Life as Me
This weekend reminded me once again of how much fun it is to be me. Not only are there all the abundantly obvious merits to the role, but odd and interesting things are forever happening, especially when I’m on my own . . .
Friday started out less than fun, actually, when I woke up at 5:00 AM with stabbing lower abdominal pain. I got out of bed and took an Aleve, then went into the bathroom - and collapsed on the floor. It wasn’t like a faint-collapse, more of a suddenly-not-feeling-like-standing collapse, but startling nonetheless. I sat there for a moment, feeling concerned. Would this cause me to miss the writers’ conference? I hoped not. I suspected food poisoning, as a girl I know has gotten it twice this semester at the UC, and I had eaten their seafood newburg on Thursday evening. It was really tasty, but probably not worth it, in retrospect. At any rate, I hauled myself up and managed to get back into my top-bunk bed, where I huddled, dizzy and clammy. I felt like I was in shock - and I say that as someone who has been in shock. My face felt so cold. After fifteen or twenty minutes, though, the pain went away, and I went back to sleep.
At 7:00, I got up and got ready to meet Ashton. I had paid him to drive me to Richmond for the conference; after getting my stuff together and wrangling with my printer, which went rogue and began printing blank pages in spurts, I got out the door. Ashton and I talked in the car about the very strange movie he had just seen, and eventually we got to Richmond. We had only just entered the city when a road on which Mapquest told us to keep straight seemed to fork left and right - no straight. We chose left, but immediately realized that the right was actually rather straightish, whereas the left was essentially a U-turn, and found us immediately leaving Richmond again. Ashton took the next avaliable road into the city.
“We’ll just go back into Richmond,” he said. “There’s no WAY that’s a bad idea!” We laughed, but wondered where the heck we were. When we glimpsed a sign, though, it said we were on Broad Street - the very street whereon the Library of Virginia, my destination, is located. We were only about two blocks down. Ashton dropped me off and headed out; I went in and got my nametag and schedules for the conference.
Like every time, the conference began with a humorous welcome speech from Professor Robbins (although this was the first time I called him "Professor" in my head). Then, there was the first-pages workshop. The way that works is that you submit the beginning of a work of fiction (between a page and one and a half pages; it’s pretty strictly laid out in the rules) in a certain format if you want to be critiqued, and they pick out as many as they can do within the time limit - apparently, the pieces are chosen to ensure variety. Each is read aloud by a professional actor, then critiqued by a panel of agents and editors moderated by Professor Robbins. This year, there were two agents and an editor; one of the agents mostly represents books that I would categorize as “other” (cookbooks, guidbooks, etc.), and so got a little snappy with the “this isn’t the type of work I represent” stuff; the other does, among other things, both young adult and fantasy! All three people liked my submission, though - it was the first page of “Dragons Over London”. Even the cranky one said,
“I’m hooked by the weirdness; I’d keep reading.” Sweet!
When that ended, it was 11:00 AM, and I went to a panel called “Writing a Query Letter”. I was rather tempted to go to “Getting Graphic”, one about what you can get away with in books in terms of violence and sex, but since my writing doesn’t really push the envelope of either (either envelope? How many envelopes are there?), it wasn’t too relevant. The query letter stuff was pretty good, although there was one funny thing: one of the people on the panel was an agent - one who was actually head of her agency - who said in a very no-exceptions type way that the magic length for a modern first novel is 80,000 words. She said, when pressed, that fantasy and thrillers might go up to 100,000 words, and that young adult could go as low as 60,000 words, but that you mostly HAD to be within about ten thousand words of 80,000 or you wouldn’t be considered at all. For a first book, I mean, an unestablished author. Well, that sent people into fits. Half the questions for the panel after that were clarifications and challenges about word count, and then people kept bringing it up in later panels, asking speakers who were authors about the word count of their first novels and so on. Silly people.
Anyway, we had lunch after that, and at 1:07 I was scheduled to meet with the YA/fantasy agent from the first pages critique for five minutes. I pitched “Dragons Over London” to her, and she gave me some suggestions; I asked if I could submit it to her if I used them, and she said yes. I thought it went pretty well.
