Philcon, day 1

When I finally couldn't stay awake any longer last night, I crashed and had over eigh delicious sleep, the longest stretch of rack time in quite a while. I worked a bit, showered, and we hit South Street, a part-fashionable, part-funky Philly district.

Our first stop was lunch at Bridget Foy's, a place I wholeheartedly recommend. I had the mac and cheese, and Jennie went for the grilled cheese sandwich with tomato-fennel soup with a drizzle of soup. All three were yummy.

We crawled the shops and ended at Atomic City Comics, where I exhibited great self control and didn't buy a thing. I did try on at a previous place the $700 Affliction leather jacket, but I didn't love it enough to buy it on the spot. I'm still pondering it, though the price is certainly a factor.

From there we cabbed back to the hotel, where we encountered perhaps the least well organized SF con registration team I've yet seen. We registered, chatted with friends, and I called home.

At 7:00, I moderated a panel on military SF. My sense of the mindset of the folks who wrote the panel description was that they thought writers of military SF should be embarrassed at what they do, but no one was. The audience of not quite twenty folks--respectable given the dinner hour and the very hard to find location--seemed generally attentive and amused, so I shouldn't complain.

Dinner was back near South Street at Gayle, where an inventive chef delivered extremely tasty dishes while showing astonishing restraint in their menu descriptions. Rather than follow the modern vogue of listing every esoteric ingredient, this menu gave simple descriptions of complex dishes. The risotto fingers with truffle soy sabayon was superb, as was my venison.

After more work back at the hotel, I plowed into Slanted Jack and can now happily report that I have finished pass four. All that remains is for me to read the entire book from start to finish on my computer and make any necessary final corrections, tweaks, and other edits that strike my fancy. I hope to ship it to Toni sometime reasonably soon. Hurrah!