BoucherCon ’09 Thursday
The problem with filling BoucherCons with meetings is that there is no time to listen to panels, which I enjoy doing. And yesterday I was in two panels, plus half an hour sitting the Mystery News desk, and a meeting with a nice gent from the Lilly library who are collecting papers for their archives and would rather enjoy mine, and then there were the two dinners.
All of which was compounded by a return of the cough under the effects of the air conditioning, which made me sound like the swine version of Typhoid Mary. There are signs scattered around the convention halls proclaiming:
shake
free BoucherCon
but without a dash there it’s difficult to know whether we are being exhorted to shimmy, and that BCon has been declared free, or if it is merely a lack of grammar police with Sharpies here. In any case, people are shaking (hands) and even kissing, so if the entire mystery world takes to their sickbeds next week, you’ll know why.
The day began and ended with Sherlock Holmes, first with a panel on the Baker Street Irregulars for which I offered the requisite note of outsider levity, then the second dinner with buddy Les Klinger and Head Holmes Honcho Mike Whelan, at which projects were mooted and names were called, some of them genial. Sherlockians are nothing if not committed to their opinions.
In between, I said hello to a hundred friends, participated in another panel run by the quickest moderator in the midwest, Chris Grabenstein, and had a great dinner with the assembled Friends of Russell at a German place with food that overflowed the platter-sized plates. I contributed two wedges of Stilton cheese, so they could discover what Russell’s passion is all about; some of them even professed to like it, although an hour later one of the more delicate ladies admitted that her mouth was still rather burning…
And so to bed, before 11:00, in an attempt to continue on my feet the rest of the weekend.
Breakfast now with my editor, at which Other Projects Will be Mooted, and then back into the fray.
I wish I could have gone.