Fending off forty screaming children with a balloon

And you think I'm joking, don't you?

Actually, the morning started off with a call from Bill Seney, the Sgt. Major of the Musketeer Auxiliary, reminding me that everyone was meeting one floor down in the SFF.Net Suite for the Musketeer Planning Breakfast, and was I planning on joining them any time soon?

As I was in my jammies at the time, I said, "Um. . .sure," and proceeded to go into Full Blown "Oh, My God I'm Late" mode. . .and realized that I was almost crippled from lack of sleep, walking around so much and general exhaustion. Lyndon, being the kind and wonderful husband that he is, offered to give me a massage, which I gratefully accepted. "I'll even pretend to be Swedish," he said.

I thought about it. "Can you say, 'The power of Christ compels you?'" I asked hopefully.

He gave me The Look™. "I love you, honey, but this whole Skarsgård thing is getting a little weird."

Fifteen minutes later (because yes, I'm just that good), I was knocking on the door of the suite. The rest of the usual suspects were already there, hashing out the performance order and giving the Cardinal (James Hartley) and his Henchwenches the lowdown on your average Musketeer performance. We also got our first view of the OOAK doll made of the Musketeer Captain (and yes, this thing looked exactly like Elizabeth Moon, down to a read carbon steel dagger and sword) that would be going into the EMF auction tomorrow. Mentally I had three hundred dollars put aside for bidding on this doll, it was that gorgeous.

After the get-together, I went back upstairs to collect some of my stuff and head over to the convention center to browse the dealer's room. There's this one jeweler who sells gorgeous opal jewelry, and I hung over his wares faunching after some of the more goregous pieces (unfortunately they're also expensive as hell, so faunching was all I did). I then stumbled across the dealer that sold Discworld stuff -- since Lyndon introduced me to Discworld and identified with Death (it's a long story), I bought him an utterly great t-shirt with a Paul Kirby illo of Death. . .holding a kitten. Hey, it's our 11th wedding anniversary tomorrow -- I need to give him SOMETHING cool for being forced to celebrate it at Worldcon.

After a quick lunch in the hotel restaurant, it was back to the room, drop off the swag, climb back into Musketeer gear and blow up 20 balloon swords, because it was time to head off to my 2:00 PM panel "Fencing for Kids." Luckily I'd mentioned this at the breakfast meeting, and Selina Rosen (who will forever be categorized as a goddess in my personal pantheon) offered to help me. Which was superb because when I walked into a room full of 40 screaming kids waving tinfoil-covered cardboard swords they'd just made, she greeted me with the info that the organizer wanted us to do a proper demo first, just to show the kids how the Pros do it.

Um. . .'kay. Unfortunately I'd left all my protective gear upstairs, so Selina lent me her spare mask and promised not to poke me too hard. We blocked off the front of the room and went through the usual weapons (epée, sabre, offhand weapon), then opened the floor up to the kids and turned them loose. The kids then proceeded to gang up on us, whacking us every which way with cardboard and balloon swords. So much for the innocence of childhood.

Selina then had the brilliant idea to have a tournament and start facing the kids off each other (mainly so that we could get a break, since we were both sweating like horses by that point) -- two kids would start, the first to make a touch won, and the loser would be replaced on the field by another fencer. We actually had a couple of kids who were damned good at fencing, especially this one little girl who was getting touches on kids almost twice her size.

Naturally there were a couple of tears when a kid lost the tourney, and a few of them got whacked really hard by an overenthusiastic opponent, but all in all the kids seemed to have a really good time. Selina took the losers to the other end of the room and got them involved in a melee while I ran the tournament, and I handed out SFWA Musketeer buttons to the winners. We started calming them down five minutes before the end of the hour, and the kid's programming organizer told us that we did a wonderful job and she'd love to have us come back and do it for Boskone and Arisia. I don't think that's going to be possible, what with Selina in Arkansas and me in Texas, but it's still nice to be told we did a good job (and many, many kudos must go to Selina, who is a wonderful child wrangler. The panel wouldn't have been half as much fun for the kids without her).

I staggered back to the room, took a shower, stretched out on the bed for a nap and promptly slept through my autographing session -- oops. Then again, I sincerely doubt anyone would've stopped by, so I don't feel THAT bad about it. By the time I did make a reappearance, I figured it was time to start making the party rounds, so I hit the Circlet Press party (their offerings and snack table are shown at left) since they were my first publishers, waved at Ctan although I don't think she saw me, then bopped over to the Liaden Lounge party, with the lovely and talented Steve Miller and Sharon Lee as hosts.

Around this time I somehow managed to hook up with Selina, Laura J. Underwood and Julia Kosatka (aka the Other Musketeers), who decided that they wanted to attend the Chesley Award reception in the Art Show and that we should really schlepp over there. Which we did, making rude comments and laughing like loons all the way.

I hadn't actually gotten a chance to see any of the artwork yet, so we spent an hour wandering through some absolutely gorgeous stuff and picking out what we'd bid on if we'd hit the Lotto before the con (well, hey, some of those pictures go for 30 grand, and quite rightly so). Selina found Don Maitz's booth and pointed out the cover art for her book RECYCLED and a super-cool skull and crossbones picture that would've been perfect for her (as she IS the Dread Pirate Rosen), then Don himself came over and told us a story about dressing up like a somewhat flamboyant pirate and being pulled over by a Florida cop who wanted to know if he had any swords in the car. Only in SF, I swear.

Oh, Selina also discovered a corollary to Yog's Law. When she went over to the bar to procure a beer, she discovered that it was a cash bar and came back rather miffed, announcing that beer was supposed to flow like water for writers, dammit. She then proceeded to come up with the following:

Yog's Law -- Money flows TO the writer.
Rosen's Corollary -- Beer flows THROUGH the writer.

Pure genius.

After awhile we decided to head back to the hotel and continue the party rounds, which wound up with us sitting in a corner of the SFWA suite being extremely loud and obnoxious, accosting Walter Jon Williams (since it's all about him, after all), and exposing a new young writer to the glory that is Mike Resnick (even if he won't fence with the Musketeers). Once I realized that the area where I was sitting had been collecting condensation from a nearby cooler (aka my ass was damp), we decided to blow that popcorn stand, go our separate ways and rejoin tomorrow for Selina's reading in the SFF.Net suite at noon.