Back from Tuscaloosa, from 2010: A Space Oddity, at the University of Alabama. I drove down with Peg Duthie (she drove, I navigated incompetently*). We got a little lost finding David’s house, and drove past our new favourite business name four times: Moon Winx Lodge. David and his wife and daughter were charming and welcoming and have one of those awesome cool old houses with loads of personality and endless stuff to look at.

The convention seemed reasonably well-attended for its first year, I thought. I went to the talks on anthropology in science fiction and on the War of the Worlds radio drama that caused such a panic when it was broadcast, as well as Jack McDevitt’s talk on how to get rejected (which Lou Anders joined in on). I was part of a panel discussion on submission etiquette with Peg and David, and read “Sundowning” to a small crowd and then listened to David read from Nursery Rhyme Noir. We were supposed to have a poetry reading in the evening, too, but everybody except the organizers pretty much cleared out at supper time, so we ended up just hanging out with a few people (including artist Steve Cooper, whose work was really cool). Drove back this morning and am relaxing with Mary Alexandra Agner’s The Doors of the Body.

*Two of the doctors I support in my day job have travelled or are travelling to the University of Alabama at Birmingham this month, so I had University of Alabama at Birmingham on my mind and Google mapped directions to Birmingham, instead of Tuscaloosa. We got in Peg’s car, and she said, “so how do we get to Tuscaloosa,” and realizing my mistake I looked sadly at my map and said, “Well, this isn’t going to help us.”