In which our intrepid hero discovers that sci-fi conventions are miraculous and fun, and that the shortest distance between two points depends entirely on how well your city is planned.  With special appearances by Ian Tregillis, Melinda Snodgrass, S.C. Butler, Corry Lee and the Kollin Bros.  And Steve Jobs, who fails to come through in a pinch while fighting the angry gods of the Boston streets.

My friend in Boston, Errick, picked me up from the airport and we went out to lunch.  On our way out, he discovered that his tire was flat so we pulled out the spare and the jack from the trunk.  On one side of the jack is a tab that you spin to raise the jack, with a hole through the middle to put the bar.  The bar we were apparently missing.  We cased the car for something that would fit into the hole but came up with nothing.  I figured I'd give my aluminum-barrelled Zebra F-301 pen a try, so I stuck it through the hole and started turning.  I was surprised when it actually held together and started lifting the car off the ground.  We got the silly little balloon tire put on and jacked the car down.  My pen now had two pretty serious dents on either side of it, but it still worked--and I had a good story to start the weekend with.

I met Ian Tregillis and Melinda Snodgrass in the hotel lobby and we talked for a while before going for dinner.  After that we had a panel that was run by Melinda, Ian and S. C. Butler (whom I am now privileged to call 'Sam') that was about treating your writing like a business.  There were about as many people in the audience as on the panel, so they had us all sit in a circle and just talk about things.  There was a CPA in the audience who was very enlightening about how and when you can take deductions.  At this point I was thinking more about absorbing the con experience rather than trying to sell myself so I didn't bring up how marketing is part of running a business, but Melinda and Ian both said they wished I'd mentioned it as marketing is a vital part of it.  So much for my plan of just absorbing and not being active about my own business.  I resolved not to be timid.  

Down at the lobby we started drinking and were joined by Stacy, an assistant editor at Tor and Dani and Eytan Kollin, two of her writers.  I was telling people that Sam reminded me of Dennis Miller, and didn't he look and sound just like him?  Anybody who has met Sam would think I was insane, but they were too polite to say anything.  

"I'll have to think about that," Ian told me when I finally figured out who Sam reminded me of.  "I wouldn't have thought that at all."

I realized after I got home that who I meant was Dennis Leary.  I can't believe Ian and his wonderful friends continued to talk to me, a clearly insane person.

We headed down to the galleria for the opening night party and at some point we were joined by Corry L. Lee, a particle physics teacher at Harvard who had recently finished a book and was looking for an agent.  A lot of people gave me their free drink tickets, which I promptly used.  I must have looked as insane as I sounded, a man in desperate need of a beer.  

I browsed the art with Ian and we were both very impressed with the guest artist, Stephan Martiniere.  His style looked familiar to me, and it turned out that it was because he was the one who did the covers for Jay Lake's Mainspring and Escapement, featuring blimps and vertical cities.  I loved those books, and loved the covers.  Now I made it my mission to meet Stephan and ask him about it as I knew next to nothing about cover design.  The problem was, everyone described him as 'French' which is useless when looking for someone in a crowd.  I went back to the bar and asked the next random stranger I saw if he knew Stephan and the guy actually did.  He walked me over and I introduced myself.  It turns out that when people say he looks 'French' they mean he wears designer glasses.  

I found out that Stephan started doing covers relatively recently.  He said he was an art director at ID (remember Doom?) who does the concept art for the games as well as the marketing materials.  Then he told me that he works on movies, including the recent Star Wars pictures.  I spent about an hour asking him questions about his process, style, influences and work.   He said he rarely reads the books he does cover art for, but that he'd read Mainspring and enjoyed it very much.  He agreed with me that the idea of a vertical city is very captivating.

I wandered around the galleria with Ian and had a brilliant time catching up with him and Melinda, blissfully unaware of my own insanity.

Most of the rest of the evening I hung out with Sam, who is a very fun person to hang out with.  I wasn't sure if he would take offense or not to me thinking he resembled Dennis Miller, so I didn't mention it.  Score one for timidity!  Though I'm sure Sam thinks I'm insane for completely different reasons.  I kind of wish I had recorded the evening as all the free drink tickets made my recollection a little fuzzy.  There was something about furries and filking.  I stumbled off to bed around midnight.

By the morning I had gotten over my fear of talking to famous authors, and went to a few panels on physics and a few more on illustration.  I met Bob Eggleton, Dave Seeley and Daniel Dos Santos, who are all awesome artists.  I thought maybe I might be able to do some book covers, so I talked to Irene Gallo, the art director at Tor.  Then I went to look at the artist's show and realized that I'm not even near their class even though Dan appeared to like my eyeball art.  Those guys are really good.

Ian, Corry, Melinda and I had lunch at the same Irish pub hotel restaurant (downtown Boston is kind of a wasteland) and talked about more physics.  The afternoon was more panels.

I found Ian in line getting his copy of Jo Walton's latest book signed and we discussed a new project we've been kicking around.  

