Sailing to Sarantium is book one of The Sarantine Mosaic by Guy Gavriel Kay. I posted a review of the second book, Lord of Emperors, because I was too impatient to wait until I could get my hands on the first in the series. Because of my lack of patience, a virtue which seems to be in contunualy short supply, the review of Lord of Emperors wasn’t very informative. Without reading the first book, I wasn’t sure which of the many details I wanted to talk about might be spoilers. I hate spoilers and err’d on the side of caution.

Now that I’ve read the first book, I spent cash money to buy it, I think I can talk a bit more freely about why I like these books.

Story

From the cover…

Caius Crispus, known as Crispin, is a master mosaicist, creating beautiful art with colored stones and glass. Still grieving the loss of his family, he lives only for his craft – until an imperial summons draws him east to the fabled city. Bearing with him a queen’s secret mission and seductive promise, and a talisman from an alchemist, Crispin crosses a land of pagan ritual and mortal danger, confronting legends and dark magic.

Once in Sarantium, with its taverns and gilded sanctuaries, chariot races and palaces, intrigues and violence, Crispin must find his own source of power in order to survive. He finds it, unexpectedly, high on the scaffolding of his own greatest creation.

Change of Tone

Sailing to Sarantium has quite a bit more magic than book 2 Lord of Emperors. That tends to give it more of a feeling of fantasy. It also changed how I saw a few of the elements of the second book. I had filed away the doctor’s many small gestures as either superstition or small religious traditions. After reading the first book, I’m now more inclined to believe that those peculiarities succeeded in warding off bad luck, creating the most auspicious start to a day, and all the other myriad of outcomes he hoped to influence.

Character focus is different as well. Sailing to Sarantium focused more closely on Crispin than the second book. Crispin was a major character in Lord of Emperors, but the other character roles seemed to take on more importance than the first book. I liked that about Lord of Emperors, it helped to make the scope of the book seem much larger. The drawback is that a couple of the supporting characters that I liked from Sailing to Sarantium are largely ignored in Lord of Emperors. They still have roles to play, but they sink even further into the background than before.

Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors combine to create a story that grows in scope as you read it, while still conveying a message. No matter how grand the events of the world around us become, we still only perceive those great and powerful moments in history by the effect they have on our own lives.

Verdict

Sailing to Sarantium is a great fantasy book. I’m glad I decided to pick it up to fill in the gaps left by reading Lord of Emperors.

I would suggest that you pick them both up. Oh… and read them in order.

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FanaticSpace - Everyone loves something.

Once upon a time, Chattacon was held at the Read House in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was a good-sized regional convention with attendance in the 1500 range.  I don’ t know what their numbers were this year, but it seemed sparse.  Chattacon now makes its home in the Chattanooga Choo Choo Holiday Inn.

Chattanooga Choo Choo Locomotive

The Choo Choo is a converted railway station on 24 acres, with a decommissioned wood-burning locomotive on display.  (I’m told the train was built in 1880, and last used by the Smoky Mountain Railroad in 1940s)  There are passenger cars that have been converted into sleeping rooms.  The accommodations are spread out, but the staff is helpful and cheery.  We were in “Hotel III”, and aside from having a wait for the bell cart and attendant, it was a painless check-in.

We had a mutual brain TILT moment when we first entered the hallway of Hotel III.   The long, narrow corridor was brightly decorated, and strangely reminiscent of The Shining.  Fortunately for us, there were no Twins in that corridor.  They only appeared in our imagination, and our fingers remained mute and still.  The secure wireless connection sucked wind, but other unsecured connections were available.

In the Beginning was Registration…

Rats in a Maze

I have many expletives in mind regarding the Registration process.  We were lab rats in a maze.   My compadre, Amber, had pre-registered.  I had not.  We went into the hotel lobby, and entered Pandelerium.   What at first appeared to be the end of long lines in front of registration tables were actually clusters of folks (say that very fast) waiting….  A lovely lady from Registration emerged from the tables to shepherd us On Site registrants to actual tables.  It was only then that it became apparent what we were all waiting for…

“I Don’t Have to Show You any Stinkin’ Badges”

Ah, but yes you do, if you want to get into the convention areas.  There’s the proverbial rub.    Computer glitch after computer glitch meant that I waited for my badge from 6:00-9:15PM.  Yes, Virginia, I waited for 3 hours and 15 minutes.   That’s not the end of the story.  You may recall that I said Amber was pre-registered.  During a system hiccup, her pre-registered check-in was lost, and she had to start over again.  She discovered this when my badge printed from one of the lovely parallel-ported printers. Then, she was told, in 30-90 minutes, she’d get her badge.  It was 6:00 PM déjà vu all over again, except that it was 9:00 PM now.  They were out of Program schedules and Program Books.

