Had a great time today with "Space Westerns" and "Perfecting Your Locations." I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if SDCC is the Caesar's Palace of conventions, then ArmadilloCon is Cheers. It's just really great to shift gears over into the slow lane, hang out with some really fun book-people, and spend the weekend with what feels like 200 of my best friends. I'm in hog heaven. (BTW, if anybody from AC is reading this right now, come find me at my reading at 9:00 tonight - I'm thinking less reading and more chatting about fantasy, Westerns, fantasy Westerns, and all the fun you can have writing dialect for fishmen. It'll be grand!)
And you might enjoy this next bit if you went to that Perfecting Your Locations, panel. Our man Elim has made it to the border - the Etascado River - with all those yearling horses in tow, looking for Sil. At the moment, he's as long on foreboding as he is short on clues.
It was a toad-colored thing, slow and withered by drought, and went sidewinding through a streambed as wide and dry as a sloughed-off second skin. Elim approached its crusty banks with full respect as he organized his posse for a drink: this here was the end of home – the end of Eaden itself – and that over there was wild country. Elim couldn't have said how far across its fifty-yard girth his right to live ended, and would not be caught leaving so much as a wet boot-print in the sand.
But the land beyond was so exactly like the land before, both stretches of wild autumn savannah as matched and identical as two halves of a ham sandwich, that Elim could understand perfectly how the first white men here had reckoned they had as much right to the one as the other, and helped themselves right to it. It wasn't until much later, long after they'd made a whole blood tributary out of this tired old water here, that anyone had started talking about borders.
Unfortunately, their most devil-minded descendant seemed to have inherited their slippery ambition. There was no sign of Sil anywhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment