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.

This weekend I will be attending the Ad Astra convention in Toronto.

I’m looking to hang out with my horror writer peeps, but other than that I’ll be all on my lonesome.

So if you see me wandering around aimlessly, please come up and say hello.

The 9 Most Annoying People I Always See at the Bookstore.

It felt so good to be back to work today. That might sound crazy unless you’ve been on strike for any length of time.

Anyway, here’s how Post-Strike Ian looked this morning:

Note the major differences:

– Wearing a button-up shirt and topcoat, as opposed to my corduroy/flannel ensemble

– Black dress shoes instead of heavy brown workboots (finally got them worked in!)

– I’m now tanned, either from being out in the sun for seven weeks, or standing too close to the burn barrel, or maybe it’s just windburn

– I don’t smell like smoke and hot dogs (can’t quite tell from the picture)

– I’m much, much happier

I head back to work tomorrow after a seven-week strike and a couple of extra days of pseudo-vacation. Here’s a list of things I did yesterday and today:

– worked on my novel

– washed a load of laundry

– caught up on my ironing

– tried the Baconator burger at Wendy’s (pretty good)

– wrote an outline for a sf/comedy novel

– watched the first season of Arrested Development

– baked a cake

Now I’m about to head out to another of TrentU’s author lectures. Tonight it’s Linwood Barclay.

While working on my novel (which is coming along fine, btw), I got to thinking about short story collections. It’s generally agreed that they are a hard sell, because bookbuyers by and large don’t really care for them. Apparently even the collections of well-known successful authors never sell as well as their novels.

Even though I love short stories, I know a lot of readers don’t care for them. I don’t understand it, but I know it’s one of the realities of the business. I’ve heard that if you’re trying to get published, you should write a novel first, because it’s easier to sell a short story collection later on after you’ve got some of that first-novel cred. I’m sure there are plenty of writers who have published short stories collections first and done fine for themselves — Joe Hill is one that comes immediately to mind — but right now focusing on my novel seems to be what’s best for me. (Of course, if a publisher approached me and offered to publish a collection of my short fiction, I’d certainly be interested.)

Despite that, I do think about the collections I’d like to publish some day. One of them would obviously be horror, or a mishmash of horror, sf, and fantasy, but I’d also like to put together a book of my comedies and literary stories. I’ve written quite a few of them over the years, and I plan on writing many more, and they seem to sell as well as my genre work. I love writing about ghosts and monsters and psychics, but I think it’s stories like “Camp Zombie” and “The Kid Pool” that show my versatility as a writer, if only because genre writers tend to stick to their specific area of interest.

I like to think that because my stories are so diverse that I have a better chance of selling my work than if I wrote exclusively in one genre. It’s like a dart board, and the more darts you throw, the better your chances of scoring a bullseye. And I think the chances of my selling a collection of my short fiction are made better by having a novel under my belt. Especially if I can sell it to one of the big publishing houses.

Ahh, a guy can dream.

I’ve been keeping a bit of a secret these past seven weeks. Something I didn’t really want to advertise, for various reasons, and something I am finally now able to talk about.

On February 4th, the union at work, of which I am a member, decided to strike. The reasons were many, but the important part is that a deal was reached today and I go back to work next week. They’re actually doing a staggered return, with workers going back on the Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. I ended up drawing Wednesday, which means I’ll be enjoying an extra long Easter weekend. It’ll give me a chance to continue work on my novel, which I’m happy to report is going like gangbusters.

In addition to being the first day of spring, and the day the strike finally ended, today is also the day I received my copies of Bound for Evil. It’s an absolutely gorgeous book, my first appearance in a hardcover collection, and I’m extremely happy with it. Here’s a pic of the book next to my giant bag of Cadbury Mini-Eggs:

The book isn’t that small, but rather my bag o’ eggs is that big.

I’ll be in Oshawa visiting my parentals tomorrow, staying over night, and coming back for Easter dinner with Kathryn’s whole fam’damly on Saturday. Other than that, it looks like it’ll be a quiet weekend. I plan to get more work done on the novel, which is my main priority now.

Sent off my new story, “The Halloween Party,” which brings me back up to 30 stories currently lingering in slush-pile limbo.

I now officially have no excuse for not focusing all of my energy on za novel.

• Currently reading: The Names of the Dead, by Stewart O'Nan