Clearly by the Monday of Worldcon I was too tired to even be writing about it a week later. :)
I’d actually been doing very well up until the Monday morning, really. I hadn’t been getting enough sleep, but apparently going home to sleep in my own bed made a real difference, because I didn’t get properly incoherent until Monday, and usually Saturday afternoon is when that sets in with these long cons.
I forgot that on Sunday (I think) I was sitting around chatting and our illustrious guest of honor, Diane Duane, swept by, causing me to bellow, “DIANE!” and leap up to hug her and give her fudge. That 20 seconds was the only time I spent with her over the weekend, which is fair, since I can actually, like, go out to pizza with her if we organize ourselves enough, whereas about 5800 other people at the convention have no such possibility. :)
Anyway, Monday morning I had a kaffeeclatsch at 10am, which I just kind of assumed either no one would be at, or that it would be filled with my friends who were taking pity on me for a meet-up at that hour on the last day of the convention. But it was not so! There were many people, most of whom I didn’t know or only knew online! That was great! Thank you, ridiculous people who showed up at 10am to talk to me! ♥ :)
I went and got something to eat after that, then took myself to the on-site bar, sat down, told Twitter where I was and that I had fudge, and let people come to me. It worked very well and I had a great couple of hours chatting with people, including the WONDERFUL HIGHLIGHT of meeting Genevieve Cogman, who is one of the went-on-to-get-published crew of us who were online gamers playing MUSHes in the early 1990s. (There are a lot of us from that group whose names you might know: Jim Butcher. Fred Hicks & Rob Donoghue of Evil Hat Productions. Cam Banks. Chrysoula Tzavelas. Nick Mamatas was adjacent to me, a load of the people knew him but I didn’t. A bunch of others I’m totally forgetting right now, but basically, this gaming group was like the 1990s version of the Inklings or the…dang it, I can’t remember what the Emma Bull/Steven Brust/Pamela Dean/etc crew called themselves, but like them too.) ANYWAY, the POINT IS, after like TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, I FINALLY MET GENEVIEVE IN REAL LIFE and it was VERY EXCITING and I’m still SO THRILLED!!!!! *happy flails*!!!!
After a while the fudge was nearly gone and my friend Ruth’s late-teens son arrived for a piece and mentioned he’d gotten to meet/talk to Sarah Rees Brennan & Holly Black, which had been great. I lamented the fact that I’d barely seen Sarah, and he knew where she was, so he took me–and this was great, it was like going somewhere with MY kid when he’s determined to not let me be distracted–he took me up to Holly’s book signing by way of moving me along every time I stopped to talk to someone. I’d have never made it up there without him, so I totally appreciated it. :)
I almost managed a full greeting to Holly, and gave Sarah the box of remaining pieces of fudge, and was chatting when Ellen Kushner, who had also been doing a signing, noticed Holly and came down to talk, too. We’d met a couple of times in real life before, but I reintroduced myself (it’s much more impressive for me to meet ELLEN KUSHNER than it is for her to meet me :)) and we talked and (thanks to Irish Kate) there was a brief rendition of “If I Were A Rich Man” and at some point it came out that on Livejournal I’d been mizkit, and Ellen cried, “*You’re* mizkit? I *do* know you! We’re *friends*!”, which was quite delightful. :)
*laughs* And Sarah broke out the fudge, and then somehow–oh, it was because I’d made cookies for her the other day–she mentioned I was a good baker as well as candy-maker, and Ellen sidled over and said, “Do you make…*pie*?” So now I’ve promised her a pie or several, and look forward to the opportunity to make those for her. :)
I finally had to leave that gathering, which was too bad because it was such fun, but I really *did* have to leave, because I had to go down to the dealer’s room and get the copies of my books that hadn’t sold over the weekend. To my great delight, I’d sold nearly everything and had hardly anything to carry home! Yay! :)
I was pretty determined, at that point, to head home early, but then I ran into ANOTHER friend whom I’d promised a chat with, and said “We’ll take 15 minutes!” and 65 minutes later had delayed them very very much… :) But we had a lot of fun talking, and I was very glad to have actually gotten a chance to catch up and answer some questions for them.
It took another hour and a half to slip out of the con after that, what with saying goodbye and everything, so my ‘early home’ turned out to be ‘7:30pm’ which wasn’t exactly early, but overall it was well, well worth it. What a wonderful week I had. ♥