So late Monday night I got back from Portland, and Tuesday I had to teach (since Miami-Dade College doesn't have Spring Break the same time as the University of Miami), but Spring Break re-started Tuesday night as everyone went out to South Beach, where the Clevelander looked like something out of one of those ridiculous MTV Spring Break specials.

Far too early on Wednesday, I took a rental car and drove up to Cape Coral to hang out with my friend and Clarion West classmate Meghan, who's on her Spring Break from the University of Florida up north. We picked Cape Coral because it's about halfway between her bit of Florida and mine, but it also has the advantage of an excellent name. It combines Florida-sounding words ("Cape" and "Coral") in a way that doesn't sound quite real. If I were making up a Florida town to set a short story in, it would sound exactly like that. Or better yet, to set an absolutely ridiculous book in. "The Hardy Boys and the Adventure of Cape Coral...."

Anyway, it was nice. Not much to do in Cape Coral, but we got lunch, went bowling, went out for coffee/tea, I got my ass repeatedly kicked at the pool table, and we went out to dinner at a jazz club on a little island on the outskirts of the area. All great fun.

Then on Thursday, I went down to Fort Lauderdale, registered for ICFA (for those who don't know, that'd be the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, a fusion sf convention/academic conference held in these parts every year) and said quick hi's to Ellen, Nalo and Ted Chiang. While I was still in Ft. Lauderdale, I went down to the ocean. I'd forgotten to bring swim trunks, but I waded a bit, then grabbed some food at that little Mexican cantina by the beach I used to grab dinner at before crit group meets in Ft. Lauderdale (you can tell they're trying for a certain atmosphere of run-downess when they serve margaritas in glass jars), then went over to the Borders bookstore, where I could sit in the outdoor cafe seating looking at the water while sipping a mocha and writing. (Oh, and pick up the current issue of F&SF, which dosn't seem to be carried anywhere in Miami.)

At this point, I'm about 3/4 of the way through a new short story, tentatively entitled "The Truth About 9/11." As you might guess from that title, it may well be one of those story ideas that seems fun and playful to me, but probably seems pointless and/or in bad taste to everyone else. We shall see.

On Friday, I had good intentions of getting back to Ft. Lauderdale in time to go to Geoff Ryman's Guest of Honor reading at 9:30 PM. The convention hotel is 45 minutes from my house, and I left at 8:15, so by all rights I should have gotten there by 9, but, well, Spring Break, south Florida..... You get the picture. Bleh. It was almost 10 when I got there, so I just wandered over to the bar. I got a mojito and was waved over to Ellen Datlow's table, where I hung out for a while, then I got a call from East Lansing and got up to take it, picked up my drink while I took the phone call and was waved over to Nalo Hopkinson's table.

This is one of the great advantages of having been to Clarion: even if (like me) you have an absolute aversion to self-conscious "mingling," and prefer to just hang out with people you know and, if and when it happens, get to know new people in a slower, more haphazard and organic way, at least the people you *do* know are pretty cool.

And Ryman was hanging out with Nalo anyway, so even though I missed his reading, I got to have an interesting conversation with him about James Bond. (In his view, the only two "good" Bond movies were "From Russia With Love" and "Goldfinger." I myself am very fond of the new one, which he thought was just OK.)

Hanging out with Nalo was a blast as always, but it meant I got back to Miami pretty late, slept in way later than I wanted to, and just barely got back to Ft. Lauderdale the next day in time for the monthly meeting of SFSFS (that'd be the South Florida Science Fiction Society), which was held in the ICFA convention hotel this month. Good to make it, though, since I won a raffle copy of Joe Hill's "Heart-Shaped Box," which I'd been meaning to read, as well as (better yet) a free parking pass for the hotel. Following the meeting, I hung out poolside for a while with Ellen, then with the Castros, then with Nalo. I went out to the ICFA cocktail reception (at which, ironically enough, I had no cocktail, the line to the bar being way too long) and chatted with Ted Chiang for a bit for the zillionth round of the Chinese Room Argument discussion before the chicks started coming out in force to bat their eyelashes at him and ask him to sign their copies of his book. (The guy has charisma.)

After dinner and everything, I didn't get back to Miami until 11:30, at which point I started to get calls asking if I wanted to go out to South Beach, which ordinarily I would have jumped at, but..... No. Not so much.

A lot of people say they find cons exhausting. Personally, I really don't, certainly not as a general rule. If anything, quite the oppsite. Staying up late hanging out over the weekend is business as usual for me anyway (I suspect that a lot of the people who find cons exhausting are morning people), but getting to do it with people I see far too rarely is, if anything, incredibly energizing.

That said.... Given the amount of driving this week (after so many months of carlessness), the getting up early, stacking things on each other.... Last night, just going to sleep sounded like a *much* better idea. (Today, I return the rental car and go back to the usual state of pedestrian-hood, which is a mixed bag. One of these days I will inevitably break down and buy a new car, but not just yet.) Next weekend is the recruitment weekend, where they fly down the prospective grad students for a weekend of seduction into Miami (which I have to organize as part of my assistantship....hmm, I should really get on that), and meanwhile there are papers to grade, short stories to finish, yadayadaya, but meanwhile, it's been a better than usual Spring Break.