Catching up

I’m finally getting some momentum back up writing the adventure novel – gonna be tight hitting the deadline.

Still struggling to get myself to do things that give me real pleasure, one of the chief of which is writing, as opposed to stuff that just burns time. I mistrust pleasure; it’s a childhood thing. As for the appeal of things like joyless (or indeed aggravating) web surfing – which I’ve dubbed waiting to die activities – I now understand better thanks to an online article I read a couple of weeks ago. It’s the subject of my long-promised and long-deferred post. Which, clearly, is hereby further deferred.

Anyway, one form of pleasurable activity I don’t have too much trouble allowing msyelf, possibly because of the pressures implicit in my solitary lifestyle, is spending time with friends. Yesterday (Monday) John and Gail Miller had me over for a Labor Day barbecue.

As it always is at their place, the food and company were excellent. What surprised me was the number of people who turned up. When I arrived I found Jane Lindskold and Jim Moore, whom I hadn’t expected to see, as well as Kathy Hedges, Walter Jon Williams’ wife. (Walter himself called from Dragon*Con at one point; we all said hi.)

(In vaguely related news: Walter, dude, you got to do something about the picture on your Wikipedia page. It makes you look ten years older, sinister, and chronically alcoholic. On the plus side it does make you look vaguely distinguished, like a debauched Thirties film star. In the Fifties. Verbum sap, old chap.)

Anyway, a bunch of other cool people showed up. Ty Franck appeared, sadly minus Jayné, who was home being a diligent architecture student. Ty is a party’s worth of entertainment by himself. Chip Wideman – creator of such abidingly popular Wild Cards characters as Toad Man and the Lama (not to be confused with the Llama.) Then George RR Martin, creator of Wild Cards (he had help, granted), as well as some other stuff I misremember, along with Parris McBride. Who’s also created Wild Cards characters. Finally, Melinda Snodgrass arrived. So we basically had the core of the original New Mexico Wild Cards Mafia on hand.

Most of these people – okay, all – I hadn’t seen since, oh, last week at Bubonicon. But thanks to the exigencies of con-going I hadn’t had a chance to talk to most of them there. So we talked a lot and ate too much.

I stayed after everybody else left and watched Transporter 2 with John and Gail. I’d seen it before and actually enjoyed it better this time. I realized that the way to approach the film was to accept that Jason Statham’s character is a superhero whose power is wizard driving. Makes it all fine.

And a very fine time was had.