Mad Hatters at the Cocteau

Good time this weekend in snowy Santa Fe. That’s me in the slash hat.

[ pic : Rebecca Roanhorse! from my left up there across to the right: Katherine Vaz, Ellen Datlow, Matt Kressl, Kris Dikeman ]
What you can’t see? There’s slashers all on the hatband:

Guess Ghostface is kind of criminally tilted (sorry, Billy and Stu), and the jewel of them all is the werewolf, but slashers on a Slash hat is the real joke. Werewolves? Werewolves are never the joke.

Anyway, we talked Alice and “Alis” (my story. we all talked about our own stories, to start things off) and I think I misremembered an old SyFy miniseries out loud for all—who were too polite to call me on it—then we signed a truckload of books, and I saw an old yellow friend from one of the other times I’ve been on this excellent little stage:

And now Mapping will be a slender volume on this shelf as well, I  guess. Very cool. So nice of George to always host us and hang out and just generally be who he is:

[ pic by Sidi Vicious (pictured, too, somehow) ]
And, while I didn’t snap any pics of all the wonderful excellent amazing hats from the Mad Hatter Contest—I mention it’s for this anthology?

—while I didn’t get THOSE pics, I did get to pose in this one. I forget who actually took it (Lucy Taylor, maybe/probably? Sarena Ulibarri?):

Then, the next morning? I got to enter this into the machine at the gym for the first time:

After which I got so lost and signal-less in the snowy mountains over Santa Fe in a rental car that my seven-hour drive was closer to eleven. But, speaking of that gym at the Hotel Santa Fe, the stairway UP to it has a completely startling photo-realistic life-size dude painted on the wall:

And, as I guess it turns out, I can’t actually write any words of import after showing him there in his shorty robe, looking so smug, reminding me of all the moments of terror he’s gifted me.

So, until next update: stay gold, or at least try to act like you are.

Author: SGJ