It’s good to be home.

Here I am, home from Vcon, the local science fiction convention and general nerdfest par exellence. Three days of awesome panels, sweet room parties, and hobnobbing with a gangly flock of my fellow intellectuals.

It kicked ass.

In fact, the only thing that makes its awesomeness less than total is that, like Christmas, after its over there is always a little bit of depression that follows as you return to your usual life and make the painful readjustment back into the normal flow of things.

It’s totally worth it, though. I had so much fun!

I truly love science fiction conventions. Were I wealthy, I would attend half a dozen a year, including and especially every year’s WorldCon. I absolutely thrive on fannish discussions and panels on intellectually stimulating conversation. Despite my obesity, I would much rather feed my mind than my stomach, and from that point of view, a convention like the one I just attended is an absolute smorgasbord feast for the mind.

But boy, does it wear you out! I am so tired now. Even just typing my thoughts like this seems hard, and I have already had a long nap.

I suspect there’s a lot of those in my near future.

It’s always hard for me to get proper sleep at a convention. Our hotel room was quite nice, and the beds were lovely, although much softer than my bed here at home, and I didn’t stay up all night partying and end up with no nap time.

It might just be the strange environment. A lot of people have trouble sleeping someplace new and it’s not like I stayed there long enough to adjust. Just three nights. (Although it still felt a tad wistful to leave the hotel room this morning. It had been home. )

But no, I think the primary factor is that I have an overactive, even hyperactive mind in my normal life, and when I go and stuff it full of stimulation at something like a science fiction convention, it just gets revved up to such a point that sleep becomes impossible.

It’s something that happens in my mundane life as well sometimes. A side-effect of genius, perhaps, or insanity. They are said to be similar.

If I had more self-discipline, I would return to the meditation practices I once experimented with, in order to learn to calm down the chattering scrambling horde of poo-flinging monkeys in my head when I need to rest. Some people complain of racing thoughts, and I suppose mine qualify. But for me, it feels more like trying to shut down a huge fireworks display, where every explosion leads to more explosions, every thought leads to more thoughts, and the whole thing is like trying to squeeze a fire-hose shut with your bare hands sometimes.

I just have so much going on upstairs. My brain is a very loud neighbour sometimes.

Oh well, this too shall pass. I am still processing all that happened in the last few days, and catching up on sleep, and trying to get some food into myself on a regular basis, and in general letting all those momenta I acquired over the weekend work themselves back down to the point of stasis.

Thank goodness for entropy.

I went to lots of fascinating panels. One of my faves was the one on selling short stories and poetry. Lots of highly valuable tips on how to get your short piece into proper shape for submission, how to write a cover letter (didn’t even know you needed one… eep!), what not to do, and so forth and so on.

And I must have at least seven or eight short stories just kicking around waiting to be hammered into shape and sent out into the big bad world to fend for themselves. Selling any of them would make me insanely happy, as not only could I use the cashola, but it would be wonderful confirmation that I am, indeed, a writer, and that I should just plain keep on writing because there might just be a career, or at least a nice income source, in this writing thing for me.

But for right now, I just want to go back to bed and sleep for another century or so. Might take me a day or two to catch up on my Z’s and get back to my usual sad little life.

But who knows? Maybe some day, I will write myself out of this box.

Wish me luck, dear readers!