CoffeeBear.net

A refresh­ing night’s sleep –in my own bead– and then back to the con. I started off the day lis­ten­ing to Cory read from the new book he’s work­ing on. It’s another young-adult novel, deal­ing with social-technological issues and sounds pretty inter­est­ing. After the read­ing was over Cory took ques­tions for a bit and some­body in the crowd asked a ques­tion along the lines of “was he con­cerned that he’d ever run out of ideas”. To which Cory replied,

It’s the 21st cen­tury; if you can’t come up with nine science-fiction ideas before break­fast, you’re not even trying.

After the read­ing was over, I fetched the New-Pi sal­ads we’d picked up for Cory and waited in the auto­graph line so I could give them to him. The line got down to the last 4 peo­ple, 3 males and one female. The first guy’s name is Mark, he gets his book signed and walks off. The sec­ond guy comes up to get his book signed and his name is also Mark. The coin­ci­dence of hav­ing three Marks all right there got to Cory a bit and he remarked on it. The women in the line popped up with a “reas­sur­ing” com­ment that her name wasn’t Mark. To which I replied that it was “no mark against her”. Appro­pri­ate groan­ing accorded and it my was turn to reas­sure her that my wife would beat me later for that pun. Then I gave Cory his sal­ads and he dis­ap­peared off to his room for lunch.

While I went off and played some board games. Puerto Rico was fun, but rather com­pli­cated for us to be play­ing in the very noisy game room with a bunch of peo­ple who’d never played it before. Then it was time to head off to the Guest of Honor Inter­view panel, where Rusty Hevelin was inter­view­ing ICON’s author, artist and fan guests of honor. It was a fun time, both for the answers and for the guests’ reactions when Rusty asked some of his ques­tions. After the inter­view panel was over, I found out Cory was really feel­ing the jet lag and wanted to lay down for a while. I told him that worked great actu­ally, because there was a longer break after his next panel which meant we could take him a bit far­ther from the hotel for a nicer dinner.

So Michelle & I helped out at the con-suite for a bit, then I caught the end of another panel and it was sud­denly 7 o’clock and time to take Cory to din­ner. It turned out that a friend of ours was look­ing for some­body to go eat with and Cory gra­ciously allowed her to join us. We all trooped out to the car and drove out to our favorite Indian restau­rant, Taste of India. The food appeared to be a hit all-around1. The din­ner con­ver­sa­tion though made me really glad our friend joined us.

She works on really inter­est­ing space/science stuff, ana­lyz­ing research data from satel­lites and what not. So nat­u­rally we intro­duced her to Cory as our “res­i­dent rocket-scientist”. Cory imme­di­ately jumped onto that topic and started ask­ing all sorts of ques­tions about her work. It was while he was ques­tion­ing her that I real­ized how intim­i­dated Cory makes me feel. Intim­i­dated isn’t quite the right word, though it is a part of the prob­lem. My real job doesn’t have any of the pos­si­ble broad, social impact like Cory’s writ­ing and I also don’t want to be “that guy” geek­ing out at Cory when he’s try­ing to eat a nice dinner2. This means I can’t talk about work, I can’t talk geek (too easy to cross the geek­ing out line) which leaves me with top­ics I feel totally under pre­pared to dis­cuss with some­body who’s spent years work­ing on at very high lev­els. *sigh*

1There were com­ments ear­lier in the day that indi­cated Cory liked the New-Pi sal­ads bet­ter than Pan­era as well.
2Geeking out like that in my mind would be a rude­ness that a host should never show to a guest.