So after getting up and doing some rewriting on the fantasy novel – some good comes of this! – I try going back to bed. No joy. Can’t get comfortable.

Happens sometimes. Been happening way too much of late.

I decide to try sleeping in the recliner in the living room for a while. For some reason, after I do that, I can usually go right to sleep in my bed.

And when I get up to move, what do I find but a dead mouse.

In my bed.

Right where I was lying.

*Urk*

So the bed’s been changed, the bedclothes are soaking forever in Clorox 2 and laundry detergent, I’ve had a weird-o’clock in the morning shower, my restful night’s sleep is completely shot in the ass, and the cats are in unprecedented disgrace.

I’m thinking of replacing them with Horrid Japanese Robot Pets.

Now I’m doing the only sensible thing: playing exceedingly violent video games and watching SportsCenter until I recover enough equanimity to get some damn sleep.

Tomorrow is going to be … trying. Stay tuned.

Bubonicon 42, 1st Panel. L to R: Steve Gould, some pensive guy, Walter Jon Williams, Ben Bova, John Maddox Roberts. Photo credit: ajhansen33

Everything seems to be going well.

The Fear the Future or whatever the hell it was panel (that’s me on it up above, right next to Steve Gould, who’s doubtless thrilled he appears to have been snapped while pulling his nose) went off fairly well and was well received. Opening Ceremonies was uneventful except that it seemed most of the listed attendees were “in the bar” (the traditional con euphemism for “missing”) – and there’s not even a bar this tear, thanks to the hotel renovation. Toastmaster Mario Acevedo made the best of it.

Haven’t got a chance to meet/talk to Author GoH Peter David yet. Artist GoH Sarah Clemens came up to me after OCs to mention we’d met years ago, and sung songs with the author formerly known as Nick Yermakov, who now seems to be known as Simon Hawke.

Since Sarah is very nice it’d be rude to point out how old that makes us both. Probably, she was like, three. I knew she was responsible for the famed St. Labia; I forgot she also did the madly popular Magnus and Loki paintings. So between excessively cute animals and hoohahs, she’s got two of my very favorite things covered.

I’ve seen way more friends, fans, artists, and pros than I can list. One AJ Hansen has been Tweeting the con, so for a running progress report, click the name. He Tweeted, “Cant wait to see Peter David. Also, looking forward to seeing Victor Milan.” For which thanks. Plus I reckon he did, since I cribbed the photo from him.

All this is Good News, and the con bids fair to be great this year. The not-so-good news: I was home by 9:20. And done.

The last several days I’ve been hit kinda hard by chest pains. Don’t panic, as the con’s subtitle has it. It’s a post-surgery thing, or more correctly, I suspect, post chest-drain thing (don’t ask.) My friend Jim Moore, who’s married to Jane Lindskold, suggested allergies. Which wasn’t as far-fetched as it initially sounded to me, since I have had a little nasal congestion the last day or two – and mainly, because it struck me allergens could cause inflammation and gripe the scar tissue. Sounds plausible, anyway.

So along with chest aches and pains, I also found myself weak and wiped. My stamina’s been a bit tricky; while I’m still not up to walking two miles daily, I do get it in (with Emma Dog, natch) most days. But sometimes it fades on me.

Today turned out to be one of those days. I couldn’t even stand for long periods without getting tired and needing to sit.

Again, this is nothing serious, far less life-threatening. It’s just something I have to deal with – and be grateful I’ve recovered so far that feeling like this is a rarity. Sadly, it is fun-threatening.

So I had to bail early, although admittedly the aforementioned Emma was happy to get her dinner earlier than she otherwise might’ve. Apologies to everybody. Especially my esteemed friends Melinda Snodgrass and Ian Tregillis (as well as Craig A. Butler and Peter David, whom I don’t yet know), who did a 9:30 PM panel on screenwriting I really wanted to catch. But mostly to my pal  Scott Phillips, to whom I wanted to show moral support. And also hoot if he lived up to his threat to pass out.

Tomorrow, I’m told, is another day. Even though when I’m there it always feels like today.

I hope this tomorrow doesn’t feel like today. Or that Tomorrow Me doesn’t feel like Today Me. Whatever.

