| A lot of time was spent at the Alpha workshop sharing funny internet videos. The best of these that I saw (thanks to Joshua Cole) was Brad Neely’s George Washington music video. This lyrical sampling should give you a fair idea of the tone of the song: Here comes George, in control. Women dug his snuff and his gallant stroll. Ate opponents’ brains and invented cocaine. He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming. You have been warned. |  |
Early in the week we did a writing exercise in which we attempted to compose the worst possible first sentence. One of these entries, written in the purple prose of a bad romance novel, contained the phrase “marble Adonis,” which became a running joke at the workshop. (We also established, based on the popularity of various students’ contributions, that the ideal opening line for this group was: “Having a zombie penguin pound a stake through your forehead isn’t as much fun as it sounds.”) At the group reading at Barnes & Noble, I read my story “Red Road,” which seemed to go over extremely well. (The audience burst into spontaneous cheers during my dramatic rendition of Francis’ climactic soliloquy.) The story describes Francis thusly: “It was true what mice said — Francis, with his thick tawny fur and large, imposing ears, was the tallest and most handsome mouse in all of Kingsburrow.” Some students then got it into their heads that Francis was the mousely equivalent of a “marble Adonis,” and they started referring to him as the “marble Adonimouse,” which inspired Lara Donnelly’s illustration (below), which I think is my first-ever piece of a fan art.
Like many writers, I spend a lot of time daydreaming, so I’m often pretty oblivious to my surroundings. At the first couple meals in the cafeteria, I grabbed a few bananas to take back to my room to snack on. I then lost count of how many bananas I’d actually collected, and where exactly I’d deposited them, and I ended up with way too many bananas — to the extent that my room acquired the distinctively cloying odor of browning bananas, and I started joking that I was having nightmares in which I was being chased down and smothered by sinister ambulatory bananas. I kept snacking on my stash of bananas throughout the week. Toward the end of the workshop, one of the students, Devon Wong, asked me, “Hey, have you noticed any bananas appearing in your suite?” I replied, “Huh?” Devon said, “Because all week, as a joke, we’ve been planting bananas in your suite — on the counter, on the desk in your bedroom — every time you step out, and we’ve been waiting for you to say something, but you never have, so we weren’t sure whether you were psyching us out or whether you could have really not noticed.” I said, “No, I hadn’t noticed. But come on, I had a ton of bananas in there already, so it’s not like I would really notice a few more.” To which Devon replied, “Yeah, but we’ve planted a lot more than just a few. I put five in there, and other people have been doing it too.” I said, “Wow. No, I guess I’ve just been eating them all. But thanks for getting those for me.”
Devon also seems to have started up a not-entirely-serious fan club for me over on Facebook. This fan club describes itself as: “The official DBK fan group on facebook. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, especially not DBK. DBK is one of the newest and freshest voices in sf/f. His work combines madness, whimsy, heart, and often talking animals, and other things that talk when they really have no right at all to be talking. Members of this group know the exploits of King Francis, we worship at the altar of Cat, and those of us with our virginity intact fear dragons.”
Yay me!