I met Jack (
crrazyjane) on my second night there as me, Cas and Deb Layne (deborahlive) headed out for dinner. If I remember right, we were walking down a street towards a bar that Cas and I had eaten in the night before, and which had made pizzas too big to fit on the table. We didn't end up eating there again, thankfully, but we were just heading in that direction with the knowledge that down there was food. Jack had the look of someone who had just spend the day at a sci fi convention and was looking for either alcohol or suicide to redeem her, and we all ended up at a place whose idea of a salad was to include sausages. Another night, Hannah Wolf Bowen (buymeaclue) agreed to let me shave her head and we walked about four of five blocks in the cold down to a chemist, who, in the American style of chemists, seemed a little more like a convenience store than a place where you could actually get your medication filled. We ended up with a shaver that needed to be charged, unfortunately, and so it never happened, though she promised me that her head would be shaved the next day. I don't think she ever did that. I also met Alaya Johnson (utsusemia), who I managed to convince to go to a bar because it was a dive, but awesome in it's diveness. I seem to remember a conversation with Jack and me telling Alaya how the more of a dive a bar was, the better it was, and I considered making that into a dialogue for the comic, but I felt there were already too many characters in it at this time. Likewise, I had to throw out the first time I met Sean Wallace (oldcharliebrown) and he said I could take what I wanted from the Prime table, since he owed me. I'd sort've prepared myself for things to be difficult when I met him, but Wallace wasn't a bad sort, and in truth he's not; though I did have to laugh when I walked into a party and found him sitting in a large, black chair, with a semi circle of young writers sitting at the floor of his feet. I tried making that into a comic as well.But, no matter how 'true' Nowhere Near Savannah is, I have to tweak things around, or chop things out at times. Good things, too, at times. I never expected to meet Jack at World Fantasy, but it's coming up to ten months or so since then, and we still shoot the shit through emails, often complaining about the price of ham. It would've been nice if I could've slotted her into the comic, but there was never a way. Another example of this involves Alisa K (
girliejones) who crashed at my place the night before catching her plane to New York. I used the time to introduce her and Cas, since they were suppose to be sharing a room later on--this got changed--and Cas bought over this bottle of something he called Raqea. Or something spelt very similar. Apparently, his girlfriend's grandmother had bought it back from Czechoslovakia, and it was this illegal booze of the potent kind. What was strange about it was that it came in this old wine decanter, clearly having never seen its own bottle, or at least to me. In fact, I remember, real clearly, after taking the first drink of this shit that could only be compared to paint thinner, that it was nothing but moonshine, and that Charlie's grandmother was going back to the old country and, with her friends, filling up a bathtub of homemade moonshine.About a month later, I learnt that I was right about that, but it was a secret, and shhhh.
So shhhhh.
It was kind of a shame to cut this stuff out, but narrative necessity, really. After all, I'd spent more than enough time talking about the behaviour of my friends, and it was now time to bring myself out and paint unflattering pictures. Turns out I needed a trilogy to do that, though.
(Cross posted to benpeek.com. Have you been there? It has naked pictures of pretty people who aren't me.)