I and everybody else do the Herd Mass Autographing Session tomorrow at 3 PM. After that, of course, comes the Costume Contest at 7:30 PM. If I were you, and you’re no doubt glad I’m not, I wouldn’t count on seeing me before the autograph deal.

Hope I feel better. Or at least more bloody energetic.

Thanks to everybody who turned out, and especially those who said hi. And Party On!

That’s good news. (Relax. There is no bad news. I told you not to panic.)

I’m really looking forward to the con this year. Don’t know why. I mean, I always enjoy it. But this year I expect it to be especially fun.

Maybe, given recent events, I just really need a con.

It starts tomorrow - Friday, August 27th, running through Sunday the 29th. The Author Guest of Honor this year is Peter David. Artist GoH is Sarah Clemens. Mario Acevedo is Toastmaster. The theme is Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. You probably worked that out for yourself.

It’s all happening at the Zoo at the Albuquerque Grand (Sheraton) Airport Hotel, 2910 Yale Blvd SE, Albuquerque, NM 87106. Guests include a wide range of out-of-state pros and fans, plus an array of the Usual NM Suspects. There’re too many to list here so I’ll list none; hit the link the con page to see who’s attending. We always get a boatload of cool people, and this year looks like no exception.

Not there, sadly, will be Debbie Lynn Smith and Connie Willis. Also George RR Martin and Parris will be absent, since they’ve already flown off to the land of Oz for Worldcon. We’ll have to do our best to have fun without them.

(Of course some of our folks are leaving more or less straightaway from Bubonicon to the same destination. We call them masochists. But it’s darned sporting of them to sacrifice their well-being and sanity so that we can have a good time!)

Since you’re no doubt throbbing with curiosity as to when, where, and how you can see me (yeah, right), for what I think’s the second year in the row I’m on the very first panel of Bubonicon: joy. It’s called The Future’s So Bright: Perils of the Near-Future Novel. Runs from 4:00-4:55 PM in the Main Room.

On Sunday (Sunday? Sunday!) from 12:15-1:10 PM I do King Arthur in Space: Long Live the King in the Valle Grande Room. Why, I don’t know. Especially at such an obscene hour of a Sunday. I mean, the sun’s barely up! Or at least I usually am.

In between, in snarling defiance of popular demand, I’ll be emceeing the Costume Contest on Saturday in the Main Room, from 7:30 PM to roughly whenever. It usually runs about half an hour.  Though Bubonicon’s a small convention – getting larger every year, though – we get a surprisingly high quality of entrants. So check it out.

And indeed, if you’re in Burque this weekend check out the con. It’s a good time.

And don’t forget your towel!

Then I let her watch -

Hit Girl ... does. So does KICK-ASS.

- Kick-Ass. What was I thinking?

Well, I was thinking Kick-Ass would be a good movie. I was wrong. It’s a great movie. I loved it. Possibly the best 2010 release I’ve seen. I liked it better than Salt, which I saw on my birthday (thanks, Larry!) and quite enjoyed. I think I liked it more than Iron Man 2. And that’s saying something, because I liked that one almost as much as I did the original Iron Man. Which may be an all-time favorite.

Kick-Ass abounds in wonderful moments, including one eye-popping bit of rumble business that caused my friend John Jos Miller to exclaim, “This movie gets another star just for that!” But my very favorite moment comes at the end, where Hit Girl – now just Mindy Macready, minus the purple wig and death-punk leathers – is about to start her first day of school. A pair of weedy white kids promptly jack her up for her lunch money. And she smiles a pixie smile, cracks her knuckles, and though she says nothing you can hear her thinking, “I’m gonna love it here!”

For some reason very few of my immediate circle of friends have seen this one. I hadn’t either. Everybody loved it at Saturday Movie Night. Check it out.

Back to Emma-centric news (I know who draws eyes to this blog), during  Movie Night Kathy Kelly-Kubica mentioned Emma was limping.  I wasn’t particularly concerned. Sometimes she lies funny and gets stiff or sore joints. I do too.

But she was still limping yesterday. Worse, she seemed to be favoring both her right feet, fore and aft. The complicating factor was, I hadn’t had her out for a walk in several days. She needed a walk – and she always wants to walk.

