That Second Cup of Coffee

Trying to recap the Opening Ceremonies would be a disservice to the Guests of Honor and the ToastMaster. Mr. Scalzi was very entertaining and a living example why you should never be introduced by someone who knows where the bodies are buried. He did tell a story on himself that involved being licked from the nape of the neck to the forehead by a grown man in a kilt that was worth the price of admission, but you pretty much had to be there. Suffice it to say, just about all of the honorees killed.

What I can talk about is the “Dessert” that followed. All the Guests of Honor were turned loose with pastries and non-alcoholic beverages to mix with the con-goers in an informal environment.

A short aside to explain my coffee habit. I drank exactly zero cups of coffee during the first 38 years of my life, excluding the “toy coffees” from Starbucks,¹ but to fuel my recent habit of getting up at 5:45 AM to write, I started exploring the utility of “the other caffeine source”.² In my experimenting, I discovered that one cup of regular coffee no more than two hours after a meal makes me essentially invulnerable to indigestion,³ allowing me to make really stupid eating decisions and get away scot-free. Imagine digging for diamonds and striking oil. End of aside.

Since I’d eaten at Burger King on the drive across the state, I drank a cup with two sugars immediately, avoiding eye-contact and reviewing my notes while I waited for my targets to appear. My cup was empty before they’d even been corralled into the meeting room; I’m not what you’d call a sipper.

There were plenty of stupid⁴ meal decisions on the pastry tables, but I resisted them to avoid the embarrassment of spraying a literary giant with tiramisu while I interrogated him/her about daily page counts.

Eventually the honorees had procured what my wife calls “a little something-something” and been descended upon by their loyal fans.

A confession: I can, with a bit of effort, be the most extroverted, outwardly-confident fellow in the room. I’ve given presentations to packed rooms at technical conferences and competed in Toastmasters speech competitions. One-on-one, I will talk until one of us loses consciousness.⁵ But I am by nature a high-functioning introvert.

Therefore, there was no way I was elbowing my way into a crowd to ask how much of the manuscript was “there” in first draft and how much had to be excavated during rewrites. I also wasn’t going in empty-handed, so I got another cup of coffee while the crowd around Scott thinned.

Mistake #2 of the conference, right there.⁶

By the time I did finally get a chance to talk with Scott,⁷ I felt decidedly… weird. The way the crocodile in Peter Pan feels when the alarm clock it swallowed goes off: my ribcage started vibrating.

I effortlessly developed a split personality: half having a conversation with my favorite YA author, half analyzing what the hell was going on inside my chest. Our exchanges over the next five minutes went something like this:

ME: How did you manage to write, what, nine books in two years? How many hours a day do you spend writing? MY BRAIN: What is the matter with you? Get a grip. You’re acting like you’re on a first date with the prom queen or something. SCOTT: They actually came out over four years, but I wrote them over a more extended period. A thousand words a day is two-and-a-half books a year. I’m taking a year to write Leviathan. MY BRAIN: Are your hands shaking? No. Good. Maybe he won’t notice. Just don’t pass out. [...memory discontinuity...] SCOTT: The Warrior series by Erin Hunter is great. It’s for slightly younger readers, but really good. They’re cats, but they have a society, they go to war… MY BRAIN: Did you just give him your empty coffee cup to hold while you wrote that down? Are you out of your mind? Put it on the floor, you fool! What is he, your valet?

He said Leviathan, his current project, will be a trilogy with a companion guide, but I’ll be buggered if I can remember what it’s about, or if I even possessed the presence of mind to ask…

(From an SFFworld.com interview, 2006-09-02) I’m working on an alternative history set in a world of advanced Edwardian biotechnology, during the first days of World War I. There are living airships and diesel-powered walkers, and the romantic leads are the son of Archduke Ferdinand and a cross-dressing young Scottish girl. It’s called Leviathan and is, obviously, the first of a trilogy.

Awesome. Thank you, Google. I could have asked about steampunk and whether he gets bound up in the physics-and-math possibilities of his creations, which would be a dumb question because most of the technology in UGLIES is based around levitation, but it would have been something.

At some point, the bouncers dragged me into the corner, stuck a dunce cap on my head and gave me noogies while his handlers whisked him off to safety.⁸

Sigh. Have I mentioned yet that it was my first time being a con-goer? It’s also my first time being a human being; I’m sure upon reincarnation I will always be flawless, amusing and well-scrubbed.

Next up, stealing Shakespeare blind and “the best 50’s SF of the 21st century.”

1. I’m always up for a Grande White Chocolate Cafe Mocha [↩]
2. The first, as any computer programmer can tell you, is Mountain Dew [↩]
3. though not heartburn [↩]
4. i.e., luscious [↩]
5. A fact my insomniac wife regularly uses to her advantage [↩]
6. For those of you keeping score at home, the first was not bringing cash to the sign-in [↩]
7. I did have to elbow one guy out of the way to do it; I’m not that introverted [↩]
8. OK, that’s not precisely the way it happened, but he probably wished it was. [↩]