Ian and I went in to Sam's reading but if I wanted to have dinner with anyone else I'd have to find somebody.  I headed down to the lobby to make dinner plans with whoever I could drum up because Ian said Corry was down there.  When I got back up to Sam's reading I found that the door was locked and I went back down to talk to Stacy who said he was a very good reader.  Thanks, Stacy.  Later I got a signed copy of Sam's book and he wrote that he hoped that I wouldn't need to use that pen to jack up a car at the next con.  Stacy, Corry, Eytan, Dani and I crammed ourselves into Dani's Friend's little Civic and went in search of a little Ethiopian restaurant in Cambrige.  The food was awesome.  

Dani actually asked me to write up an estimate on his site, which I never expected to happen.  Normally I hand out cards and eventually hear back from people, but not quite so immediately.  We talked shop for a bit as he's in advertising in LA.  Then, since Stacy paid for dinner, Dani insisted that we drive her back to her parent's house.  It was around 9pm, about when the Tor party was starting, but they said you never want to show up early for those anyway.  

The iPhone is really an exquisite piece of engineering.  Like any piece of art, it is not designed to actually be touched, because to touch an iPhone is to sully it with your dirty fingerprints and hand grease. Steve Jobs sends along a little black iPhone-shaped hanky in the packaging because he knows that you're going to want to touch his flawless work with your grubby unworthy fingers.  I named my phone Steve.  It seemed appropriate.  This is going somewhere, bear with me.

So I bring Steve along to Boskone, thinking he will come in handy to quickly demo some sites or my artwork, and because he comes with a camera and a GPS system linked to Google maps.  The camera worked fine when there was enough light and Flash won't work unless I jailbreak Steve, which left Google maps and GPS to save the day.  And save the day he didn't.

We're driving Stacy the Tor editor to her parent's house in New Hampshire (or within insult-hurling distance, anyway) and as Stacy has presumably been to her parent's house before she knows the way.  She was sure to drill into us the way back to Boston: 128 south to 1 and then straight on till morning.  She must have assumed that Corry would know how to get us back to the hotel once we drove I-93 into the heart of Boston.  Corry is more of a mass transit person though, which we discovered soon after skidding onto the highway and not quite spectacularly flipping the car over in a shower of sparks and bloody carnage.  That Civic packed with people was not so much mass transit as density transit.  The difference is subtle but crucial.

"Which exit do we get off on?" I asked, suddenly mortified that my sentence ended with a preposition in a car full of authors.

"I don't really know," Corry answered.  "Let's get there and I'll see if I can figure it out."  She was going to use the Force.  That seemed to me like a reasonable thing for a particle physics teacher to do on a mini-road trip during a sci-fi convention.

At that Dani asked me to produce Steve, which after a day of taking blurry photos, demoing Flashless websites and tiny 3-inch masterpieces was informing me that I should plug him in soon.  I plotted the route and told everyone that we would be looking for exit 20A and then making a left onto Summer.  That's exactly two turns to reach the hotel, if you include the exit ramp which is more of a gentle curve.  And if you exclude lane changes, which Eytan believes should be sharp turns. Especially when traveling nearly 90 mph down the pothole-ridden Highway 1.  Those turns are understandably missing from the Google route.

"I put on my turn signal," Eytan retorts indignantly.  He is correct, however I don't believe the turn signal had time to inform other drivers of his intentions before we were in the other lane and it was switched off.  Light just doesn't travel that fast.  I begin to suspect his day job is in the pit crew for a NASCAR team and he's working on his moves for his eventual promotion to driver.  I'm convinced that for training purposes NASCAR drivers fill a Honda Civic with people and drive through the Big Dig looking for exit 20A.  This is too bad, since if we die a horrible flaming death in this tunnel I will never get the opportunity to read The Unincorporated Man, the book that Eytan and Dani wrote together which is coming out in the next month or so.  It sounds very interesting.

"Wait, turn here!" Corry exclaims as one of the many forks in the tunnel appear suddenly from around a curve.  "That looks familiar."  Eytan is very good at taking direct turn commands regardless of lane and we were soon shooting down the exit on two wheels. 

"I don't think that was the right exit," I said.  "Steve didn't want us to turn there."  We saw some signs for Logan airport and Corry explained that it felt right.  That was good enough for Luke, so it was good enough for me.  Right before the airport we decided to exit the highway and turn around when Corry announced that this was not a very good neighborhood.  I fired up Steve, who again politely suggested that I plug him in but soldiered on anyway. 

The funny thing about Google maps is that it gives more weight to highways than to surface streets, even if you are only a few blocks to your destination.  And the funny thing about Boston is that Google might just be right, but there's no way to know and I didn't have time to really explore.  I replotted our course and it wanted to send us up I-93 North, back to New Hampshire.  After one balk we circled around and tried to trust Google's instincts.  It became clear quickly that we would need to exit and find another entrance to I-93 South because contrary to Steve's instructions, there is no U-turn on the interstate.  

Normal cities have an underpass or an overpass at an exit that you can cross and just two left turns later you're back on the highway.  Since Boston was built on a massive Boston-shaped Indian burial ground the roads not only have bad dispositions but evil intentions as well.  I believe they eat lost tourists.