While Waiting for Badgot…

We spent our time socializing with friendly fen in waiting, including my old pal, writer Wendy Webb.
At 10:40PM (yes, that would be 4 hours and 40 minutes!), Amber got her badge.  However, they were out of lanyards,  schedules, and Program Books.  We did obtain a map with helpful designations, such as “Mundanes.”  The badges were LOVELY works of art.  We missed the entire Friday night schedule of programming because we needed our stinkin’ artsy fartsy badges!!!

We were so exhausted by the time we were done that we didn’t even go to the Con Suite to get free beer or attend any of the advertised room parties.

It’s a New Day!

We spent Saturday morning with Robby, the Fearless Dragon*con Filk Track Director, having our first Filk Track meeting.  Feeling fairly excited and upbeat, we left chanting, “Gimme an F…gimme an I…”

Tom Smith in Concert

Tom Smith also did a fun, crowd-pleasing concert, and even perpetrated (um, I mean performed) his material to many new listeners.  He was a busy guy, as he MC’d the tiny Masquerade on Saturday night.

Author guests Katherine Kurtz and David Weber were easily found, and regional writers participated in panels on the craft and business of writing.  It was a full day’s programming.

The Dealers Room was decent, and we made our first drive-by of it to see what we might want to buy later… ALL the Dealers were friendly.  ALL OF THEM.  What a nice surprise to feel as if they actually wanted our business!  Sadly, we never made it to the art show.

Many of us who did other stuff during the Masquerade and planned to return to the open filk afterwards were disappointed to find the Conference Center hallways rolled up and silent by 11:00 PM.  Arc Attack (the Tesla Coil music folk)  was giving a concert in the Con Suite building…and the free beer was flowing.

The Warriors

The Choo Choo

Every Day is Like Sunday…

It was time to pack up and check out all too soon.  The Bell attendant couldn’t find a cart.  Soooo he came up and helped us to carry our stuff to a golf cart, and drove us to our car!  YEAH!  We made Choo Choo gift shop purchases for kids, and unsuccessfully attempted to get breakfast (they were setting up for lunch, but not ready).  We went back to the Dealers Room and did a little more shopping.  We had another brief conversation with Tom Smith, and ran into writer Rob Sommers.  Then we had to make the difficult choice between attending the final guest panel, and feeding our faces away from the hotel.  Our faces won.  We took off.

The only thing not to like at Chattacon was the registration madness.  In many other ways, it reminded me of conventions of old, where fans talked to each other “just cuz”.  In fact, that’s the single biggest factor that causes me to say I would return to Chattacon.  EVERYONE was friendly, whether staff members or fans…sober, drunk, or tired.

About the badge problem:  I volunteer to bring the magic markers next year!!  Who’s up for bringing the perforated cards or stick-ons?

Official photos of Chattacon

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Dragon*Con is an extravaganza of sci-fi fandom held annually over Labor Day Weekend in downtown Atlanta, Georgia.  As of 2008, it spans four hotels and boasts an attendance of more than 30,000 fans.  Rumor has it that when the numbers swell with day pass folks, the count can go as high as 50,000.  It can be a little overwhelming to attend a convention with 30-50,000 of your, er, um, closest friends.  This year, the addition of the Sheraton, and the completed Marriott renovation, made the long Labor Day weekend a much more pleasurable experience than in the recent past.

What To See…Beats Me!

With a cacophony of choices in a wide variety of fandoms, you can’t see everything.  Lines for many popular media based events are long, and give you no guarantee of entry even after you’ve waited for frakking ever.  For me, the choice is simple.  I don’t try.  That has it’s own pitfalls, though.  If I had tried to get into the Firefly panel with Nathan Fillion and supporting cast members, I would have been able to get in.  Instead I watched it on Dragon*Con TV .