After that, I went to a panel called “Me, Myself, & I: Writing in First Person”. It was all right, not too spectacular, but interesting enough. Hey, to me, practically anything to do with writing tends to be riveting, anyway. At 2:15, a speaker interviewed a thriller writer named Kyle Mills - it was the only event going on for its time block. I was glad, though, because I probably wouldn’t have gone otherwise, not being a thriller writer, but it was wonderfully entertaining. Mr. Mills was kind of a harried-looking young guy who seemed good-tempered and happy to be there but was also clearly and confessedly terrified of writing. Listening to him was lots of fun. And yes, someone asked about the word count of his first novel (about 125,000 words, but that was some time ago).
At 3:30, I went to a panel called “Point of View”. That, I knew, would be fascinating, as the panelists included Carolyn Parkhurst, who just made the New York Times bestseller list with her second novel - both it and her first were in first person. Also on the panel was Professor Robbins, who hates first person point of view with a vitriolic passion. Then, there was a Pulitzer-prize winning poet, Claudia Emerson, and another thriller writer, Eric Van Lustbader, who, I’d like to point out, has an awesome name. Anyway, there was a bit of a dogfight.
At the end, there was fondue in the lobby, and then Professor Robbins and a couple of friends gave me a ride to my hotel, the Linden Row Inn. He was still mad in the car because Claudia Emerson called him arrogant in the panel. He’d played it off pretty well at the time, but he was clearly upset about it.
The Linden Row Inn was awesome - very old and classy, totally non-Murder Motel-ish. It even has a complimentary shuttle that leaves every half-hour and will take you anywhere within two miles, so I would be able to use it to get to dinner and to the library the next day. Anyway, I went to investigate my room. It was big and nice, and this was the first time I’d ever had a hotel room to myself. I searched it for bad guys. There weren’t any. I flopped onto the bed and called Momdad; they agreed that I’d probably had food poisoning that morning. I told them a bit about the conference, then went out and got the shuttle to a place called the Strawberry Street Cafe. Two older women had been waiting with me for the shuttle; we had to miss the first one, because a bunch of other people had signed up for it, and we wouldn’t all fit, so the driver said he’d come right back and take us next. The women were grumbling that he seemed rude, as if he didn’t like his job.
“If you don’t want to be doing it, don’t do it!” one said. I wondered about that logic; I also only thought the driver seemed busy. Indeed, he was quite nice when he drove me to the cafe; we talked about Richmond, and he asked if I’d seen Monument Avenue. I said probably, but I wasn’t sure; he said he’d drive me by it on the way back.
The Strawberry Street Cafe keeps its salad bar in a bathtub. It’s a big antique-type bathtub sitting up on a low table and full of greenery and stuff. It’s really quite cool. I ate at the bar, as the place was quite full, and got salmon with pineapple salsa and really, really good mashed potatoes. I wish I could make potatoes like that! Anyway, I was at one side of the corner of the bar, and another woman (she turned out to be a pilot) was just down the other side, also apparently by herself; then, a guy came and sat at the corner and amused us with anecdotes. We realized we were all there solo, so we called it our “singles’ corner”. The fellow drank girly pink drinks (I think they were maybe vodka and cranberry juice, but arranged to look very girly; he had come in and ordered, and I quote, “something fruity and sweet”). He told us about his four-year-old son, the ex-wife who had tried to kill him for the insurance money, and the long-term girlfriend who eventually discovered she was a lesbian, but whom he kept dating for three years after she started bringing women home. It was all highly entertaining.
When I finished dinner, I went out and called for the shuttle; I had fifteen or twenty minutes, so I went just down the street to look at the market the shuttle driver had mentioned. It reminded me of Wawa, but with more wine; there were lots and lots of silly brands for something like $5.99 a bottle; one had a brown-paper label with the stenciled name “CHEAP RED WINE” (also avaliable in “WHITE”, but still “CHEAP”). There was one with three monkeys on the front called “Pinot Evil”. I laughed, and then I went next door to look in the window of the wine-and-desserts shop (I suspect this is where the neighborhood’s expensive wines are located). As I was walking by, I passed a girl who looked familiar; we both stopped and turned, and she said,
“Do you remember me? I went to high school with you.” Turns out it was Isolde, who not only went to high school with me, but lives next door to me at home. :P Her family moved in what, ten years ago? They’re not very neighborhood-social, but I still can’t believe I almost didn’t recognize her. She’s working at the wine shop; we talked a bit, and then I caught the shuttle back. We drove down Monument Avenue, with the horseback statues in spotlights in the dark. I got back to the hotel, tipped the driver, and went to my room.