"Turn left NOW!" Corry yelled.  Eytan seemed uncharacteristically unsure.  After more yelling he swerved left and we soon saw signs for 93 South.

"I just cut that car off," he said as if it were important.  We had nearly driven over two surly pedestrians (they call them 'Southies' here) after our first misguided exit from the freeway, and cars seemed much more capable of handling the impact of our crowded borrowed Civic.  

After nearly driving the wrong way down a one-way street, we were back on the highway again and repeating "20A" over and over again, the mantra that would hold the evil Indian spirits at arm's length and soothe the angry road gods.  "What's after exit 20A?" Dani asked me, and Steve replied that we'd be taking a left on Summer.  I started to feel like Gwen in Galaxy Quest.  I had one job in that car.  It was stupid but I was going to do it.

The other funny thing about Boston streets is that the ones you need to turn on are rarely labeled, as if the city planners decided that if you're not already hopelessly lost a few signs aren't going to help anyway.  If you don't know how to get where you're going, you probably don't belong there.  Arrogant tourists.  Go back to your gridded charmless cities and don't come back until you have at least a thousand five-way intersections and a four-billion dollar Interstate tunnel system.

Eventually we overcame our testosterone, stopped near a nice-looking grad student and asked him for directions.  His instructions were repeated three times and became more detailed each time as if he felt like we were not capable of following directions.  I'm not sure what gave him that impression, but the fact that we had in our possession a GPS unit with satellite imagery and yet were still hopelessly lost might have been one of the clues.  The final directions included such features as a traffic cop and road work as well as street names that he made us repeat twice.

Dani and Eytan dropped Corry and I off at the hotel where we made our way up to the Tor party, understandably in need of a beer.  They were going to park the car across the street and be right up.  They arrived perhaps 45 minutes later, and I didn't ask how finding a parking space went.  I didn't want to know.  All I knew is that Steve had failed me utterly and completely.  Not only that, Steve was covered with dried sweaty smudges that the little black hanky couldn't remove no matter how much I tried, and he wouldn't respond to my pleas to take photos.  It was very literary and metaphorical.

I discovered later that not only had I missed James Morrow's reading from his latest book, but I missed him giving away free signed copies to anyone who showed up.  That wasn't in my program booklet, so I probably would have missed him anyway.  I asked a few people if they knew what James looked like, and they said he was just at the Tor party but left moments earlier.  I went back inside to drown my frustration in more beer.

When we got to the Tor party we left our jackets in the closet even though my room was just down the hall.  Getting beer was way more important than walking an extra hundred feet.  I had a great time listening to Chad Orzel patiently answer my amateur hack physicist questions about quantum entanglement and time travel.  Pablo Defendini of tor.com thought my idea of writing an interactive story with Ian might have some merit and he gave me his card.

The slackers eventually cleared out and I sat down with Dan Dos Santos and Pablo and played some cards.  We headed down to the bar along with Stephan and were joined by Martha somebody, an editor from Popular Science magazine who had run out of business cards.  We ordered large blue drinks that tasted like coconuts and Dan checked out my eyeball art and appeared to like it.

Eventually we stumbled back upstairs and I got Stephan to write something in French on my print of his cover for Mainspring.  Something French.  "Sure," he said, "but I won't translate it for you.  He wrote, "un stylo qui souleve une bagnolle peut surement souleve un dirigeable" which Google translated as, "a pen which raised a bagnolle can probably raised an airship." I later discovered that 'ma bagnolle' is French slang for 'my car' but it took a serious Google search to unearth this.  Many thanks, Stephan.  Google thinks your tenses disagree, but I think we all know how I feel about Google by now.

By 4:30am we were watching YouTube videos of R. Kelly's rap opera and I realized that I needed to get some sleep before my very early plane ride.  I was disappointed to discover that I'd be missing Ian and Melinda's readings that morning because of bad planning on my part.  I headed back to my room and crashed.  In retrospect I should have tried to change my tickets and damn the cost, but I was not thinking very clearly that night.

At 8am I remembered that I'd left my jacket in the Tor suite.  I called the room and got Dan, who stayed there instead of trying to drive home or sleep on someone else's floor.  I know they were all up after I left, so he can't have been asleep long when I called.  Sorry, Dan.  If you hadn't remembered that it was me who woke you, please don't read this.  Though it is lucky for me that you decided to stay or nobody would have been in that room and I would have lost my jacket at Boskone.  An offering extracted at knifepoint from the angry gods of the Boston roads.

This trip confirmed my suspicions about writers and the market for good design in the sci-fi community.  As anywhere, the people who are savvy about treating their writing as a business will also understand the need for good design and marketing.  I had a great time meeting the artists, writers and editors in the sci-fi community and I know I can make a place for myself among them.  Ian said that becoming a writer involved a little talent and a lot of luck; Sam added that luck will bring you the opportunity to hit a grand slam, but it's still up to you to hit it out of the park.  But I know things will work out well, because the whole time I felt like I was with my kind, and they were very welcoming.