So I took her to our usual haunt. As we walked toward the entrance to the ditch she was limping pretty badly. And I thought we’d just go a little ways, enough to get her some sensory stimulation and alleviate her boredom, then get her home.

But once we got on the ditchbank proper she perked right up. She was just so danged eager I didn’t have the heart to cut the walk short.

And then as the walk went on she limped less and less, until it pretty much went away. So I guess it was some kind of muscular stiffness.

Despite the fact that well-placed clouds kept it from being oppressive she was dragging a bit at the end. And she was definitely gimpy after we got home. Which concerned me we had, in fact, overdone it.

But today – she seems fine. What with one thing or another neither of us got out (I had kind of sporadic sleep last night.) So probably the rest did her no harm.

Hopefully we’ll both be ready to hit the trail again tomorrow.

Bloody tourists.

Yes, it looks a little different from the original. (If you open the earlier blog post in a separate tab, line the images up the same, and then switch back and forth between tabs, you can really see the difference. Also, it’s kind of creepy.)

There’s a reason for that: the image above was done using models and Photoshop by somebody named Frank Daniel.

Here’re two at-least-as-awesome shots of more models based on the Classics Illustrated design, courtesy of one Mike Maynard: a head shot, and a diorama. They all come from a whole page of Martian death machine goodness.

Somebody’s got a lot of time on their hands. And Gods bless ‘em!

Hat tip to Oliver Mellors, better known in these precincts as Meowlin, for turning me onto all these wonderments via Facebook.

In other news: my birthday has duly occurred, as it tends to each year about this time. I had a fine, if quiet one, largely spent perusing the gratifyingly large number of well-wishes on Twitter and Facebook. A big thank you to all who wished me a happy birthday. It worked!

I’m now officially 56, and still refuse to either act or feel my age.

Sadly, I could not (as I always have before) indulge in a nice chocolate cake I made for myself. Thanks to Wendy Jay I was reminded the Candy Lady in Old Town had sugar-free cakes – which I still can’t eat, by reason of starch – and candy, which I can.

Since Emma Dog and I needed a walk I bundled her into the car and off we went. Old Town was surprisingly crowded. Took a couple passes down Romero St. to find a suitable parking spot. On the first go-round, as we were passing between the Plaza and the Basket Shop, an adorable little girl in a long pink dress pointed to Emma and yelled to her Mom, “Look at that cute little doggy!”

Well, as the song says, 2 out of three ain’t bad.

Today started off well, with a good night’s sleep, something which still isn’t a given. Then I let my perfectionism impede my progress on the rewrite, which is not so good.

And most special of all, I got hit with yet another Plumbing Crisis. Which, while it wasn’t as major as the sewage backup, still had to be dealt with. Indeed it still does, despite my best efforts and a trip to Home Despot. I’m too annoyed to talk about it anymore.

Did get a nice, belatedly birthday dinner out at a Chinese buffet – the which works well for me, since I can get my fill of fat, fiber, and protein without paying for (and wasting) starch and sugar I can’t eat. And on the way home on I-40 I got to see a spectacular lightning display to the north. Wonder if the infamous Solar Tsunami could have energized the atmosphere more than usual?

(It strikes me the coronal mass ejection thing kinda/sorta fits in with the whole War of the Worlds theme, since the novel begins with an astronomer observing an anomalous eruption from Mars.)

And this is running on too long, and I need a good night’s sleep tonight, because I’ve gotta lotta rewriting to do tomorrow. Plus plumb.

So – laters.

At least to an appropriate size.

As I may’ve mentioned, I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist. While I was in the hospital I was diagnosed as suffering from severe clinical depression. What with one thing or another, I couldn’t argue with that.

So today I had my last session. Why’s that? Because my shrink, his mentor, and I all agreed I didn’t need them anymore.

Basically, I seem to be headed in the right direction. I’m acquiring the tools to do what I need to do, and using them appropriately.

I had to ask a question: it was my impression that clinical depression was currently believed to have mainly physical causes. Which made me wonder, how come I am, to all evidence, getting better? I mean, yeah, almost dying. That’s pretty big, sure. But like turning some kind of switch in the brain?

