I left my shadow waiting down the road for me awhile…

March has marched on out, and here is April, letting me know that it’s farther along in the season than I think, and I’d better get my literal butt into literal shape and push myself more in the working out department, and the writing department, and the spring cleaning department – all the departments.

I am a tad behind in blogging, due to, well, everything, and so this will be a State of the Lindsey post to get my mind in order.

At the beginning of March I was down in the Bay area. I went to FogCon, which is a small, fun little con, and I was on the radio on KPFA, with my aunt Kris Welch. She has a radio program on Fridays and Saturdays, and you can check out the interview in the archive if you go to https://kpfa.org/ and look up the date, which was March 6th at 1230 pm or so. Kris interviewed me, and also Lori Ann White, who is a local writer and my friend. (I stayed with her while I was there, because I love my Lori.) We talk about SF/F conventions in general, and A Ragged Magic in specific. Yay! It was so much fun. I was a bit nervous, and worried I was talking too fast, but I was told it went well.

The convention itself was fun, although it felt a bit disjointed to me, which was mostly because we weren’t staying there at the hotel, so we were on the road a lot. Lori was kind enough to drive me all over the Bay area and back so I could visit her, and go to this con, and see fambly. (Lori is kind of fambly, so I was with fambly all that weekend and it was great.) (Except for the plugged-up ear that would not unplug, due to the tail end of the month of teh sick, and teh crud, and teh bleah. That part sucked.) We hung out with friends new and known, and on Saturday night we played a game called Slash, which is kind of like Apples to Apples but with making up OTPs (One True Pairings) (i.e. romantic relationships) with the names on the cards. The names were real people as well as fictional characters, and it is a blast to play. I love it more than all the other versions of that kind of game I have played, and I want to get it. Thanks to our new friends and our already known friends for inviting us to play. And thanks to Gary for letting us more social types drag him along, because he was hilarious.

On Sunday evening Lori and I went back to KPFA and watched the honoring of some of KPFA’s notable women for International Women’s Day, and then had dinner with some more notable women, notably my aunt Kris and cousin Nicolas, and Nicolas’ notable baby Mandela (who is cute enough to melt your face, I am not kidding, this kid is working it). Then on Monday Lori drove me back north (again!) to Kris’ and Nicolas’ house, and my parents came over from Davis, too, and it was just a Welchy time. So much Welch, I’m telling you. My dad is used to it, but I hope Lori was amused and entertained.

Moving ahead in time, Norwescon was here in the Seattle area (Seatac, but it counts) this past weekend. I did not officially attend, but I did go Friday night to have dinner with my editor/publisher, and some of the other authors/artists in our house. We are a fun, silly group, and I like hanging out with us. There are some interesting things going on, publishing-wise, that I will reveal at a later date.

We (Scott and I, along with the Per Aspera crew) then headed over to the convention, and went to parties. Scott and I were there as unofficial “hey these people know us enough to just let us in” people. Not really ghosting, but not really attending, either. Good times were had. Saturday I attended the con as a bar-con attendee; which means I spent most of my time in the bar. But I did go to Julie McGalliard’s book launch party, where we celebrated her book coming out, “Waking Up Naked in Strange Places,” which is fantastic and you should totally check it out. http://gothhouse.com/ Julie and I work together at our day jobs (well, we work for the same place, near one another) and sometimes we have lunch or snack breaks and brainstorm story. I’m so excited to see the story in book form, which I had her sign her very own self. She sold out of books this weekend, and people had to place orders. So exciting! Go Julie!

I spent the rest of Saturday hanging with various and sundry wonderful people, meeting some new wonderful people, reconnecting with wonderful people I haven’t seen in a long time, and laughing myself silly. Well, sillier. Good times. Even though I couldn’t afford to officially attend, and I didn’t get see everyone I would have liked to, and I had to drive the long drive home both nights, I’m so glad I went.

Sunday was a day of not going to the con. I had modern rehearsal in the afternoon, and since I didn’t get back to my apartment until after 2am, I didn’t get out of bed until 11. And then I laid about in a stupor for a good long time, feeling old and logy. I am old, Father William. It is very hard on me to stay up until 2 anymore. Plus the sugar-drunk is probably not great for me, either. But it was worth it. (For those all six of you who read this who might not already know, I do not get actually drunk, because alcohol tastes icky, but I usually have way too much sugar at a party.)

Rehearsals for this year’s dance performance are in full swing and I’m hanging in there, even with the 2+ weeks of dancing I missed in Feb due to being sick, and the month+ of other workouts I didn’t have. But it does mean that I’m not in the shape I wanted to be in at this point, and the rehearsals are harder on my body than I’d like. So – this means more workouts, and pushing myself (carefully) and maybe even (bleah!) lifting weights. (BLEAH!) (Hate weights. Hates them. So boring.) I would rather do thousands of crunches and pushups (to pumping fun music) than lift weights. But if I want to get the muscles stronger faster, I might have to. Stupid sickness, making me behind where I want to be. Also I need to get back on track with my knee PT exercises, because ow, old knees.

On the GOOD side of all of that, the dances are So Much Fun and we are SO DAMN AWESOME so if you are local to Seattle, and like to watch fun dancers kicking All The Ass, you should be ready to buy your tickets for the show. The show – TAKE||PAUSE – will be June 12-13, tickets on sale May 1st, and there will be jazz, modern, Broadway, ballet, hip-hop, and tap dancing in it. I’m in 3 pieces – well, 5. Well, 3. Well, it depends on how you count. I’m in one jazz, one modern, and one Broadway jazz, but that Broadway is really 3 pieces, that were going to be a medley, but due to costume changes and other constraints, are now spread throughout the show. So it’s kind of 3 pieces, although for rehearsal purposes it’s 1. We’re dancing the Chorus Line audition piece, part of All That Jazz, and Too Darn Hot – and we are so very Broadway, with All The Cheese. (Our upcoming t-shirt: “If it gets too pretty, it loses the cheese.”) You will love it. The modern piece has started rehearsing now, and there’s going to be some fun partnering in it (I need stronger quads right now, holy shmolies), and the jazz is going very well, lots of Charleston type moves and spins. My knees hate me, but I’m working on them.

Writing-wise, this past month was partially a bust. I blame being sick for so long. I did get some done, and I had a breakthrough of some pretty cool proportions. I spoke with Fabulous Editor Jak ™ about all of it over the weekend, and I’m going to go ahead with my breakthrough and follow the story. It’s a little nerve-wracking, but I’m still working, and still plugging away on it. If I think too hard about how much further there is to go, I get overwhelmed and it all stops. So I have to just keep working on groups of scenes and hope it all strings together into some kind of coherent whole in the end. I feel like I sort of almost kind of know what I might be doing. Ish. Which is about par for the course for writing, so I guess it’s going well.

So that’s the rather long State of the Lindsey wrap-up report for the month of March and beginning of April. I’d better get back to it – it being All the Things. Get to writing, people, and take your dance breaks, and Rock On.

Title is from “Cloudy” by Simon and Garfunkel

2 thoughts on “I left my shadow waiting down the road for me awhile…

  1. I’d like to make it to FogCon sometime. Thanks for the insight regarding it. I agree, time to get all the departments in order :p So much to do, so little time. Hope you get more writing time soon!

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