A Spring Day in Philadelphia

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Except for a light drizzle of rain, yesterday was a fine spring day in Philadelphia. Regina Kanyu Wang was in Pennsylvania for the Nebula Awards Weekend and before going home made a side jaunt to Philadelphia. So a group of local writers met at Little Pete's Restaurant for lunch and conversation.

Regina is a science fiction writer from Shanghai, the co-founder of SF AppleCore, China's mostt influential fan organization, and the International PR Manager for Storycom, a start-up publishing house in China. It goes without saying that the conversation, roughly equally about Chinese publishing and American, was involving.

We talked, we learned, we made connections, we jotted down the titles of forthcoming collections of Chinese SF in English translation. The hours flew by. Then, after the waiters turned down the lights and began very ostentatiously cleaning up, we went our various ways.

Such meetings are, by their nature, ephemeral. But important, I think. And look how happy we all are! It was a good afternoon.

From left to right, above: Sally Grotta, Camille Bacon-Smith, Regina Kanyu Wang, Tom Purdom, Samuel R. Delany, and me Not shown because he was taking the picture was Bill Wood.

And on an unrelated note . . .

At the Nebulas, Scott Edelman was trading donuts for reminiscences about past Nebs for the podcast at his blog Eating the Fantastic. I told about the time I walked out on Newt Gingrich and regaled my fellow self-evictees with a telling of my children's story "Free Moose." I probably should have included the first couple of pages in the telling. But we grow too soon old and too late wise. As we used to say back in the day when Mastodons wandered Wales.

For those who are curious, the link can be found here.

Above: Copyright 2018  by Bill Wood.

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