I checked it for bad guys again. There still weren’t any. I realized that the room was all mine. “I could dance around,” I thought. “Oh - I don’t have any music. I could sing . . . it’s not the same.” I settled for a shower, watched a little TV (not much was on), and went to bed.
On Saturday, I missed the shuttle I was signed up for because the driver (a different one) assumed that someone else went with my name on the sheet, but he came back and got me right afterward, so I was still on time to the library. I tell you, the Linden Row Inn is pretty great - and it’s on the site of a garden Edgar Allan Poe played in as a kid. Pretty neat, hunh?
Anyway - conference. After the welcome, there was another one-item time block until 10:45, an interview with a writer named Sheri Reynolds. Her book “The Rapture of Canaan” was on Oprah and a bestseller - she wrote it, she said, because “My agent said the book I had tried to write was no good; she said ‘You’re a little Southern girl. You know about tobacco fields and religion. Why don’t you write about that?’”, and so she did. It was pretty cool; they picked good speakers to interview. Then, from 11:00 to lunch (at noon), I went to a panel called “The ‘Real’ World: How to Make Your Setting Come to Life”. I really liked it - the writers talked a bit about fantasy worldbuilding, and also about what you can get away with if you set your story in a real place. “Don’t put a murder in a real hotel,” said the thriller writer.
I had lunch with some really nice older women, who told me that being an old woman really is as cool as Sophie when she turns old in “Howl’s Moving Castle”. Score! (No, I did NOT ask them “So, what’s it like being old?” I told them about the book, and described how Sophie’s attitude changed when she was made old, so she felt like she had less to lose and didn’t care what people thought, and they said “It really is like that!”) One of them is writing a mystery, and the other an interesting story which takes place at a bed-and-breakfast. We had fun talking.
At 1:00, I went to a talk called “Finding Your Voice”, which didn’t have much concrete to say; I honestly think Professor Robbins did a better job defining voice in about fifteen minutes in our class. In fact, when I ran into him later, he said he’d left that discussion because it was “meaningless drivel” or some such.
At 2:15, I went to “Writing PG-13: What You Can & Can’t Do in YA”, which was neat. They had the chief children’s book editor of HarperCollins and two YA authors. Of course, they were all pretty vague about what you actually CAN’T do in YA - one of the authors had written an award-winning YA book which included an incestuous rape, and the other had written one set in a war zone in Peru - the editor said at this point that he thought the things you probably couldn’t get away with were necrophilia, bestiality, and maybe saying certain things about religion.
The last panel was “What I Wish I’d Known”, with Claudia Emerson, Eric Van Lustbader, Kyle Mills, Sheri Reynolds, and Michael Stearns (the HarperCollins editor); Professor Robbins moderated. There were a lot of humorous moments.
After the conference ended, I called a cab (the first time I’d done that myself - or even taken a cab by myself). It was way late; I was standing at the front steps of the now-closed Library of Virginia at about 5:20 PM, hating cities furiously as half-toothless guys called me “beautiful”. Eventually, the cab came and took me to the Main Street train station.
I walked into the station, only to find the entire lower floor cleared out and polished in the manner of a spacious ballroom, with tables holding flutes of champagne and high-end h’ordeurves. Uniformed caterers tried politely to chase me out, as they were having “a private function” in a few minutes; I asked where I might get dinner, and they said to go out the front doors and to the left, and there would be food places at the end of the block. I did so, hating cities more fiercely than ever as I walked down the dirty street.
I found myself feeling pacified when I began hearing live music and wandered into what seemed to be a hippie street market, full of tie-dye and bright colors. When I took a good look around, however, I realized that I had in fact just walked into the Gay Pride Virginia street festival. It was full of gay couples with dogs and vendor stalls and rainbows. Awesome. I went to a diner which bordered that street (I saw a guy wearing leather chaps go in, too; he had jeans on underneath, but still, CHAPS). It was called the River City Diner, and I got food there and ate at a table surrounded by about a dozen guys who would have put me in mind of a frat if not for the amount of giggling, earrings, and lap-sitting.
I would just like to take this opportunity to point out that, when I was in England, I went to London for ONE DAY, and they were having a Gay Pride parade. Whenever I go into a major metropolitan area, gay pride events emerge from the metaphorical woodwork. I think they follow me. How awesome is that?
Anyway, I finished eating and went back to the Main Street station, where I went up the side stairs to sit in the waiting area and read. I finished my book (“What Do You Say to a Naked Elf” - Becky got it for me. Someday, I may need to know. Shut up, I can dream), which was quite unexpectedly goodish, all while not even a dozen yards from an unidentified black-tie event in the next room. There was no one else in the waiting area except for caterers flitting around and one surly security guard. I got a call on my cell from Becky, who was with a bunch of my friends at the Fantasci convention, to let me know that Ashton was entering a costume contest as a Klingon in drag. I told her about the Gay Pride Virginia festival.
After a bit, a middle-aged man in a tux, an older woman, and two boys, maybe four and seven, came into the waiting room. I asked what this event was; they said it was a wedding. The woman was the boys’ grandmother, and the man was their uncle, and they were all friends of the groom.
“Why don’t you go in and get something to eat?” the uncle said. I tried to protest, but he insisted. “No one will know,” he said. Well, I was dressed up for the conference, after all - not in a floor-length gown, like a lot of the women, but in dressyish pants and a collared, button-down shirt . . . I went with him and ate some insanely fancy food (crabmeat and yummy pasta), and we went over to the bar, where I got a rum and Sprite. The uncle gave me a funny look.
“I am twenty-one,” I said. “I have an ID . . .”
“Rum and Sprite?” he said.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “My mom gave it to me when I was . . .”
“When you were little?”
“Well, not LITTLE exactly.” I spotted the bride and groom looking picturesque against the mantlepiece. “Would it be really, really weird for me to congratulate them? They don’t know who I am.”
“No, come on!” The uncle and I went over to the couple, and the uncle said, “We don’t know her name, but she’s the only one getting on the train to Williamsburg.” I congratulated them and told the bride she looked beautiful.
So. Turns out the wedding (now in reception) was being held at the train station because the groom is a train buff. The Main Street Station is very little-used now, and the Williamsburg train was the only one coming through that evening, and I was the only one getting on it. And it was late. People were, in fact, sort of waiting for it. I wondered rather whether the entire wedding party was planning to see me onto the train, which would have been awesome.
I went back to the waiting area. After a moment, the four- and seven-year-old boys ran in with a dollar from their parents to get Skittles out of the snack machine. Their Skittles got stuck; I gave them another dollar to get them out, and they became my best friends of the evening. A man dressed in a way that suggested he was the Wedding Jester came over and gave them an inflated rubber glove to play with, and they batted it around like a ball. When another parent came by with two kids of maybe three, the older boy invited them to play.
“It’s fun to play with little kids,” he told me confidentially. At a pause in the game, he inspected the Out of Order machine which was supposed to give me my prepaid ticket. “That’s not right,” he said. “Do you have your ticket?”
“They said I could get it on the train,” I said. “It’s late, though, and no one can tell me when it’s coming in.” Well, given that the only uniforms around were caterers and Surly the Security Guard, not surprising.
“Everyone’s going back to Williamsburg anyway,” he said. “You could probably ride with us.” We played keep-it-up with the glove for a bit; at another pause, the seven-year-old picked up my drink. I moved immediately to get him to not drink it, but he wasn’t about to; he gave a debonair smile and held it out to me.
“Finish your drink before we play anymore, or we might knock it over,” he said, looking for all the world like a miniature, freckly, tuxedo-clad James Bond trying to pick me up.
The train was quite late. It let a bunch of people off, and then, when I got onto the platform, it was moving again.
“Is this Train 99?” I asked, walking beside it.
“It’s the only train tonight,” said the woman conductor standing in the doorway.
“I’m supposed to be on this train,” I said conversationally, beginning to feel rather anxious.
“We’re going to stop,” she said, and they did. I got on and sat down; they confirmed my ticket over the phone, and then I called Momdad, who were now in New York.
When I got to Williamsburg, it was dark, and I stepped out of the station and could not get my bearings. “Williamsburg only has one train station - RIGHT?” I thought, concerned. I started walking. Eventually, I ascertained that I was in the right general area, but I still came to an intersection that I just didn’t recognize. Tired and confused, I stopped and looked around -
- And saw, in a halo of light, the Williamsburg Regional Library.
Some of you may know that the Williamsburg Regional Library, personified, is my hero and possibly the love of my life. Now, I had just turned to see him standing at the corner with a glowing lantern and a gentle smile, radiating peace and kindness, holding out a hand to me. “Lost?” NW + WRL OTP.