I never seem to get to the Miss Klingon Empire Beauty Pageant either.  I’ve wanted to free my inner Klingon and be a participant myself, but dang it, I don’t know any practicing Klingons to ask for help.  Maybe next year… At 6 ft. tall, I could make a passable Klingon.  Hint, hint, is anyone out there listening?

The Dragon*Con Dealers Room is one of my favorite places to do early Christmas shopping.  Okay, yeah, I know, you can find most of the stuff online.  BUT, the Dealers Room and Exhibition Halls are like a giant bazaar of the bizarre and beautiful.  Who can resist?

I’ve been out of what I would call participatory fandom for years.  Once upon a time, I did filk and theatrical stuff back in Virginia.  Once upon a later time, I participated in the Writers Track programming at Dragon*Con.  Some years ago I went into gaffiation for a while, writing, but not attending any conventions.
Then my sister-friend and SCA maven, Dinah, reawakened my dormant fannish gene…and I started filking again.  It was all downhill from there.  Um, I mean it renewed my fannish sense of self.

I also happened to have a post-apocalypse short story published in a magazine and anthology.  Thus I participated in the Apocalypse Rising program track this year.  Discussions were lively, and the rhetoric occasionally heated.  I don’t know what it was like from the audience, but it was a blast from where I sat .

Program Track sounds so dry, doesn’t it?  There are many fandoms contained within Dragon*Con (officially or not), and each is almost a mini-con of its own.  This evolution in the ever burgeoning Dragon*Con makes it possible for fans to connect, share, and not get lost amid the proverbial teeming masses that conglomerate to make up Dragon*con (yes, I meant to say that, not congregate).

It’s exciting to walk down the halls and see the Weyrfest, Brit track, X track, gaming track, and of course, the venerable Anime/Manga track rooms, to name just a few.  Dragon*con can be as big or as small as you choose.  That factor, along with a metaphorical masochism inherent in my soul, made me return to Dragon*Con, like a stealthy prodigal fan.

If you go to nothing else big, attend the Dragon*Con parade! As a former costumer (yeah, did that, too), I am impressed by the sheer magnitude.  Costumes range from beginner level to amazing, and all promenade together.  The entire weekend is full of costumed fen, but this is definitely on my “don’t miss” list!

Tempest in a Tambourine & The Sound of Music

There was plenty of music for all tastes around the convention.  There was Jedi karaoke at a nearby café on Saturday night.

A spirited violin jam complete with a Celtic dancer/violinist happened on Monday.

Absent from filking for many years, I’m from the “old school.”  That means I am of the pitch in and try to make it work school of fandom.  Filking had changed quite a bit during my gaffiation.  I only recognized a few names, and knew even fewer in the community.  I was acquainted with a goodly amount of their music, though.

There was a dismaying flame war going on at Live Journal about past Dragon*Con filking.  Due to a variety of circumstances, there was no Filk Director this year until a few weeks before the convention.

I’d volunteered to help with the Filk track.  Eventually, one Robby Hilliard, the new Filk Director, contacted me and asked if I was still interested in helping.  Sure, what did I have to lose?

Nothing, as it turns out.  Robby Hilliard is a Celtic musician from Chattanooga   with a good head for organization and a very positive attitude (you can pay me later, Robby    Working with Dragon*Con, he was able to address many of the complaints of the Filk track attendees, which had definitely outgrown its previous space.

Concerts were held in ballroom sections, and the Filk Room was dedicated to that track 24 hours a day.  Many of the usual area filkers boycotted the convention.  Both the Brobdignagian Bards and the Bedlam Bards performed to near capacity crowds before it was all over.  The Great LukeSki held two shows, despite being hampered by being asked to step up to the plate at the last minute.  Carrie Dahlby was featured as well.

Open filking was sparse this year.  We were invaded by a group of frat boy geeks on Saturday night who wanted to take over the room.

Yet, before they left, they were singing the choruses of a Battlestar Galactica filk.  Taking chorus for an easy credit paid off for them, because they weren’t bad at all.  The delightful and talented Ridikulus Music folks stopped by, featuring Luke She, and did a couple of songs as well.

With Robby the Fearless slated to be at the Filk ship bow in 2009 as well, I look forward to writing about and participating in an expanded Filk track for next year.

Ghost Hunters!

