Exactly one month from today, Michelle and I will be jetting off to Denver, CO, via Tokyo. The plan is to arrive in Denver on the Monday just before the Denvention 3 Worldcon begins–which gives us just two days to get over a lot of jetlag. When we went to Toronto for Torcon in 2003 (which meant four consecutive flights, 33 hours of flying, and 12 timezones crossed), we arrived two days before the event, and had a very strange, stressful and sleepy time of it. Just as we were starting to feel reasonably acclimatised to Toronto time, it was time to come home again. It looks like we have that same exciting experience before us again.
Not that I mind. As incredibly unpleasant as modern air travel can be these days, I still love it. I don’t know what it is. The aeroplane geek in me gets off on the minutia of the actual flying. I like to know just which kinds of plane we’ll be on. I always ask our travel agent if this time we get to go on the A380 and he always says no (though if we went via Singapore Airlines, and were prepared to start the trip in Sydney, we could get the great behemoth). This time we’ve got a succession of 747s and 737s ahead of us, with a sprinkling of A320s. Which tells me, hmm, squeezy seating!
I love airports, too, which I know is also weird. Always have. Many years ago, when I was 14-15, I actually had a part-time job at Perth Airport, in the car park. My dad worked there, too, in the booths where you had to pay for how long you’d been parked. I couldn’t figure out how to operate the ticket-checking machinery, so they had me out in the car park itself, often at odd hours of the night, directing the traffic pouring into the airport to available parking spots. It always seems like it was raining, and horribly cold, when I think about it these days. I had a bright yellow vinyl raincoat, and the rain was always good at getting inside the coat, trickling down my teenage back. Often had to wear sunglasses in the middle of the night, too, because of wankers flashing their high-beams at me. Such sport! Such hilarity!
The thing was, though, that when the flow of traffic was light or just not happening, I spent a lot of time hanging out in the Terminal, soaking up the vibes of the place, watching planes taking off and landing. I remember the strange yellowish light gleaming on the skins of planes from around the world, from the sodium vapour spotlights on the airside, the smell of burning kerosene, the whine of spinning engines powering up or down. It was magic. I longed to be on one of those planes, going somewhere exotic, but figured I never would. We were, if not exactly poor, then not exactly made of money, either.
These days, the airport is all different. The old Terminal was demolished years ago to make way for a shiny new Domestic Terminal, and an equally shiny International Terminal. Over the next 20 years these two buildings will be somehow amalgamated (or possibly simply demolished and rebuilt) into one sprawling facility. As it is now, the two Terminals are quite some distance apart, and considered to be woefully inadequate for the high levels of traffic currently pouring through them.
In any case, back to the forthcoming trip: 10 hours to Tokyo, a six hour layover, then another 10 hours to San Francisco, a few hours there, then two and a half hours to Denver. We stay in Denver for just that week, then it’s off to Calgary, CA, Canada, where the following weekend I’ll be a guest at Con-Version 24 , the big local convention. Even though I’ve known about the whole “you’ll be the author guest of honour!” thing for some time now, it still kind of freaks me out. Me? Really? Seriously? Apparently, yes. I’m dead chuffed–but also deeply humbled. I hope I do a good job. I worry a lot about somehow blowing it, or somehow offending people, or not being interesting enough. Then, the day after Con-Version wraps, we head home, more or less following the same path. Once we get here, I expect Michelle will go straight to bed (she always goes straight to bed once we get home), and I’ll go over to my parents’ place to tell them about it. They get concerned.
This time, though, I’m taking a laptop, and I’m hoping to write updates about the trip as we go. Previously on these trips I’ve relied on snaffling access to public computers in airports, etc, or computers available at the Worldcons–and have always been disappointed. Yes, there are public computers at the conventions, but you just can’t get near them for the queues. This time I’ll just need a wifi connection, so with a bit of luck I’ll be more able to do updates. Writing posts while fried out of my brain on jetlag and fatigue should be big fun! I’ll be sure to provide photos so you can judge for yourself.
In Other News:
The other exciting thing going on right now is this: as we speak my new book, TIME MACHINES REPAIRED WHILE-U-WAIT , is at the printers, being turned into an actual, for real, book that you will be able to buy. OMG! I cannot wait to see it, to smell the pages, to feel the heft of it. The Worldcon people have given me a public reading slot–now I just need to make sure there are people there to hear it! The folks in Calgary, I’m thinking, will probably also be keen to let me read from it.
I was working on the galley proofs of the book for three frantic weeks last month. At first it looked like I would have only a week, tops, to go through the manuscript, looking for problems, and that suggested I would only have time for one, maybe two, correction cycles. As it happens, I had a lot more time than that, and we managed five correction cycles. And by the fifth cycle I was still finding problems in the text that needed sorting out. I have no doubt that even when I’m doing readings, I’ll still be spotting new problems. Such things breed like cockroaches in the dark. You can never get rid of all of them. Still, that all said, I’m guardedly optimistic about the book. It turned out, I think, fairly well. Or at any rate, it closely resembles what I had in mind for the project when I first set out on it at the beginning of last year–which is something you can almost never say about a book, in my experience. You start out with Idea X in mind, but what you end up with, after all that time and work, is something else. With a bit of luck the thing you end up with is still worthwhile. I’ve had plenty of experience with books that started out with some great idea, and turned to crap by the time I was done. Ugh.
More soon…
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