On the way back onto campus, I encountered one of the President’s cats. I wanted to pet it. It was walking away, but when it heard me, it stopped to wait. I love cats. I knew it would wait - it was that kind of evening.
Friday started out less than fun, actually, when I woke up at 5:00 AM with stabbing lower abdominal pain. I got out of bed and took an Aleve, then went into the bathroom - and collapsed on the floor. It wasn’t like a faint-collapse, more of a suddenly-not-feeling-like-standing collapse, but startling nonetheless. I sat there for a moment, feeling concerned. Would this cause me to miss the writers’ conference? I hoped not. I suspected food poisoning, as a girl I know has gotten it twice this semester at the UC, and I had eaten their seafood newburg on Thursday evening. It was really tasty, but probably not worth it, in retrospect. At any rate, I hauled myself up and managed to get back into my top-bunk bed, where I huddled, dizzy and clammy. I felt like I was in shock - and I say that as someone who has been in shock. My face felt so cold. After fifteen or twenty minutes, though, the pain went away, and I went back to sleep.
At 7:00, I got up and got ready to meet Ashton. I had paid him to drive me to Richmond for the conference; after getting my stuff together and wrangling with my printer, which went rogue and began printing blank pages in spurts, I got out the door. Ashton and I talked in the car about the very strange movie he had just seen, and eventually we got to Richmond. We had only just entered the city when a road on which Mapquest told us to keep straight seemed to fork left and right - no straight. We chose left, but immediately realized that the right was actually rather straightish, whereas the left was essentially a U-turn, and found us immediately leaving Richmond again. Ashton took the next avaliable road into the city.
“We’ll just go back into Richmond,” he said. “There’s no WAY that’s a bad idea!” We laughed, but wondered where the heck we were. When we glimpsed a sign, though, it said we were on Broad Street - the very street whereon the Library of Virginia, my destination, is located. We were only about two blocks down. Ashton dropped me off and headed out; I went in and got my nametag and schedules for the conference.
Like every time, the conference began with a humorous welcome speech from Professor Robbins (although this was the first time I called him "Professor" in my head). Then, there was the first-pages workshop. The way that works is that you submit the beginning of a work of fiction (between a page and one and a half pages; it’s pretty strictly laid out in the rules) in a certain format if you want to be critiqued, and they pick out as many as they can do within the time limit - apparently, the pieces are chosen to ensure variety. Each is read aloud by a professional actor, then critiqued by a panel of agents and editors moderated by Professor Robbins. This year, there were two agents and an editor; one of the agents mostly represents books that I would categorize as “other” (cookbooks, guidbooks, etc.), and so got a little snappy with the “this isn’t the type of work I represent” stuff; the other does, among other things, both young adult and fantasy! All three people liked my submission, though - it was the first page of “Dragons Over London”. Even the cranky one said,
“I’m hooked by the weirdness; I’d keep reading.” Sweet!
When that ended, it was 11:00 AM, and I went to a panel called “Writing a Query Letter”. I was rather tempted to go to “Getting Graphic”, one about what you can get away with in books in terms of violence and sex, but since my writing doesn’t really push the envelope of either (either envelope? How many envelopes are there?), it wasn’t too relevant. The query letter stuff was pretty good, although there was one funny thing: one of the people on the panel was an agent - one who was actually head of her agency - who said in a very no-exceptions type way that the magic length for a modern first novel is 80,000 words. She said, when pressed, that fantasy and thrillers might go up to 100,000 words, and that young adult could go as low as 60,000 words, but that you mostly HAD to be within about ten thousand words of 80,000 or you wouldn’t be considered at all. For a first book, I mean, an unestablished author. Well, that sent people into fits. Half the questions for the panel after that were clarifications and challenges about word count, and then people kept bringing it up in later panels, asking speakers who were authors about the word count of their first novels and so on. Silly people.
Anyway, we had lunch after that, and at 1:07 I was scheduled to meet with the YA/fantasy agent from the first pages critique for five minutes. I pitched “Dragons Over London” to her, and she gave me some suggestions; I asked if I could submit it to her if I used them, and she said yes. I thought it went pretty well.
After that, I went to a panel called “Me, Myself, & I: Writing in First Person”. It was all right, not too spectacular, but interesting enough. Hey, to me, practically anything to do with writing tends to be riveting, anyway. At 2:15, a speaker interviewed a thriller writer named Kyle Mills - it was the only event going on for its time block. I was glad, though, because I probably wouldn’t have gone otherwise, not being a thriller writer, but it was wonderfully entertaining. Mr. Mills was kind of a harried-looking young guy who seemed good-tempered and happy to be there but was also clearly and confessedly terrified of writing. Listening to him was lots of fun. And yes, someone asked about the word count of his first novel (about 125,000 words, but that was some time ago).