Oh, I almost forgot!  I’m a huge fan of Ghost Hunters and Ghost Hunters International!   Due to other obligations, I didn’t get to see their panels.  I’d seen Dave Tango arrive on Friday.  However, Rob, Dustin, and Dave were in the lobby on Monday as we were taking our leave, and they allowed me to take a photo!  Woo-hoo!

And in the End…

If you asked twenty people (or 30,000+) to describe Dragon*Con, there’d be no consensus, probably not even a quorum.  Dragon*Con is as many different conventions as its fans make it.

(Photo credits:  Jedi Karaoke – Amber Hansford; Brobdignagian Bards – Les Howard
All others by Shiny1 & Chuck deVarennes.)

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FanaticSpace - Everyone loves something.

Yay!!! Here’s a little teaser of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog:

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

I’m so super excited now. I also found out a little more about Dr. Horrible. Neil Patrick Harris is Dr. Horrible, a low-rent supervillain, and he’s trying to woo Penny, played by Felicia Day, defeat his nemesis Captain Hammer (that’s Nathan Fillion) and gain entry into the Evil League of Evil. I caught a glimpse in that trailer of Simon Helberg, Howard Wolowitz from The Big Bang Theory, which is even more fun, cause that’s a great show. Also, if you look really carefully, you’ll see that the news anchors are David Fury and Marti Noxon.

I just love Joss Whedon so much, I want to dangle him from my rearview mirror.

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FanaticSpace - Everyone loves something.

Starting this week, I’d like to provide you with a review of the latest episode of Doctor Who to air in the US. Doctor Who is currently in it’s fourth season and airing in this country on the Scifi Channel Fridays at 9 PM. The British fans of the Doctor are several episodes ahead of us Americans. My goal is to remain spoiler free while still discussing an overview of the episodes.

I’ll begin with my review of last week’s episode “The Unicorn and the Wasp”. It is the seventh episode of the season. I realize that episode eight aired Friday night but I’m holding back that recap for a couple of reasons. First, “The Unicorn and the Wasp” was a wonderful episode and I can’t wait to tell you about it. Second, episode eight is a two-parter. I’d like to wait and cover both parts at once. Finally, with only five new episodes remaining in season four, I don’t want to miss a single one.

Murder, mystery and mutant wasps all lie at the heart of “The Unicorn and the Wasp” episode. While visiting the English countryside in 1926, The Doctor and his companion, Donna Noble, stumble onto a classic whodunit, complete with Dame Agatha Christie. Set amid the quiet elegance and propriety of a British manorhouse, this episode is a rollicking adventure.

The Doctor and Donna crash a weekend gathering of the social elite. The guests include potential victims who bear a striking resemblance to Clue game characters including Miss Redman and Professor Peach (who’s killed in the library with a lead pipe, no less). Also present is legendary mystery author Agatha Christie. As the mysteries unfold and more murders occur, she helps the Doctor to solve the strange goings-on.

This episode really showcases the Doctor’s current companion, Donna Noble. Donna is not particularly well-liked by many fans but I love her. She brings a maturity and wry sense of humor to the position that few of his recent traveling partners could match. The scene in which the Doctor is poisoned is the perfect example of her delightful commaraderie with the Doctor. Overall, this is one of my favorite episodes of this season. It has humor, intrigue and just the right amount of other-worldliness. For a closer look at the episode, check out a trailer here. I give “The Unicorn and the Wasp” 7 out of 10 stars!

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You might think that it would be difficult to create a relevant blog about TV shows that have been off the air for several years, but not so. I have lots of stuff I can ramble on about, endlessly, if necessary. But instead of going back and talking about stuff long past today, I want to talk a little bit about Joss Whedon’s new show, Dollhouse, which is coming to Fox in January, 2009, and will air on Monday nights at 8 pm, leading into 24. I plan to keep talking about it, too, so that more people find out about it and watch it.

I admit that I’m a little worried. Not about the show, cause that will rock, but about Fox. I just can’t bear for Fox to kill off another show once I fall in love. They’ve murdered so many shows that I liked. Firefly, for one, Drive (a Tim Minear production, which starred Firefly’s Nathan Fillion) was another. The list is pretty long. Since Fox has a habit of putting shows in the Friday night spot of death or just not giving them a chance to get an audience (Drive was cut after only 4 episodes aired – it was literally the second week), I want to make sure that Dollhouse has amazing ratings from Day One. No matter what night it airs.