What my doctor said was that, yes, there’s evidence for the physical hypothesis as a cause for severe depression. Also, there’s evidence for what I believe he called cognitive processes: thoughts and feelings.

Which makes sense to me. We’re complex critters. With some of us it’s going to be more of one, in some the other. One size never fits all.

I guess I just needed basis to feel that the progress I’ve made – internally, corroborated by external evidence – can somehow be real. Yeah, I know a thing that’s real is so whether or not there’s a conventional explanation for it. Still. I feel more confident if there’s an explanation for it.

Even if it’s, you know, wrong.

Things aren’t perfect. I’m not perfect. And perfectionism is something I’ve been striving to cure myself of.

I’m getting better. Doing better. Doing more. I’m headed in the right direction.

And the odds look good I’ll stay that way. Fingers crossed. And – yay!

Finally, for some reason I’m not comfortable outing my shrink, big a help as he’s been. Maybe I should ask him. Maybe I will.

But for now – thanks, Dr. Pedro!

===

In other tidings, and as a follow-up to yesterday’s post, say hello to my little friend my shiny new Facebook profile: http://www.facebook.com/vicmilan.

Oh, and WordPress? If your software doesn’t support display of certain characters, why the freak does it offer them in the “Insert custom character” option in your menu bar?

Yeah, I’ll link to my page (Wall?) when I figure out how.

I’d resisted. For a long time I was reluctant on account of a little revision of their Terms of Use last year that appeared to assert Facebook’s perpetual ownership of everything you posted there, including your name and likeness. Which was so not happening.

My likeness may not be much. But it is, well, mine.

So one friend asked, a trifle tartly, why I used the unacceptability of the Terms of Use when I declined that person’s invitation to join Facebook, but joined now. “Because they changed them to my satisfaction,” I said. And it appears they have.

So anyway.  I’ve, naturally enough, frittered away a bunch of time in the day or so since I joined. What’s more, I broke down and signed up for my own YouTube Channel. I’m going all the way, here.

(I would’ve said “the Full Monty,” but I’ve already given one friend nightmares tonight…)

I’m doing these things for professional reasons. No, really. I’m getting frighteningly near the point I’m going to have something to sell, and I need to sell it hard. It’s time to take steps … though not to distract myself from finishing the book.

Too much.

So, if you’re on Facebook, please hit me up. I’ll be getting links up here once I figure out what’s what.

And yes, I will be giving VictorMilan01′s YouTube Channel a workout soon, thank you very much.

Next thing you know, I’ll be dating musicians.

As we frequently do of a Saturday morn my BFF Joe and I met for breakfast at our favorite Village Inn on Menaul east of University. As we ate and talked some people came in talking excitedly about all the police and emergency vehicles across the street at the hotel. I glanced out the window – we were in a booth on the east side of the building, near the front – but saw nothing interesting.

But people kept peering out and getting more and more interested in what was going on. I looked around a while later and saw a whole fleet of police vehicles on the east side of the hotel and in the parking lot across the side street. I also commented on the presence of the Hazmat truck.

Then the big white evidence van turned into the side street.

I went to the bathroom. When I returned Joe told me about fifteen guys in body armor and camouflage, toting assault rifles, had just trotted into the building. There were some other dudes in battledress hanging around a white SUV, which I took for their equipment truck. They were there the whole time.

So, things were getting more and more intriguing. News camerapersons from somewhere set up a camera on a tripod on our (north) side of the street.

Joe went and suggested to the manage that he draw the front shades – in case some crazy decided he wasn’t getting enough attention and tried targeting people sitting by the windows. Not much happened as a result of that. Possibly the police advised it was unnecessary, as we found later.

Joe and I didn’t, you know, move away from the window or anything. The walls, I believe, are nice and comforting brick. If high-velocity metal particulate pollution got to be an issue, we could get on the floor. It’s nothing I haven’t done before, but that’s another story.

Westbound traffic backed up on Menaul. The cops were diverting people through the VI parking lot – in one entrance, around the back, and out the other.  This didn’t seem the best solution, and in reasonably short order somebody wised up and blocked the street a block east, where there was an actual street to send people up.