At 3:30, I went to a panel called “Point of View”. That, I knew, would be fascinating, as the panelists included Carolyn Parkhurst, who just made the New York Times bestseller list with her second novel - both it and her first were in first person. Also on the panel was Professor Robbins, who hates first person point of view with a vitriolic passion. Then, there was a Pulitzer-prize winning poet, Claudia Emerson, and another thriller writer, Eric Van Lustbader, who, I’d like to point out, has an awesome name. Anyway, there was a bit of a dogfight.
At the end, there was fondue in the lobby, and then Professor Robbins and a couple of friends gave me a ride to my hotel, the Linden Row Inn. He was still mad in the car because Claudia Emerson called him arrogant in the panel. He’d played it off pretty well at the time, but he was clearly upset about it.
The Linden Row Inn was awesome - very old and classy, totally non-Murder Motel-ish. It even has a complimentary shuttle that leaves every half-hour and will take you anywhere within two miles, so I would be able to use it to get to dinner and to the library the next day. Anyway, I went to investigate my room. It was big and nice, and this was the first time I’d ever had a hotel room to myself. I searched it for bad guys. There weren’t any. I flopped onto the bed and called Momdad; they agreed that I’d probably had food poisoning that morning. I told them a bit about the conference, then went out and got the shuttle to a place called the Strawberry Street Cafe. Two older women had been waiting with me for the shuttle; we had to miss the first one, because a bunch of other people had signed up for it, and we wouldn’t all fit, so the driver said he’d come right back and take us next. The women were grumbling that he seemed rude, as if he didn’t like his job.
“If you don’t want to be doing it, don’t do it!” one said. I wondered about that logic; I also only thought the driver seemed busy. Indeed, he was quite nice when he drove me to the cafe; we talked about Richmond, and he asked if I’d seen Monument Avenue. I said probably, but I wasn’t sure; he said he’d drive me by it on the way back.
The Strawberry Street Cafe keeps its salad bar in a bathtub. It’s a big antique-type bathtub sitting up on a low table and full of greenery and stuff. It’s really quite cool. I ate at the bar, as the place was quite full, and got salmon with pineapple salsa and really, really good mashed potatoes. I wish I could make potatoes like that! Anyway, I was at one side of the corner of the bar, and another woman (she turned out to be a pilot) was just down the other side, also apparently by herself; then, a guy came and sat at the corner and amused us with anecdotes. We realized we were all there solo, so we called it our “singles’ corner”. The fellow drank girly pink drinks (I think they were maybe vodka and cranberry juice, but arranged to look very girly; he had come in and ordered, and I quote, “something fruity and sweet”). He told us about his four-year-old son, the ex-wife who had tried to kill him for the insurance money, and the long-term girlfriend who eventually discovered she was a lesbian, but whom he kept dating for three years after she started bringing women home. It was all highly entertaining.
When I finished dinner, I went out and called for the shuttle; I had fifteen or twenty minutes, so I went just down the street to look at the market the shuttle driver had mentioned. It reminded me of Wawa, but with more wine; there were lots and lots of silly brands for something like $5.99 a bottle; one had a brown-paper label with the stenciled name “CHEAP RED WINE” (also avaliable in “WHITE”, but still “CHEAP”). There was one with three monkeys on the front called “Pinot Evil”. I laughed, and then I went next door to look in the window of the wine-and-desserts shop (I suspect this is where the neighborhood’s expensive wines are located). As I was walking by, I passed a girl who looked familiar; we both stopped and turned, and she said,
“Do you remember me? I went to high school with you.” Turns out it was Isolde, who not only went to high school with me, but lives next door to me at home. :P Her family moved in what, ten years ago? They’re not very neighborhood-social, but I still can’t believe I almost didn’t recognize her. She’s working at the wine shop; we talked a bit, and then I caught the shuttle back. We drove down Monument Avenue, with the horseback statues in spotlights in the dark. I got back to the hotel, tipped the driver, and went to my room.
I checked it for bad guys again. There still weren’t any. I realized that the room was all mine. “I could dance around,” I thought. “Oh - I don’t have any music. I could sing . . . it’s not the same.” I settled for a shower, watched a little TV (not much was on), and went to bed.