Personally, if I was Joss or Tim, I would not give Fox another chance. But I guess you have to do what you have to do to sell your show. I’ve just been hurt too many times and I’m not as trusting.

Anyway, Dollhouse. Along with Joss, who will produce, write and direct, other Buffy alum will be joining the show, including Tim Minear (Angel, Firefly) and Steven DeKnight (Buffy, Angel, Buffy Season 8 comics) as consulting producers, Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain (Angel) as showrunners, casting directors Anya Colloff and Amy McIntyre Britt (Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Serenity), Eliza Dushku (Faith on Buffy and Angel) as series regular and Amy Acker (Fred on Angel) in a recurring role. Tim Minear and David Solomon (Buffy) are also set to direct.

Basically, the show is about people known as “Actives” or “Dolls” who volunteer to give up five years of their lives in exchange for a big payoff at the end of that time. During the five years, they are hired out for particular jobs, crimes, fantasies, or whatever. Their personalities are wiped clean between each assignment, and they are imprinted with new personas, including memory, muscle memory, skills, and language.

Here’s a link to a (very exciting for me) trailer for the show. 

So start telling all your friends. Whedon’s coming back to TV!

YOUNG BUFFY: Hi, Willow. What are you doing here?
WILLOW: Actually, I’m, uh … looking for you. Here. Again.
YOUNG BUFFY: Do you like dolls?
WILLOW: No … and I think we already deja’d this vu.

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FanaticSpace - Everyone loves something.

Wow, this is it.  My first blog at FanaticSpace.  I’m very excited, cause for the first time I’m able to blog about something I really, really love, the Whedonverse.  For any of the uninitiated out there, the Whedonverse is all of the wonderful entertainment created by the incomparable Joss Whedon, which includes tv shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly, the movie Serenity, based on the Firefly series, and various graphic novels, such as Fray, Buffy Season 8, and Angel After the Fall.  He also writes the Astonishing X-Men, and he’s written screenplays for other movies outside of Buffydom, which I may reference from time to time.  He was also a writer for Roseanne, but I probably won’t ever bring that up again.

I’ve seen each episode of Buffy at least 20 times (I’m totally serious about that) and every ep of both Angel and Firefly at least a dozen times.  I’ve watched Serenity probably 8 times.  So I’ll babble about all of that, as well as the graphic novels, and also what the cast of the shows is doing now.  Plus, Joss has a new show coming up in January, 2009, Dollhouse starting Eliza Dushku, who played Faith on Buffy and Angel.  We won’t run out of stuff to talk about.  

Ultimately, what I hope to do here is just share my great love for all things Joss, make friends with other Whedonites, and, hopefully, lure some people over to the dark side.  Come join us, I promise you’ll love it. 

In the words of Giles, “Something’s coming. Something is gonna’ happen here…soon!”  Buffy: “Gee, can you vague that up for me?”

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FanaticSpace - Everyone loves something.

“Think you’ve seen it all? Think again. Outside those doors, we might see anything. We could find new worlds; terrifying monsters; impossible things. And if you come with me… nothing will ever be the same again!” – The Doctor

 Doctor Who…a man of many faces, spanning decades, and uniting fans of all ages.  You would be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t at least heard of the Doctor.  Most who have seen the series either are fans or soon become fans.  It’s hard to resist.  A delightful combination of science fiction, fantasy, humor, horror and a charismatic central character that carries viewers on a trip through time and space each week. 

 This is the first in my new weekly series on the good Doctor.  I plan on exploring the former Doctors and their companions.  The villians and strange, new worlds.  I hope to provide reviews and opinions on the episodes as well.  Basically, I want to share my love for Doctor Who with you. 

 My fascination with Doctor Who began as a child.  As an impressionable pre-teen, I discovered Tom Baker’s Doctor Who on my local public broadcasting channel.  It didn’t take more than an episode or two to hook me.  Maybe it was the scarf.  Or maybe it was his crooked grin.  More likely, it was the imaginative story telling and light-hearted feel of the show.  That combined with a science fiction base made for the perfect combination.  As the episodes unfolded, I discovered other Doctors.  Each traveling through time in the TARDIS.  Each unique and special in their own way.  So far there have been ten incarnations of Doctor Who.  The latest is played by David Tennant, a classically trained Scottish actor. 

