Black Gate Zeppelin to Dragon*Con Update Episode 4: Boys Smell
On the whole, I’m not opposed to traveling with boys. Generally speaking they are amusing companions particularly when refusing to ask directions, thereby winding you through mildly interesting places while attempting to locate the desired destination sans MapQuest. Along the route, in an effort to distract their hapless passengers from all the pointless meandering, they can generally be counted on for lively and revealing conversation about former girlfriends, prior arrests and entirely icky things done in frat houses; all of which become prime blackmail fodder for later use.
Therefore, I did not immediately dismiss Howard’s idea of coming along on a road-trip to the Atlanta Dragon*Con in the Black Gate zeppelin via the Canadian Rockies, Baja and Rhode Island. Frankly by the normal standards, it’s about as much planning as I’ve ever know these boys to do. Besides, just seeing the look on John’s face when he heard the whole plan would have been more than enough incentive in and of itself, but when I learned the zeppelin had enough cargo space to house the new batch of interns plus my blender, I was in.
Now several days into the trip we are, of course, hopelessly astray of the original brilliantly planned route, E.E. Knight keeps going on and on about the steaks at Le Cheveux Club Pour Les Hommes and how big his Mauser is, and in an attempt to get cell coverage John insists on going topside in spite of the turbulence, then throwing up over what I hope is Cleveland but at this point could just as easily be New Mexico.
And the overall conditions in this zeppelin are starting to deteriorate.
Who was the first person to write high fantasy?
The second issue of Bull Spec, Samuel Montgomery-Blinn’s quarterly print magazine of Speculative Fiction, arrived last week, with a spectacular cover by Vladimir Krizan.
There are indeed urban legends at work in the Collector’s market. For example, the entire print order of George Alec Effinger’s first novel, What Entropy Means to Me (Doubleday, 1972) was supposedly pulped before publication (almost certainly untrue).
“Imagine if Frodo had died during his journey and the One Ring had returned to Sauron.”
There’s a temporary lull in operations and the skies are clear over Oklahoma, so I thought I’d take the time to set the record straight about our expedition to Dragon*Con via the Black Gate zeppelin, the Harold Lamb. John described the 
Dark Worlds #5 (Summer 2010) is online at last.