The 2008 Nebula Awards weekend began for me in Baltimore rather than Austin, because I ran into Peter Heck and Jane Jewell at BWI. We were all taking the same Southwest flight, and since that airline has no assigned seating, we were able to commandeer a row and entertain each other along the way, sometimes by chatting, but mostly by snoring, since we’d all had to get up around 4:00 in the morning to make our unexpectedly shared flight.

We also shared a cab to the Omni Austin Downtown, and we arrived there ravenous. We took the concierge’s recommendation for a good Tex-Mex restaurant, the Iron Cactus. Since I don’t drink, I wasn’t able to appreciate the range of tequilas they had—almost 100 different varieties—but the red snapper was worth the walk.

Since the opening events for the weekend wouldn’t start until later in the day, I decided to spend the afternoon wandering Austin, something I hadn’t managed to do at all when I was here for the 2006 World Fantasy Convention. My first stop—the O. Henry Museum.

O. Henry lived in Austin for 16 years, and in this house from 1893 to 1898. Austin was where he became known for his embezzlement rather than for his writing, and was sentenced to five years in a federal prison. Which basically means that this was the place where he decided that since he was unlikely to ever get rehired at a bank, he’d might as well head off and give writing his all. (more…)

Back at the 1999 Philcon, Paul Levinson, who was then the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, approached me and asked if I would act as Toastmaster for the following year’s Nebula Awards ceremony in New York. Ham that I am, I immediately accepted. The video below, the first of five clips available from that night, shows how I repaid Paul for that honor.

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