To Boskone I did go…

Arrived Friday afternoon and managed to get myself checked in and settled just in time to get in a first pass at Larry’s table in the Dealer’s Room before I had to run off to the first client meeting. With those Liaden folks. *g* We had a very intent discussion for the first bit and then started rambling about other possible projects. Interupted briefly by a visit from Charlie Stross (which I welcomed as I’d met him only briefly at Torcon and this was a chance to get reintroduced without a crowd). Overall – I think the meeting went well, though, of course, I’m anticipating lots more work now. *g* After grabbing some dinner with mcurry at Dick’s Last Resort (very noisy, but fun), we scampered off to Pictionary (where suricattus and her team were beating the pants off their competition). Eventually, we wound up at the Art Show Reception. A crush as always — and with Del Rey giving away a few free books (I copped a copy of Elizabeth Moon’s Speed of Dark) which were on a table right by the food, the obstacles were entertaining at the very least. And I spotted something I simply had to own (though I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to get it home since I’d parked outside the city at a T station) — a Cthulhu clock. Hopefully, I’ll have a picture to share at some point, because I did indeed bid and win on Sunday.

I never seem to sleep well my first night in a hotel, so Saturday started off in a somewhat blurry place. Caffeine in the form of cappucino and a rather overly indulgent chocolate chunk muffin helped – at least I paid attention somewhat during the utterly fascinating “Editoral Eye” panel.* I think I was coherent enough by the time I met suricattus for lunch at The Cheesecake Factory. Much gossip ensued. Oh, and some business too (as she’s got several ideas/projects in the works). I had the yummiest dish: Crispy Spicy Beef and then we split a piece of Southern Pecan Cheesecake. This was followed by a mad dash up to the bar for my next client meeting (for a small con there were certainly a lot of them present it seemed). More work was created for me. Heh. Payments to follow up on. New projects on the horizon. Discussion over the potential messes that can come out of collaboration. Afterwards, I did a bit of dashing around in an attempt to find a place that would take 10 adults and 2 children at a less than two hour notice on Valentine’s Day. I knew it wasn’t going to work, but I hadn’t expected the restaurant that the gang used last year to go out of business at 3pm on Friday afternoon. I’d even made the reservation several days early. *sigh* Eventually, we ended up with take out in ahf and caulay‘s suite (lucky bastards got their room messed up and ended up on the executive level). It was still fun, even if not quite what we had planned and afforded me the opportunity to actually chat a bit with tryslora whom I barely get to see much during cons anymore since she works the SMOF angle and I work the publishing angle. Post-dinner, I was off to where? — you guessed it, the bar for a client meeting. This was the last one of the con, so I think I was starting to come down off my agent-high a little. Very involved discussion with a client who has done gangbusters in short stories but keeps getting stuck on the novel-length end of things. I’m hoping to see a new project get finished sometime this year. After this it was off for some rather disappointing party crawling. Disappointing because we only found two – the Columbus Worldcon bid (where we didn’t stay) and the exclusive Frank Wu invite-only shindig (where I won a small press tshirt of some sort). So, um….back to the bar (sensing a theme?) where I did partake of a very nice bit o’ Scotch and hang out with various people before calling myself done.

Luckily, with the clients all taken care of, Sunday was more for myself. I could guard my precious Cthulhu clock in the artshow (and later figure out how to pack it and get in on the T). I took the best god-daughter ever shopping for her (slightly late) birthday present. After hitting several kiosks in the mall, she chose a cute necklace with a star charm that sported several different colored pieces of glass in it. She was much chuffed that one of them was pink and she got me to buy it for her anyway. Runner up gifts included one of those Russian dolls with increasingly smaller dolls inside (and naturally she had to take it all apart and drop the smallest one so that it rolled under the kiosk) and her very own set of fancy chopsticks (she’s inordinately proud of herself for learing to use those lately apparently – can’t really blame her – she’s only 6 years old). If you want to see a picture of my precious devil that looks like an angel, hit tryslora‘s journal and look for the icon with the two children in it. Cashing out at Larry’s table took much less time than expected since we’d visited him quite a bit during World Fantasy back in November. But I managed to pick up a few things of interest including the new edition of Peter Pan illustrated by Charles Vess, Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder and Kelley Eskridge’s Solitaire — not that I needed more books to add to my to-be-read pile. mcurry and I grabbed dinner on the way home, and that was that.

Now it’s back to work and trying not to think about how soon the next conference is…and trying to forget how much they wear me out because it means not getting a day off before hitting the paperwork again. *wry smile*

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*re: the “Editoral Eye” panel — the gist of it left me with two questions that I never got to ask as I tend to feel that those in the audience who aren’t agents should be able to get in theirs as I’ll always have more opportunity. One of them arose from a comment made (by Ginjer Buchanan, I think) that once a publisher gets pegged for a niche, they tend to try and capitalize on it. True, but the other side of that coin is that you then can get rejections which state they already have enough vampire books, and aren’t taking anymore. Or something along those lines. Oh — and the second question I considered throwing into the mix had to do with how much of the shaping of a line occurs pre-acquire and how much of it occurs in editorial revision. I never asked either one but both are food for thought.