We were thinking about leaving when the manager came by to tell us the police had sealed the perimeter and were asking everybody to stay inside. As in not leave.

We also found out that Joe’s leading surmise was correct: some suicidal guy had forted himself up in there. (If you want to off yourself, a proven and reliable way to do it is to lock yourself inside your house, apartment, or hotel room, call 911, and say you’re not coming out. For some reason that inspires the police to rush over and kill you.)

So we sat there a while watching what we could see. Which wasn’t, in truth, much. The Camo Dudes continued to hang out by the toybox truck. The hotel maintenance staff (we guessed from their matching blue shirts, anyway) came to hang out near the camera crew on our side of the street.

It looked as if we could be there a while. These standoffs can go on for a long time. Especially if the guy shot himself early on and the police negotiator was going to spend the next sixteen hours trying to talk his cooling corpse into surrendering (“Don’t do it, Charlie! It isn’t worth it!”). Which happens.

I got to regretting I hadn’t set up my TracFone to communicate with Twitter. VI doesn’t have public WiFi, and anyway my netbook was in the car, where I couldn’t go get it. So, no live bulletins from the front lines: sorries. I did eventually text my friend Larry.

A cop came in and spoke to a manager. Suddenly people started queuing up at the cash register. Sure enough, the manager turned up to say we were cleared to go. But we were supposed to leave by the east entrance, and turn left, for some reason.

We decided to wait until the line got shorter. We got talking again. Finally it struck me we might want to move out while the moving was good. Our chance to leave could be merely a window, which could close promptly if things suddenly hit the fan.

So off we went. As I was paying Joe talked to a manager. It turned out the guy in whose honor they were holding the standoff was in a room on the south side of the hotel, facing away from us, which was why the police decided to let us go.

As we exited the coffee shop the negotiator was yelling at the forted-up guy on a loudspeaker. Guess he wasn’t answering his room phone. Possibly because he was, I don’t know, dead?

At any rate I noticed a lot of what seemed plain old citizens loitering around the front entrance. Which didn’t seem that great an idea. First of all, police have been known to be mistaken about things like where their target actually is. Or how well contained he is – meaning he might have moved without anybody noticing.

Also, contrary to what you hear endlessly in the media and see on all the cop-porn TV dramas, not all cops handle their weapons particularly well. If shooting broke out we weren’t necessarily immune to catching a stray one even on the supposedly wrong side of the building, and in any event the other direction from the presumed perp. There’s always the happy prospect of accidental discharge when some eager beaver is trotting around with his finger on his M-4′s trigger and the safety off.

So we hustled out of there without our usual ceremonial 10-15 minutes of fat-chewing in the parking lot. (Joe and I like to talk. We’re good at it.) Fortunately by this time they’d reopened Menaul and were allowing us to use both exits from the parking lot.

So ended our Great Coffee House Siege of ’10. And, just a note, none of this was remotely the fault of Village Inn or the restaurant’s personnel and management. Who are really nice people and have been super solicitous about me since my little health faux pas earlier in the year. They’re not responsible for what goes on across the damn street. That’s why I restrained my initial impulse to give this post a cutesy title like The Village Inn-cident. There is too such a thing as bad publicity.

When I got home, after a side trip to Costco – where, in total, I’ve spent upwards of $200 in the last two weeks (drat you, Emma Dog, for refusing to learn not to eat!) – naturally my first action was to hop online and try to get the details on what as going on, and how (and whether) the standoff had been resolved.

And guess what? Nada. On the usually-reliable KOAT-TV website the closest thing I could find was a bit on a freaking bear invasion.

And … this is odd. The situation must’ve started no later than about 11 AM – we got out around 12:30 PM, if memory serves (and remember, it doesn’t always.) It’s now 2:24 PM in the Mountain West. And the damn bears are still the “top story” over to KOAT.

Then again, sometimes incidents that ought to be fairly major news … get flushed, somehow. Are never heard about. I know this from personal experience. Still, I can’t imagine the local news not eventually saying something about so major a flap in the middle of Albuquerque.

Then again, we shall see.

And that’s why I haven’t gotten anything constructive done today! It’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.