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Considering I spent about 13 hours yesterday either in my hotel room or the hotel lobby prepping Comic-Con stories for Blastr, it’s amazing anything strange was able to happen to me, since what kind of strange stuff could likely happen while I’m alone in my hotel room? (Please … don’t let your minds go there.)
In any case, when I finally made it more than 100 yards from my laptop and over to the Random House party at Bootlegger, I ended up in a conversation with Vladimir Verano of Third Place Press, who at one point looked at my badge and wondered why he knew my name. Then the proverbial light bulb went on over his head, and from his bag he pulled a galley of Sean Howe’s upcoming history of Marvel Comics in the ’70s, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.
That’s coincidental enough, but the really strange thing? From the placement of his bookmark, I could see that he’d just, and I do mean just, gotten to the part where I came in.
At Vladimir’s request, I autographed the page where I first appeared, even though my desire to read Sean’s book and find out what really happened back then when I was too busy living it to pay attention is so great that I’d rather have created a distraction (Look—George R. R. Martin!) and then dashed from the bar with it under my arm. But I behaved.
So is that serendipitous enough for you?
It more than just having a random conversation with a guy who didn’t know who I was at a con with 150,000 people in attendance who then revealed he was reading something with my name in it.
It’s not even that he was reading a book that won’t be out for months and for which very few copies exist.
It’s that his bookmark was plunked down just a page or two after the first appearance of my name, so that I was the last thing he was reading about before he closed the book.
The chances grow more unlikely with the progression of the sentences.
As for preferring the previous white on black text to the current black on white text, I’ve received dozens of complaints over the year and a half the new site has been up, calling it unreadable and hard on the eyes. I finally had to give in to the evidence. You’re the only one who has stated otherwise, you contrarian, you!
Isn’t technology wonderful! I am getting instant con reports, especially since I’m old enough to remember the days when I read con reports in fanzines and magazines on paper weeks or months later.
I call that Edelman’s Schadenfreude Theory of Convention Reporting. It’s not sufficient to report on a con days later. No! You must report while the con is still ongoing, and people can think, “Why aren’t I there?”
James
In this case serendipity is math. Comics, SF etc, is a small field, you’ve been in it for a long time. You were also in comics when it was a smaller field. The odds of someone running into you at the biggest convention while also reading about you isn’t that surprising at all.
I just wonder if you will find beauty in the math, or be disappointed because it’s “only” math.
BTW, I liked the old blog format better.
Enjoy comic-con!