 Doctor Who was first broadcast on BBC in 1963.  The story of the time-traveling alien and his many different companions became a popular British science fiction television show.  The original show ran until 1989 and has been listed in Guinness World Records as the longest-running science fiction television show in the world.  Then the series returned again in 2005, fresh, new and ready to win new fans worldwide.  Currently, Doctor Who is being broadcast in the UK on BBC One on Saturday nights.  If you’re like me and stuck in the United States, you can catch the Doctor on the Scifi Channel on Friday nights.  Both are in the midst of the fourth season, though the American run episodes are trailing the first run British episodes by four.

 So what is the allure of Doctor Who?  It’s hard to pinpoint but it remains undeniable.  The series has run for nearly thirty years.  It has spawned at least two other scifi series, Torchwood and The Adventures of Sarah Jane.  The fans of the show are some of the most diehard fans in all of fandom.  I include myself in their numbers.  So each week, I’ll be here to explore the world of Doctor Who.  Since it defies time and space, this could take awhile.  If you have questions or topics that you’d like me explore, please feel free to let me know.  You can find me hanging out in the TARDIS…

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Bob Asprin as Hakiem autographs a Fan’s playbill

My Personal Wake for

Robert Lynn Asprin

So if you’re looking for biographical info on Bob Asprin, this ain’t the place to find it. You can find that info here and here .

This is for me. This is for Bob. I’m not likely to be there for his French Quarter funeral procession, or anything else more formal.

Robert Lynn Asprin (June 28, 1946 – May 22, 2008) was my friend for more than a quarter of a century. I met Bob in 1979 at a little, now defunct science fiction convention in Virginia Beach, called Sci-Con. My friend, Dinah, and I were standing in line, waiting for a programming room to open.Back then, World Con was the biggest science fiction convention around and Sci-Con was a friendly little convention that was a lot of fun.

There was a really obnoxious guy standing in line behind us, talking loudly with a younger guy who was asking him the words to an Irish folk tune. The obnoxious man stumbled on the words, and then frakked them all up as he smugly sang them back to his line companion. I don’t know what possessed me to turn around and engage them.I was not particularly outgoing in those days…though I wouldn’t say shy. Maybe it was because we were standing in line for so long…maybe I was bored. Maybe he was just getting on my nerves! I interrupted their conversation, loudly sang the correct words in the correct order back at both of them and turned around. Needless to say, the obnoxious guy was Bob Asprin. He tapped me on the shoulder and, irritated, asked me more or less who the hell I was… And that was the beginning of a 29-year friendship.

This was before his halcyon writing days, his semi-famous near-legendary rise to fame with Lynn Abbey and the Thieves World series. It was after the days of Yang the Nauseating in the SCA. He was a medium-sized fish in a smallish pond. “Fingers” Asprin dragged me into my 29-year love-hate affair with filking as well. Dorsai style versions of “ay yi, yi yi, your mother swims after troop ships” and too many others to recount. Add Bob Zentz and Robin Welch to the mix with Bob, and our melodious (cough cough) horizons haphazardly expanded and ebbed, depending on the time of night and the quantity of spirits.

Even then, Bob held court in hotel bars. When the local convention committee asked two of us to get Bob to the airport after a convention was over, we thought they were exaggerating about it being a difficult task that required dedicated people assigned to it. Not so. A group of young men sat figuratively (and some literally) at his feet, drinking in the stories and jokes with which Bob regaled them, raptly traveling with him up the vaudevillian scale to the absurd and hovering there…traveling down into the shanachie depths, and back up a bardic path…a disorienting ride of a routine. Neither audience nor narrator was willing to move back down into the mundane and go home. We had to physically drag him away from his audience and race to the airport. It should go without saying that he missed his plane and had to wait for the next in the airport bar, where he happened to run into a few departing fans. (ba-dah-boom, cymbals crash) We left him there, and apparently he eventually departed the airport.

Linda Stage Manages Tempus

Then came Thieves World. The Myth Adventures series became wildly popular. Bob’s fan base grew exponentially and became more adoring. To know him was to love him or hate him. There weren’t many in the middle realm, and some occupied both territories at different times. I was writing a lot of music, performing a bit more than routine filking, and through a series of coincidences and an offer of underwriting by a new convention committee chairman, my Thieves World original filks morphed into a slightly more propped “Our Town” style musical, based on the first three Thieves World books. Permissions weren’t hard to get, and if I recall correctly, our material simply claimed copyright to anything not covered by all the many and various Thieves World copyrights.

