It occurs to me that it was exactly two months ago that I must have given a shout across the "wide gap of time" and sent out the dramaturgickal invocation that has apparently caused... certain events to come to pass. And that's all I'll say about that for now, except to note that I've tapped into a very Suppressed Transmission sort of energy these days. Though in all fairness, perhaps the qualifier "more so than normal" really belongs at the end of that sentence.

Tomorrow night, kids. Hopefully all will be revealed then. In the meantime, keep yer fingers crossed for me.

So Nobilis was frickin' awesome, much as I expected, and worth the trek down into the wilds of Manassas - without getting too much into let-me-tell-you-about-my-character nerdiness, I'm playing the Power of Alternatives, who has literary roots of a sort, even if those roots tap into a vein with an all-too-narrow audience thus far. (Consider me unwrapping a Mars bar and winking slyly in the direction of India.) It's all about the big coats and the World-Walker Gift, baby! We're doing it again in three weeks, which is a Good Thing indeed. And Fred, the Hollyhock God, reminds me of nothing so much as a sort of Venti-sized version of Steven Brust on a Skittles bender. How cool is that?

And Foucault's Pendulum kicks ass. It has the Comte de Saint-Germaine. Go, read it, right now.

We did manage to score a copy of the new Harry Potter this weekend as well. Stacy picked it up at Books-a-Million during her trip to Potomac Mills while I was off doing Simple Divinations and turning into crows and whatnot. It is one big-ass book, not that that's stopped Stacy from devouring three hundred-odd pages of it in the interim. Of course, some of us have had more of a head start than others, and still managed to find time to go have witty cocktail-party conversations with Mike Mignola and shit, but I'm sure we'll all be caught up by the time we make it to New York this summer. Don't think I can't fit my Beating Stick into a carry-on, you know.

And over it all, NEARfest looms. Huzzah!