Nobody, darnit

Today, I went to the first ever Bellingham Comic Convention. It's certainly the densest con I've ever been to. Hopefully that means it was a success and next year they'll have a bigger venue. Keffy got Michel Gagne's Zed, because it had a metal band on the cover. Possibly because of this, he gave her the trade paperback free. I fell in love with it on the first page. :-)

I also saw tigernach and nealbailey, who can now be known as The Guy Who Looks Like Scott Hinckley. (Fortunately, Neal now has bright blue hair, so I can tell them apart.)

Then I undertook a trek to library and mall which ended in me watching the History Channel documentary, "Engineering an Empire" hosted by Buckaroo Bonzai, which managed much drama, and even a little useful information. (Carthage's harbor rocks) But dude, if you're going to emphasize all the dead people (oh no!) hacked to pieces in battle, let there be a little blood on the actors. Please.

Had a nice time at the conference. It was tiny, only about a hundred or so people. Very very nice. I got there late on Saturday, that couldn't be helped, but I still got to stand for an hour and a half listening to Harlan Ellison ramble on about everything from writing to being bitten by parrots (he was bitten by a parrot Thursday night. I got to see the dime sized crescent wound where the beak sank into his forearm.)
If you ever get a chance to hear him talk, do it. I think I was really lucky, since he says he has vowed off conferences, and he is pretty old. But for some reason (he's not sure himself) he got convinced to come. One of the women I talked to said that Fredrick Pohl, who came to the first one, went around and told everyone it's the greatest con he'd been to, so now they can get whoever they want. Apparantly Ellison was happy to be there because so many of his friends were there. He knew half the room, seriously. I may well have been surrounded by huge names in the writing industry, completely oblivious to all of them.
Anyway. Harlan Ellison is an energetic man who talks in huge, looping circles, like that show Connections. He'd have people make sure he got back to his point, and quite frequently received reminders. :) But you're happy to let him blab, because everything he says is interesting, and he's known so many interesting people. He didn't tell us the whole story, saying it was far too long and complicated, but he apparantly had some adventure with Carl Sagan that left Sagan pissing himself in an alley.
The thing he said that probably touched me the most was at the very end, right as I was about to leave. He talked about how writers have very unglamourous lives. Philip Jose Farmer apparantly ended up working twelve hours a day at a milk bottle cleaning plant. I think it touched me so much because hanging out with professionals in such close quarters (two of the panels I went to had less than a dozen people in them, and we just talked back and forth), it made my goal of being published more real, as if simply being around these people makes the goal more real, less of a dream.
It also made me realize I need to read more. Half the books they were talking about I didn't know. Granted, most of them were sci-fi. Second, I realize I have been in my hole for far too long, and I needed to emerge. Well, I did, and now I"m happy to crawl back.

So I have now actually interacted with a Famous Person. Oooohhhh... My big moment was at a discussion about censorship, and Ellison was asking this soft spoken guy where he drew the line. The guy said he had no problem with consenting adults, as long as it was in private. Whereupon I added that sexual acts in public involved a nonconsensual audience. Ellison was pleased by this and said something, I don't remember what. The important this is that he asked my name, and forever after, everyone in the room knew my name, and one guy even referred back to my comment later. (Hey, I've got to get my ego-boost somehow. I wasn't exactly outgoing, but I didn't freeze up like I do sometimes in crowds, and I'm damn proud of myself.)