World Fantasy 2009, Part 2
As I mentioned in the first WFC post, one of the best things about the convention is meeting virtual friends and coworkers in person, often for the first time. Sometimes when you don’t even expect it.
Back in 2004, I started a small blog on a site called Journalscape. It started mostly a platform for me to rant about the 2004 US presidential election, but eventually it moved on to other things, and it became a place for me to chronicle the joys and struggles of my life, talking about things I loved, my efforts to deal with my chronic nerve pain, and of course my aspirations to one day become a published author.
Journalscape was a great community of very supportive people. We all read each others’ blogs and commented on them at random, and slowly, some of us became close friends in our own right, though we never actually met. I wrote in February about how excited I was to finally meet Lo at NY ComicCon. I thanked Netta for being a beta reader of The Painted Man on the acknowledgment page. But there are still others out there, like Maggie, the Electric Grandmother, or the young woman known only as Make Some Pasta. Etc.
So I’m at this party at WFC on Friday night, and we’re hanging out at the Eraserhead Press party, where they were serving their own self-brewed specialty beers, in custom bottles with their book covers on them. It was an impressive effort, and I liked the dark beer.
The party was pretty crowded and it was really late, plus I’d had more than a few Guinness over the course of the day. My eyes were a little blurry, but across the room I saw someone that I was sure I recognized… but I had no idea from where. Did I know her? Was she famous? An old co-worker? As I pondered, she wandered through the room and headed towards the bathroom, where all the beers were in an ice-filled tub as an attendant handed them out.
Suddenly it hit me, that’s Maggie. I saw her picture once when she friended me on facebook. I remembered she had recently moved to CA, and how she too had been an aspiring SF writer. I put a hand on her shoulder. When she turned, I said, “I’m sorry, but I think we might know each…”
That was all I got out before her eyes widened. “Peat?!” she gasped, and swept me into a hug.
I guess she remembered me, too. It was really amazing to see her, and to have time to relax with some drinks and just hang out. We’d never laid eyes on each other before, but immediately we were talking like old friends.
Reading this entry was like watching a good movie: it made me sniffle and then made me laugh, all resulting in happy contentment.
🙂
<3 the JS family forever
Ha great that you met some of your fans in person. I am going on holiday to New York this Jan was planning to do something like that. (Not actually out right stalking just if I saw you, yes I know New York is a big place.)
And now I am confused can your blog handle Youtube Vids or not??
Dwayne, my blog can handle YouTube just fine. The problem is that a lot of readers have not updated their browsers, and some of those, like the dreaded Internet Explorer 6, crash when I embed video.
I try to be accommodating about it, but embedding video is so cool it’s hard to resist sometimes.