Bob Zentz as Cappen Vara

Bob Asprin was our narrator, Hakiem, and we opened at the historic (antiquated) Chamberlin Hotel at Old Point Comfort. The Chamberlin had a real stage and terrible electrical problems. When we had to use the spotlight, it blew the breakers every minute or so and plunged the entire theater into darkness. Still, the production was good and bad in semi-equal parts, and fraught with all the usual amateur theatre difficulties.

Seeing Bob perform my script as Hakiem, and adding his own additional material seamlessly into the narrative, is happily etched into my brain. I fully intend to bore my grandkids with that tale if I am around long enough to do so.

Myrtis & illyra listen

As Writer/Director, I wound up portraying Illyra, because no one else in our community could reach the notes of her song. I nearly missed my own cue as I was running around backstage. I belatedly discovered that Lynn Abbey had a lovely singing voice, and had I approached her, might have considered doing Illyra (thanks, Bob old friend! I still owe you for that one!). Nevertheless, Lynn was gracious about the production. In fact, was there ever anyone as publicly gracious about her exasperating husband? I can’t think of anyone.

Like some others, mirror friend or foe, I have many more Bob stories. I’m not ready to share them yet…and some probably don’t need to be committed to the cyber world. It wasn’t always easy being one of Bob’s friends, but it was never boring. He was capable of great kindness to others. Certainly he was always that way to my kids and me (though not always so to my prospective beaus…he was like a proverbial Dutch uncle). Yet he was a notorious womanizer as well. I recall a close male friend of his delicately referring to Bob’s many companions as “decorations”. Bob was not always kind to them, carelessly dismissing them at the drop of a hat, or the sound of a “one string Japanese guitar” and off-key voices. I know he often regretted that behavior, and in later years avoided it.

Over the last 29 years, we commiserated over failed marriages, disastrous relationships, and the various exigencies of life in general. Sometimes we didn’t see each other for a couple of years, with only sporadic contact of any sort. But it was one of those friendships where it took only a few minutes to be pals again. He had that gift. Perhaps it was because we could be brutally honest with each other. I recall one such conversation. Me: “I’m not surprised. If I’d been her, I would have kicked your ass out a long time ago. I’m amazed she put up with your crap as long as she did.” His woundedness lasted all of a couple of minutes, and then we had a mock argument wherein I parried his every excuse with an incident worthy of his expulsion from the relationship. We even had a discussion about marriage (as in the two of us) that ended in mutual hilarity. Then we had a toast, “Up the long ladder and down the short rope, to hell with King Billy…”

Rascal, rapscallion, master storyteller, sad sack full of fecal material, you were always my friend. I will miss you, Bob. Damn you for leaving without saying goodbye…isn’t that just like you?

So let’s all raise a virtual (or real) glass of Tullamore Dew (Jameson’s will do if you must) and let me hear you sing, “Ay, yi, yi, yi, your mother swims after troop ships.”

(Shiny1 is sometimes known as Patricia deVarennes, and was known as Patricia Ross in the olde times of this narrative)

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Threads Closed

The book giveaway threads have been closed. I printed up the names of all the people who entered and drew names at random. Well, I did that twice since there were 2 books to giveaway.

Check your e-mail if you entered the giveaway.

I’ve sent e-mail to the winners to let them know. I’m just waiting on their responses. Once I receive those e-mails I’ll announce the winners.

I’m doing it this way because I’ve had winners who didn’t respond in the past. If I can’t send someone their book, then I’ll have to pick a different winner.

More Giveaways

I did learn a few things from this that will help me a lot in future giveaways. There will be more giveaways. So make sure to check in from time to time.

If you have any suggestions for prizes you’d like to see, please let me know. If you leave a comment and tell me what you’d like to win then there’s a better chance that it’ll be a prize in the future.

: Fun Stuff, Fandoms, Fantasy, Books, Contest, Giveaway, Erec Rex, The Dragon’s Eye, The Monsters of Otherness, Kaza Kingsley, Autographed Books, Winners

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