Dry Ice Factory

I've finally completed the first draft of an epic trip report about my travels in November 2010. It's sitting at 20,000 words right now. I've sent it off to five people for feedback. This has been a long process, but I'm happy to have reached this stage. Makes it seem more likely that I'll actually finish the damn thing.

Brussels, November 2010

Belgium is, amongst many other things, apparently a center of European comics culture. This is celebrated in Brussels with a series of murals in the city center. I'm not sure which artist is being honored in this one, but I love how, despite the crappy photo quality, there are a lot of perspective shifts, trompe-l'œil, and palimpsests in this shot.

There's a lot of great street art in Brussels, and just a lot of cool design in general. Belgium also lays claim to being the source of art nouveau. This is balanced somewhat by an overabundance of scary clowns and puppets.

Here's another photo by Rob Jackson, taken at the Salutation during our Nottingham pub crawl. From left to right, it's Lennart Uhlin, Doug Bell, Christina Lake, Mike and Pat Meara, and me. The Salutation is one of the two pubs we visited that claims to be the oldest in England. It was full of old school punks, too.

This is a shot of me and the fishlifters at Novacon with a copy of our labo(u)r of love, Slow Train to Immortality, which was an anthology of British fanwriting from the years 1995-2009 that we produced for Corflu Cobalt earlier this year. Photo is by Corflu Cobalt chairman Rob Jackson.

I'm at gerisullivan's house in Massachusetts for the night. Tomorrow we head for Toronto and SFContario.

I'm having a blast so far. The trip to Belgium with reverendjim and pingopark was epic. Probably the peak was the visit to the Cantillon Brewery in Brussels where after the tour (which was very cool in itself) we timed things right and ordered the right kind of beer to convince the brewer to bring out a bottle of the 2008 Lou Pepe Kriek to give us a taste and chat for a bit about the cherries they use. Novacon was a terrific chance to meet many friends, and it's hard to pick out a prime detail. Perhaps the highlight was the elitist pub crawl that Mike and Pat Meara led on Saturday, with Christina Lake, Doug Bell, Lennart Uhlin, and Rob Jackson in tow, along with myself. We hit four pubs, including two that claimed to be the oldest pub in England. The Trip to Jerusalem is one -- a maze of rooms and passageways and chimneys dug into the side of a hill.

Back in Croydon, I took a daytrip to the pebble beach of Brighton with the Fishlifters on Tuesday, then a production of Cardenio in the evening -- a reconstruction of a play that was attributed to Shakespeare and Middleton. It's a tender, loving revenge tragedy featuring necrophiliac rape and a pile of corpses -- but a distinct lack of boiled heads, as Claire pointed out.

Well, I need to hit the sack before the road trip tomorrow. Geri has hatched mad plans for an All Worldcon, All the Time party at SFContario. We are trying to figure out how we will fit all the supplies into the car. Tomorrow is another adventure!