Up at 3:30 am Omaha time to make my plane yesterday — that’s 1:30 am here on the West Coast. Both planes were late, but I got to the hotel around 1 pm all the same. Alan and his spouse had already checked in, so I had that easy. I went down to the dealer’s room, where I vegged at the Night Shade Books table all afternoon and yakked it up with whoever came by — had a couple of nice chats with Paul and Debbie of Wrigley-Cross.

Also hung with the Borderland Books folks, spent some time talking to Chris Roberson (recently interviewed by John Scalzi) as well as buying his book Paragaea: A Planetary Romance [ Amazon ]. Nice dinner with the Night Shade and Locus folks, some quality bar time, then the Borderlands and Bizarro parties, after which I crashed out — 22 hours after I’d gotten up.

And I banged out a book proposal for the sequel to Trial of Flowers on the way.

Maybe today I’ll be more alert and productive. Though my best bon mot of yesterday, complaining about how tired I was and my lack of partying of skills, was the plangent: “I used to be bullet-proof, now I’m not even bullet-resistant.”

Woke up this morning after a decent night’s sleep and went for a 5.4 mile walk this morning. Urban hiking in San Francisco — if you want hill work, this is the place. Route here if anyone’s really curious. Walked through Chinatown, North Beach, along the Embarcadero and back up through downtown more or less. Sadly my camera (old one, new one’s still in the shop, though ready to be picked up) ran out of batteries right about the time I hit Chinatown, and I was out so early I didn’t find an open bodega until I was almost back to the hotel.

A few photos to follow in a later post, but for now, in the department of truly pointless use of bandwidth, I took a little 11-second *.mov of a cable car track, because I happened to cross it at a service point where the rattle of the cable beneath the street was clearly audible.

Don’t forget the Teddy Bear Gun poll, I’ll close it tomorrow.