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Oct. 18th, 2005 12:04 pmI am still happy and full from the fantastic dinner that Andrea made for us last night. She made pork chops and corn and some fantastic butterscotch-chocolate brownies. Yum! I am so very indebted to her for cooking for me. I'm lucky she likes to; the most complicated thing I can produce in a kitchen is a microwaved burrito.
Yesterday was wonderful. Andrea and I spent the evening together, having dinner, braiding hair, and entering more books into our Librarything directory.
Librarything is so much fun. I've wanted to catalog my household books in a better way since middle school and it's great to finally get around to it. We worked through about half the row of books on the floor (overflow due to lack of shelf space), just enough to get to the paperback shelves. Having done a lot of Andrea's social work books, I wanted to do something different and start on our sci-fi and fantasy stuff. The floor having been cleared, Andrea sat down in front of the steelcase unit that we've packed three-deep with those ubiquitous (at least in fen households) uniformly sized, soft-cover volumes of fiction with bright covers emblazoned with dragons or spaceships or wizards or far-flung planets or ancient glowing artifacts or ancient mysterious moons or...
The first shelf contained a bunch of my TSR-published novels set in various D&D worlds. In my case, largely The Forgotten Realms or the universe of Spelljammer. As we went through them one by one, adding in ISBN numbers and titles and a wide array of tags ("Hmm; this one needs 'fantasy', 'fiction', 'd&d', 'forgotten realms', 'the dark elf trilogy', and 'inscribed') my thoughts kept drifting back to the place that I acquired most of them.
Gen-con was such a wonder to me in the years when I was going. I would wait for it all year, every month spent in anticipation of the happiness to come. My two yearly holidays were Christmas, and GenCon.
The last couple evenings before my parents and their friends gathered together for the trip to Milwaukee were spent packing stacks of books carefully into the biggest backpack I could find, hoping to meet all the TSR authors who were there every year to sign books and talk to their fans.
Of course, I didn't really talk to them. I was far too shy to do that. There were only two occasions when I had something remotely resembling a conversation with any of them. One year, standing in front of Robert Salvatore's booth, my set of The Dark Elf Trilogy in hand to be autographed, I asked the only question I could put together from a mind that had suddenly gone blank upon reaching the head of the line. "How do you pronounce Drizzt's name?" I was embarrassed for some time after that since that very issue was addressed in the books I was having him sign. The second occasion was in a wonderfully witty conversation where, responding to Ed Greenwood about the book he was signing with all the eloquence of a kindergartner reciting from his Weekly Reader, I said "I like Elminster." That still makes me blush. I'm sure neither of them remember me, but those are two of that kind of incident that just keep popping into my mind once in a long while, making me ask myself just what I was thinking...
Despite the nature of my experiences with the attending authors, I loved GenCon. I still do love the GenCon that was. In crystal clarity I remember walking through the TSR castle, the bright overhead lights making evenly spaced rows of bright white dots on the lenses of my glasses, looking at the rows of bright, crisp new books calling out to me from shelf after shelf. I remember the smell of the new convention center that first year after the Mecca and the throngs of people like me, with long hair, or doctor-who scarves, or shirts plastered in too many buttons to see the fabric. I remember sitting at the Games Library watching people going by and knowing that, even though I didn't quite know how to fit in, I was still home.
I just don't feel like there's much there for me at GenCon anymore since the last year in Milwaukee when they stopped running the games library. My parents and their friends had run the library for literally as long as I could remember. It gave me a home space in the crowds and without it, the convention just isn't as appealing. It isn't the same place I loved and I'm not that interested in going back. I wonder if my parents felt the same way when it moved off of the UW-Parkside campus so many years ago.
Books have so many memories for me. Few things are more intimately tied to my memories than my books. I wonder what other surprises await me in the stacks...
Yesterday was wonderful. Andrea and I spent the evening together, having dinner, braiding hair, and entering more books into our Librarything directory.
Librarything is so much fun. I've wanted to catalog my household books in a better way since middle school and it's great to finally get around to it. We worked through about half the row of books on the floor (overflow due to lack of shelf space), just enough to get to the paperback shelves. Having done a lot of Andrea's social work books, I wanted to do something different and start on our sci-fi and fantasy stuff. The floor having been cleared, Andrea sat down in front of the steelcase unit that we've packed three-deep with those ubiquitous (at least in fen households) uniformly sized, soft-cover volumes of fiction with bright covers emblazoned with dragons or spaceships or wizards or far-flung planets or ancient glowing artifacts or ancient mysterious moons or...
The first shelf contained a bunch of my TSR-published novels set in various D&D worlds. In my case, largely The Forgotten Realms or the universe of Spelljammer. As we went through them one by one, adding in ISBN numbers and titles and a wide array of tags ("Hmm; this one needs 'fantasy', 'fiction', 'd&d', 'forgotten realms', 'the dark elf trilogy', and 'inscribed') my thoughts kept drifting back to the place that I acquired most of them.
Gen-con was such a wonder to me in the years when I was going. I would wait for it all year, every month spent in anticipation of the happiness to come. My two yearly holidays were Christmas, and GenCon.
The last couple evenings before my parents and their friends gathered together for the trip to Milwaukee were spent packing stacks of books carefully into the biggest backpack I could find, hoping to meet all the TSR authors who were there every year to sign books and talk to their fans.
Of course, I didn't really talk to them. I was far too shy to do that. There were only two occasions when I had something remotely resembling a conversation with any of them. One year, standing in front of Robert Salvatore's booth, my set of The Dark Elf Trilogy in hand to be autographed, I asked the only question I could put together from a mind that had suddenly gone blank upon reaching the head of the line. "How do you pronounce Drizzt's name?" I was embarrassed for some time after that since that very issue was addressed in the books I was having him sign. The second occasion was in a wonderfully witty conversation where, responding to Ed Greenwood about the book he was signing with all the eloquence of a kindergartner reciting from his Weekly Reader, I said "I like Elminster." That still makes me blush. I'm sure neither of them remember me, but those are two of that kind of incident that just keep popping into my mind once in a long while, making me ask myself just what I was thinking...
Despite the nature of my experiences with the attending authors, I loved GenCon. I still do love the GenCon that was. In crystal clarity I remember walking through the TSR castle, the bright overhead lights making evenly spaced rows of bright white dots on the lenses of my glasses, looking at the rows of bright, crisp new books calling out to me from shelf after shelf. I remember the smell of the new convention center that first year after the Mecca and the throngs of people like me, with long hair, or doctor-who scarves, or shirts plastered in too many buttons to see the fabric. I remember sitting at the Games Library watching people going by and knowing that, even though I didn't quite know how to fit in, I was still home.
I just don't feel like there's much there for me at GenCon anymore since the last year in Milwaukee when they stopped running the games library. My parents and their friends had run the library for literally as long as I could remember. It gave me a home space in the crowds and without it, the convention just isn't as appealing. It isn't the same place I loved and I'm not that interested in going back. I wonder if my parents felt the same way when it moved off of the UW-Parkside campus so many years ago.
Books have so many memories for me. Few things are more intimately tied to my memories than my books. I wonder what other surprises await me in the stacks...
