I headed off with John and Cory for dinner at the Atlantis Steakhouse, where we dined on aged beef, had a great conversation, and realized that Renovation was the second consecutive Worldcon to be held in a city with legalized brothels. (What’s that? You don’t remember prostitution being legal in Melbourne. Well, it was.)

By the way, we only discussed this hypothetically. No. Really. I mean it. (more…)

Trying to stay as clutter-free as I can, I picked up a stack of back issues of Brooklyn Magazine, and put them to the “How many of these things do I really need?” test.

First off, let me explain that I mean the Brooklyn Magazine which started publishing in 1978, and as far as I know ended in 1979, not the Brooklyn Magazine that’s currently alive and publishing.

As you can see from the first cover of the earlier Brooklyn Magazine and the most current cover I could find for the more recent incarnation, the new publication is a far classier production than we were ever able to put out.

Saying “we” implies I had a lot to do with the mag, but I didn’t. I wrote a book review for each issue, and did an interview with Fred Pohl, since The Way the Future Was was, after all, about growing up in Brooklyn. But other than that, all I ever had to do with the publishing of the magazine was when I’d pop in to say hello while walking from my apartment off Dahill Road in Bensonhurst to my favorite Chinese restaurant on 65th Street, which is how I discovered the magazine existed in the first place.

Yes, that’s right—as I walked from my apartment to pick up Chinese food one day, I noticed a storefront with the Brooklyn Magazine logo, went in and introduced myself to the editor before the first issue was published, and convinced him that he really needed my book reviews to be a part of it all. (more…)

I just woke from a bad dream about John Kessel, and now I can’t get back to sleep.

I was at a Nebula Awards ceremony, seated one table away from John. He was called upon to say a few words about science fiction poetry (and thinking about it now, I have no idea why, since there are so many other topics in which he’s more of an expert), but instead of rising and walking to the podium, he just sat there, mumbled a word or two, and fell silent. Maybe he’s forgotten his speech, I thought, and so with one of my feet, I slid over a copy of a recent volume of the Nebula Awards anthology which I just happened to have at the banquet and which just happened to have an essay of his in it. I figured it might remind him of what he wanted to say. But though I pushed the book at him, bumping it into one of his feet, he didn’t respond, and his chin dropped to his chest, and I got worried.

As the silence grew, and no one did anything, I got up and knelt by John, calling his name. He didn’t respond, and so I pressed my fingers against his throat, searching for a pulse. I waited, unsure whether I could feel anything. First I thought there was a pulse, then I thought there wasn’t. But in either case, since he wasn’t telling me to get my hand off his throat, I knew something was very wrong.

Strangely, no one else had yet taken any action (they all just sat there!), and I pulled John to the floor, stretched him out, and called for someone to get a doctor. I shouted John’s name over and over, thinking that I’d better start CPR, since no one else seemed to be doing anything. I kept shouting his name as I woke, and found myself in bed, thankful it was only a dream.

And then I lay there, thinking … even though it’s 4:45 a.m., and I need lots more sleep for the day to come, there’s no way I’m getting it now.

Until I thought … maybe if I wrote about the dream and shared it with you, my mood might pass, and I could fall back to sleep.

So that’s what I’m trying. I’ll let you know later if it works.

Meanwhile, I hope John’s okay. And I’m sure glad I don’t believe in omens.

I didn’t get to go to the first Worldcon I’d hoped I would. That’s because the first Worldcon I wanted to attend was Dallas in ’73 and the 1973 Worldcon was instead held in Toronto. Which explains a lot. But not everything.

Come to think of it, I didn’t get to the first comic convention I wanted to either. That would have been the 1969 July 4th weekend con run by Phil Seuling at the Statler Hilton Hotel. But my parents didn’t think I was old enough to wander off to Manhattan on my own while they were at a bungalow colony out in the country. So I had to wait until ’70 for what was to be my first con of any kind.

When I got there, I looked something like in the photo below, which shows me a year later at Seuling’s ’71 con, snapped as I sat in the front row (as always), with Phil at the podium.

But back to my first (almost) Worldcon. I was a supporting member of Dallascon, and I’ve got the membership card to prove it, signed by Tom Reamy, chairman of the “Big D in ’73” bid. In addition to the neat card with that wonderful George Barr artwork, I also received copies of The Dallascon Bulletin, more magazine than progress report.

But the Dallas Worldcon bid collapsed, and since I wasn’t in the loop back then (I don’t think I was even aware yet that there was a loop), I have no idea why. (more…)