Happy Presidents Day 2010

Caroline is off from school this week which makes the week kind of different. Next weekend she is going to Siblings Weekend with her sisters. It will be the first time all 4 girls will have been together since Ariel’s Bat Mitzvah.

The rest of Farpoint was short but fun. Caroline got to play with a couple of her con buddies. I got the car pack with Peter. And Peter did a panel along with selling some books. The drive back was pretty uneventful until we got within spitting distance of the city and we had to make a bunch of spilt second decisions. Then I remembered that it was Chinese New Year (Happy Year of the Tiger) so entering the city and getting up to 42nd street became a whole new challenge. We did so and Peter got to his meeting in time.

Bear Auction was splendid. The nice thing about going every year is that you meet people that you see there every year. You catch up on news and the rest while looking at these beautiful bears. I finally had the dime drop last night that a designer I admired is also an Icon in the doll making groups. I had chatted with her every year. Discussing the bear she designed and how she did it. I knew her by her first name and didn’t find out until this year what her last and nickname were. I have admired this woman’s work for years and used things that she wrote about in various doll magazines to improve my work. It was nice to say Thank You to her. I also got to show her a couple of my puppets which I brought to show the head of Broadway Bears to see if I can’t convince him to let me dress a bear or two. He liked them a lot and in about two weeks I plan to rattle his cage again.

Peter also got a pleasant surprise this year. Just about every year round January something strikes Peter and he writes a song based on a Broadway show tune and about supporting Broadway Bears. This year because he took Ariel to see Hair, he had the soundtrack of Hair stuck in his head. And so he wrote a Broadway Bear version of the title song Hair. Last night four cast members from the current Tribe sang his version on stage at BB Kings. Ariel got to meet them after the auction. So both of them were very happy.

Overall we had a good weekend and now are sorting out the rest of the week.

I am grateful that we made it to where we had to be mostly on time.

LJ Idol 6 Wk 14 The Place than can not be

Living with a writer can be interesting. You find yourself talking about the strangest things. The what-ifs or how would you do something are just part of the day. About a week ago Peter came out of his office and asked if I could help him with something. I said sure. He said turn around I need to figure out if I can strangle you from behind. I turned around and we worked for a bit figuring out how he might be able to strangle me from behind with his bare hands. I am sure if someone were to looking through the window, it would have looked like he was trying to kill me or at least domestic abuse. We sorted it out and he went down and wrote what he needed to write for the comic book he was working on.

I was a fan of Peter’s work before I met him. I liked his writing style. He amused me and made me laugh. I remember reading Supergirl and enjoyed it. I didn’t really notice who wrote it until a later but I knew that I eagerly awaited the next issue. Now I get to watch and read these things months before the rest of the world. On the one hand I don’t really take part with discussions of comic books that my husband writes any more but on the other I get to know what happens while fans speculate about it. I have a hard time remembering where we are in the story line on the newsstands and in the comic books shops since I read scripts and see pages as they come through the house.

Some of the most fun is being part of the planning process for a project. Figuring out how the story is going to work and how the characters are going to act and react to the situation being presented to them. There is a certain rush that I get when I know that my idea is going to be the one implemented in the story.

Our conversations to anyone outside of fandom must sound very weird. I can remember I was helping Peter sort out some story points for Fallen Angel and we were talking about whether a character was going to be murdered or die as an accident. We were going through the ways to make an accident look like murder and how to make murder look like an accident. Our waitress was use to overhearing this kind of talk from us so she didn’t bat an eyelash but there were a couple of women on their lunch break who apparently got a little alarmed at our conversation and told the hostess on the way out about what they had overheard. The hostess smiled and informed them that we were writers and were probably working on a book or something. Everyone who worked at the restaurant got a good laugh but in some ways we were lucky that we were in a friendly environment.

I can tell when Peter has gone off to some other place that doesn’t exist other than in his head. His eyes get a far away look and he purses his lips. When he returns to our realm, I ask him where he has been. He tells me what he is working on in his head. His head is full of stories that haven’t been told and even though he is typing as fast as he can, I don’t think that all the places he has seen will be seen by readers, which is a shame since I have enjoyed my visits there.

This has been my entry in the LJ Idol contest. My partner in crime this week is the every lovely adpaz.