Getting Fingerprinted

I had to go to the school district headquarters to get fingerprinted.

The odd thing about the district headquarters is just how much they fulfill the stereotypes. The place has paint, panelling, and architecture straight out of the 1970s. It looks and feels like you've just walked into a coming-of-age script for people my age. Oddly enough, they were just as dingy in 1977 as they are now.

It took two tries. I apparently have faint fingerprints, and the machine they used, a glorified scanner, had trouble seeing the ridges.

It was a faintly surreal experience, with a patient woman massaging a lotion into my fingers to make the ridges more pronounced, then instructing me on how to relax so she could do the "finger rolls" and "finger slaps" necessary to collect all the information needed.

It took about half an hour. And now my prints get sent off to Washington. We shall see if my blatant crossing-the-streets against the "no crossing" sign scofflawry registers.

Friday Norwescon: The panels.

I will say that I got more out of this Norwescon than usual. Maybe I'm just feeling better about writing. The current story is tragically bogged down in the "not another café scene, please," and I'm trying to come up with a different setting, but that's do-able.

The one major assignment of the day was "outline a book in an hour." Being stupid and Elf, I did three at a time. I had five minutes for each part. Two minutes per novel, and one for the short story. Piece o' cake. I wish I could say I was getting anything useful out of them, but when I was done I did characterize one as "What if the child Kal-El's spaceship had fallen on Hobbiton, as written by Iain M. Banks." The other made me realize that the plots of two other books in the Infinite Trunk are more or less the same, which is not necessarily a bad thing: a sword & sorcery novel will have a markedly different feel, and market, from a hard-science pastiche.

The other panel of the day was "How to write smut." I nearly took over the panel, but instead rudely topped from the bottom. I didn't learn much (duh), since I've long since graduated to reading James Salter and D.H. Lawrence for tips. When it was over, I apologized for my rudeness, but a friend of mine said, in front of the panelists, "You should have been up there. You virtually invented alt.sex.stories yourself."

Well, yeah, but I still had help.

And then came the dramatic ending.

Saturday: I'm feeling very mellow

Saturday, we started late. Well, relatively late. Despite the incident the night before, we were all out of bed by nine, although with breakfast and such we weren't there until almost 11. Even worse, every panel I tried to go to was full, and I couldn't go in.

I wrote almost 2000 words today. I did get to the other sex scene panel, where we agreed that "cum" was shorthand for "I'm a 14 year old boy who's never had sex," that Literotica is the best website out there for casual smut consumption, and that it desperately needs competent competition. "His eyes fell upon her breasts" is appropriate only in Zombie Porn. [Rule 34].

I also spent 85 minutes in line waiting to get Jim Butcher's autograph for Lisakit. I don't even read him. Worse, I didn't bring Sails and Sorcery (Renee' Stern was there), nor anything from my Neal Stephenson collection, and he was there and he had zero people asking for his autograph. I did get Jay Lake to sign my copy of The Sky that Wraps.

The girls danced the night away.

Sunday: The winddown

Sunday, I made it to Jay Lake's reading, which was fun. He looked like he was doing okay, given his recent medical adventures. Other than that, it was more meeting in the hall face-time with friends and fans. I hit the dealer's room and came home with a stack of books, an entire half-shelf full to read between now and Foolscap.

We left Kouryou-chan at home. Her sister was over at her mother's for the Easter day celebration. When she woke up, Lisakit gave her a ride to the hotel and I caught up with her at the front door. Kids with cellphones for the win.

There wasn't much left, though. Kouryou-chan did some of the Easter stuff, I did one last panel, and that was it. We registered for next year, said goodbye to all the friends we could again, and headed out.