March 31, 2008 @ 6:35 pm

I had meant to write this last night, but I’ve been busy coding the new issue of ChiZine (which should be going live tomorrow).
Phew, what a weekend. It was an event even before I got to Ad Astra on Saturday. Here’s the skinny:
Friday afternoon I get a phone call from my wife while I’m at work. She tells me she’s experiencing abdominal pains, and she thinks it might be her appendix. I tell her to go to the ER right away, but she says she wants to wait to get a hold of her family doctor and see what he says. The guy tells her to go to the ER, so she gets her mom to take her, and I leave work to meet them.
I won’t give you the full play-by-play, because we were at the hospital for eight hours that night, but the end result is that after some tests and a CT scan, the doctor could find nothing wrong with her. Her white blood cell count was normal, so she wasn’t fighting anything, and her appendix was fine. Very odd. The doctor said the only thing he could think of was that she had some low-grade virus or infection, small enough that it wasn’t showing up on their tests. His treatment: Tylenol and Advil.
It was definitely an ordeal, but the important part is that she’s fine and healthy. Crazy way to spend your Friday night, though.
At the time it was looking like we were going to have to cancel all of our weekend plans, but after the doctor’s diagnosis, we decided to try and salvage what we could. Kat didn’t want me to miss my convention, since it’s the only time of the year I get to hang out with my horror peeps. I didn’t care about that since her health was my main priority, but she still wanted to go to Toronto and visit our friends (the original plan), seeing as how she was still in some pain and wanted something to distract her.
So we left for Toronto early Saturday morning. I dropped Kat off at our friends’ new house near the Danforth, and then I zipped up the DVP to the Crowne Plaza, where Ad Astra was taking place. They were in the midst of some construction and as a result everyone had to do valet parking, which I had never done before (more on that later).
The con was really, really great. I spent most of the morning cruising the panels with the talented Gemma Files, and her equally talented hubster, Stephen J. Barringer. I attended Gemma’s reading, as well, during which she read from a couple of forthcoming stories, and the first chapter of her novel-in-progress. Very good stuff.
I cruised the dealers room, but it didn’t really turn my crank. It was a bigger room than the one at World Horror Con, but I guess that seven weeks on strike makes me a bit wary about spending money on books I don’t really need. Oh well.
In the afternoon we hooked up with the larger horror writers group, including guys I met at WHC, like Brett Savory and Michael Kelly, and new blokes such as Simon Strantzas (who, according to rumour, has a story coming out in Best New Horror), Richard Gavin, and Michael Colangelo. I also spoke a bit with Sèphera Girón and Michael Rowe.
There are people who are nice and people who are talented, and while it’s rare to meet people with both qualities, I was lucky enough to spend the entire day with a whole whack of them. Lots of great shop talk and energizing conversation.
Ad Astra is, primarily, a sci-fi convention, but since us Canadian writers don’t have an annual horror con, AD seems to be where we congregate. It felt like the rest of the con was kind of flowing around us, which was fine by me. I didn’t really know anyone except the horror people, although I did bump into a bunch of people from my Toronto Trek days, which was a nice little surprise.
I ended up leaving around 11 pm. I saw Robert J. Sawyer while I was waiting for the valet to get my car. It seemed he and his party were waiting for theirs as well. It was one of those awkward moments where I would have liked to have said hello, seeing as how we had already met last year at WHC, but it didn’t feel right, so I stuck to my side of the lobby.
So all and all, despite a wacky start, it was a good weekend and I was glad I went. I got to attend the convention, chatted with my horror peeps, saw our friends’ new house, and most important of all, Kathryn is happy and healthy.
All is well.