On Saturday, I missed the shuttle I was signed up for because the driver (a different one) assumed that someone else went with my name on the sheet, but he came back and got me right afterward, so I was still on time to the library. I tell you, the Linden Row Inn is pretty great - and it’s on the site of a garden Edgar Allan Poe played in as a kid. Pretty neat, hunh?
Anyway - conference. After the welcome, there was another one-item time block until 10:45, an interview with a writer named Sheri Reynolds. Her book “The Rapture of Canaan” was on Oprah and a bestseller - she wrote it, she said, because “My agent said the book I had tried to write was no good; she said ‘You’re a little Southern girl. You know about tobacco fields and religion. Why don’t you write about that?’”, and so she did. It was pretty cool; they picked good speakers to interview. Then, from 11:00 to lunch (at noon), I went to a panel called “The ‘Real’ World: How to Make Your Setting Come to Life”. I really liked it - the writers talked a bit about fantasy worldbuilding, and also about what you can get away with if you set your story in a real place. “Don’t put a murder in a real hotel,” said the thriller writer.
I had lunch with some really nice older women, who told me that being an old woman really is as cool as Sophie when she turns old in “Howl’s Moving Castle”. Score! (No, I did NOT ask them “So, what’s it like being old?” I told them about the book, and described how Sophie’s attitude changed when she was made old, so she felt like she had less to lose and didn’t care what people thought, and they said “It really is like that!”) One of them is writing a mystery, and the other an interesting story which takes place at a bed-and-breakfast. We had fun talking.
At 1:00, I went to a talk called “Finding Your Voice”, which didn’t have much concrete to say; I honestly think Professor Robbins did a better job defining voice in about fifteen minutes in our class. In fact, when I ran into him later, he said he’d left that discussion because it was “meaningless drivel” or some such.
At 2:15, I went to “Writing PG-13: What You Can & Can’t Do in YA”, which was neat. They had the chief children’s book editor of HarperCollins and two YA authors. Of course, they were all pretty vague about what you actually CAN’T do in YA - one of the authors had written an award-winning YA book which included an incestuous rape, and the other had written one set in a war zone in Peru - the editor said at this point that he thought the things you probably couldn’t get away with were necrophilia, bestiality, and maybe saying certain things about religion.
The last panel was “What I Wish I’d Known”, with Claudia Emerson, Eric Van Lustbader, Kyle Mills, Sheri Reynolds, and Michael Stearns (the HarperCollins editor); Professor Robbins moderated. There were a lot of humorous moments.
After the conference ended, I called a cab (the first time I’d done that myself - or even taken a cab by myself). It was way late; I was standing at the front steps of the now-closed Library of Virginia at about 5:20 PM, hating cities furiously as half-toothless guys called me “beautiful”. Eventually, the cab came and took me to the Main Street train station.
I walked into the station, only to find the entire lower floor cleared out and polished in the manner of a spacious ballroom, with tables holding flutes of champagne and high-end h’ordeurves. Uniformed caterers tried politely to chase me out, as they were having “a private function” in a few minutes; I asked where I might get dinner, and they said to go out the front doors and to the left, and there would be food places at the end of the block. I did so, hating cities more fiercely than ever as I walked down the dirty street.
I found myself feeling pacified when I began hearing live music and wandered into what seemed to be a hippie street market, full of tie-dye and bright colors. When I took a good look around, however, I realized that I had in fact just walked into the Gay Pride Virginia street festival. It was full of gay couples with dogs and vendor stalls and rainbows. Awesome. I went to a diner which bordered that street (I saw a guy wearing leather chaps go in, too; he had jeans on underneath, but still, CHAPS). It was called the River City Diner, and I got food there and ate at a table surrounded by about a dozen guys who would have put me in mind of a frat if not for the amount of giggling, earrings, and lap-sitting.
I would just like to take this opportunity to point out that, when I was in England, I went to London for ONE DAY, and they were having a Gay Pride parade. Whenever I go into a major metropolitan area, gay pride events emerge from the metaphorical woodwork. I think they follow me. How awesome is that?
Anyway, I finished eating and went back to the Main Street station, where I went up the side stairs to sit in the waiting area and read. I finished my book (“What Do You Say to a Naked Elf” - Becky got it for me. Someday, I may need to know. Shut up, I can dream), which was quite unexpectedly goodish, all while not even a dozen yards from an unidentified black-tie event in the next room. There was no one else in the waiting area except for caterers flitting around and one surly security guard. I got a call on my cell from Becky, who was with a bunch of my friends at the Fantasci convention, to let me know that Ashton was entering a costume contest as a Klingon in drag. I told her about the Gay Pride Virginia festival.
After a bit, a middle-aged man in a tux, an older woman, and two boys, maybe four and seven, came into the waiting room. I asked what this event was; they said it was a wedding. The woman was the boys’ grandmother, and the man was their uncle, and they were all friends of the groom.
“Why don’t you go in and get something to eat?” the uncle said. I tried to protest, but he insisted. “No one will know,” he said. Well, I was dressed up for the conference, after all - not in a floor-length gown, like a lot of the women, but in dressyish pants and a collared, button-down shirt . . . I went with him and ate some insanely fancy food (crabmeat and yummy pasta), and we went over to the bar, where I got a rum and Sprite. The uncle gave me a funny look.
“I am twenty-one,” I said. “I have an ID . . .”
“Rum and Sprite?” he said.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “My mom gave it to me when I was . . .”
“When you were little?”
“Well, not LITTLE exactly.” I spotted the bride and groom looking picturesque against the mantlepiece. “Would it be really, really weird for me to congratulate them? They don’t know who I am.”
“No, come on!” The uncle and I went over to the couple, and the uncle said, “We don’t know her name, but she’s the only one getting on the train to Williamsburg.” I congratulated them and told the bride she looked beautiful.
So. Turns out the wedding (now in reception) was being held at the train station because the groom is a train buff. The Main Street Station is very little-used now, and the Williamsburg train was the only one coming through that evening, and I was the only one getting on it. And it was late. People were, in fact, sort of waiting for it. I wondered rather whether the entire wedding party was planning to see me onto the train, which would have been awesome.
I went back to the waiting area. After a moment, the four- and seven-year-old boys ran in with a dollar from their parents to get Skittles out of the snack machine. Their Skittles got stuck; I gave them another dollar to get them out, and they became my best friends of the evening. A man dressed in a way that suggested he was the Wedding Jester came over and gave them an inflated rubber glove to play with, and they batted it around like a ball. When another parent came by with two kids of maybe three, the older boy invited them to play.
“It’s fun to play with little kids,” he told me confidentially. At a pause in the game, he inspected the Out of Order machine which was supposed to give me my prepaid ticket. “That’s not right,” he said. “Do you have your ticket?”
“They said I could get it on the train,” I said. “It’s late, though, and no one can tell me when it’s coming in.” Well, given that the only uniforms around were caterers and Surly the Security Guard, not surprising.
“Everyone’s going back to Williamsburg anyway,” he said. “You could probably ride with us.” We played keep-it-up with the glove for a bit; at another pause, the seven-year-old picked up my drink. I moved immediately to get him to not drink it, but he wasn’t about to; he gave a debonair smile and held it out to me.
“Finish your drink before we play anymore, or we might knock it over,” he said, looking for all the world like a miniature, freckly, tuxedo-clad James Bond trying to pick me up.
The train was quite late. It let a bunch of people off, and then, when I got onto the platform, it was moving again.
“Is this Train 99?” I asked, walking beside it.
“It’s the only train tonight,” said the woman conductor standing in the doorway.
“I’m supposed to be on this train,” I said conversationally, beginning to feel rather anxious.
“We’re going to stop,” she said, and they did. I got on and sat down; they confirmed my ticket over the phone, and then I called Momdad, who were now in New York.
When I got to Williamsburg, it was dark, and I stepped out of the station and could not get my bearings. “Williamsburg only has one train station - RIGHT?” I thought, concerned. I started walking. Eventually, I ascertained that I was in the right general area, but I still came to an intersection that I just didn’t recognize. Tired and confused, I stopped and looked around -
- And saw, in a halo of light, the Williamsburg Regional Library.
Some of you may know that the Williamsburg Regional Library, personified, is my hero and possibly the love of my life. Now, I had just turned to see him standing at the corner with a glowing lantern and a gentle smile, radiating peace and kindness, holding out a hand to me. “Lost?” NW + WRL OTP.
On the way back onto campus, I encountered one of the President’s cats. I wanted to pet it. It was walking away, but when it heard me, it stopped to wait. I love cats. I knew it would wait - it was that kind of evening.