Con is short for convention, but it can also be short for conversation, for that’s what conventions are—one long flowing conversation as I bounce from one attendee to another. (The bouncing is purely metaphorical, I assure you, though if things get too tense with the nominees competing for the Stoker in my category, you never know what might happen.) When I think of Friday at the 2008 World Horror Con, that’s what I remember, endless conversations with friends old and new.

Discussing professional wrestling with Dennis Etchison, the pros and cons (there’s yet a third con!) of writing collaborations with Wilum Pugmire (with whom I sat at the mass autographing session, as you can see at right), the many forgotten 1980s’ small-press horror magazines with Gary Braunbeck, what a nice guy Pete Crowther is with Roy Robbins, the slowness of some publishers to bring out their promised books with GAK, hot new writers such as Paolo Bacigalupi and Benjamin Rosenbaum with Jeremy Lassen, revenge as a means of literary inspiration with Gene O’Neill, the magic of Italo Calvino and Julio Cortázar with Maria Alexander, methods of dealing with rejection with Whitney Lakin, pissing off editors with Adam Niswander, the changing face of the San Diego ComicCon with Eunice Magill, his upcoming first novel The Jigsaw Man with Gord Rollo, suicidal authors with Norm Prentiss, and many dozens of other conversations that swirl in my memory.

And then there’s also the chance to pull out and dust off old stories to tell all over again, as when I shared with Ann Laymon and others over dinner how I’d once chased a pickpocket through the New York City subway system only to end up having to go to the hospital, and when I told Beth Gwinn and Ed Bryant about my private tours of the Manhattan morgue given by then Chief Medical Examiner Michael Baden. So far I’ve managed to avoid telling my flying cow story, but we’re only halfway through the convention, so who knows what’s still to come?

Convention throat—always a danger when I just won’t shut up for days at a time—is starting to set in, and I’m scheduled to do a reading in a just a few hours. I’d better keep my mouth shut for awhile so I don’t sound like a cross between Broderick Crawford and Harvey Fierstein!