The climax of World Fantasy is, of course, the banquet. They clear out the biggest hall and fill it with round tables and put a stage at one end. There is a catered dinner, and then they announce the winners of that year’s World Fantasy awards. Publishers can reserve entire tables for their employees and friends, but mostly it’s a seat-yourself affair.
This leads to the phenomenon that occurs when you have a group of people who essentially share interests, but who do not all know each other. I’ve observed this at World Fantasy banquets: you have molecules of people who all know each other, and these glob together and take over entire tables. The result being that, if you don’t have a pre-arranged group of friends, it can be a little daunting to find a seat. My mother and I have therefore developed a system in which we simply select the table with the best view of the stage and sit there—but apart from each other. We do this so that we don’t appear so clique-ish, and also so we have more of an opportunity to talk to people we might not otherwise know.
Last year at World Fantasy I sat in between a con chairman and an editor. We chatted about the con, his con, books, fantasy, and stuff. When it came out that I was a writer (which I thought almost went without saying but hey) the editor—a charming woman who’d come to the banquet at the last minute after her flight was canceled and a friend gave her his ticket—turned to me and said: “You are going to send me a story for our anthology, right?”
“I… am?” I said.
The editor, who turned to be Adria Laycraft, explained about a project she was working on with a friend. Briefly, it was to be an anthology of urban Green Man stories. Charles de Lint was going to write them an introduction, and they were open for submissions until the end of November.
We bantered back and forth, the end result being that I went away with her card and a promise to send her anything if “something came up.”
This happens to me a lot at cons. I meet people, they have ideas. There is the vague promise that something might come of it. In my experience, something rarely does. People disappear back into their own worlds, and even if you exchange business cards the chances of them getting in touch with you are slim. I assumed this encounter would likely be more of the same.
Except… after the con, when I was home and entering the info from all the cards I had collected, I remembered Adria and her project. I went to the website she’d told me about, and I was intrigued. But I’d never written anything with the Green Man in it, and I knew I didn’t have it in me to write a story “to-order” as it were.
Except… then I got an idea. I’d been visiting my aunt in her city, biking around on residential streets, through tunnels and over pedestrian bridges. As a country-raised person none of these hidden corners of greenery struck me as particularly wild, but they did hold within them the possibility for a story. I wondered what wild things clung to these little pockets, and what would happen if you stumbled into them at just the wrong (or right?) time. What unusual characters would you meet?
The idea spawned a drawing. Two characters staring at each other, and I knew there was a story behind them.
The idea festered (germinated?) and eventually evolved (grew?) into a story. I wrote it down. I did it in one sitting over the course of a few hours on a fall afternoon. I showed it to my Wonderful Mother. She read it and said: “This is wonderful. They are totally going to want it.”
I was skeptical. I have terrible luck with these sorts of things, and my native inner critic assured me that there would be plenty more stories they would probably like better. But I’d enjoyed my conversation with Adria, and it helped to remember that there were real people on the other end of the submission form.
I sent the story, telling myself firmly that nothing would come of it.
I moved on to other projects. Blessedly, I forgot about the whole matter until I received an email in January cheerfully informing me that “…they were in the final round of picking stories,” and mine was still under consideration.
“Well of course they’re still considering it,” my mother told me. “They’re totally going to buy it.”
I went away and hyperventilated for a while, then went back to painting Year of the God-Fox pages. I was still skeptical.
All of the above, of course, is simply a lengthy lead-in to an announcement I should have made at the top of this journal: on October 2nd (this coming Wednesday) Bitten by Books is hosting an online book launch for Urban Green Man: an Archetype of Renewal, edited by Adria Laycraft and Janice Blaine, featuring an introduction by Charles de Lint and… yes… the first appearance of my short story “Abandon All —-”
You can order a copy of the book here and read more info about the book launch here. There will also be a physical book launch at Bakka-Phoenix Books on October 19th at 3:00 PM, so if you’re in Toronto you might want to catch that. Obviously I won’t be there, but I will be at the online launch on October 2nd, tearing up the chat and answering questions. I’d love to see you there.
Goldeen Ogawa is a writer, illustrator and cartoonist. You can email her at goldeenogawa@gmail.com or peck at her on Twitter @GrimbyTweets.
