I had a blast last week when I went to Indy. I had posted last week about how I wished it could go on forever, and no more so than Saturday. I had gone home to get more copies of my biography of Anthony Boucher (and decided to spend a wonderful night in my own bed!) I went back on Saturday. I manned the Mystery Scene booth for two hours. There’s no better place than the bookroom to sit and see all the people walking by. I was able to watch a part of Doug Greene’s panel on 1934, which was so pertinent to my research on the new book.

Then Jim Huang asked me to take some of the statues over for the guests of honor. Now anyone who has ever seen me navigate the simplest of directions knows that this is a dangerous thing to entrust to me. I get lost on the way to the kitchen. And I’m married to someone no better at it than I am. So I had fears of taking SJ Rozan’s award and ending up in Crawfordsville. But fortunately, I found people who were headed in that direction and followed them to the Theater.

I found the theater just fine, but realized that I had been so focused on finding the place that I had no idea of who to give them to. So I wandered around for a few minutes until someone kindly took them from me and pointed me to the green room. I was too nervous to eat any of the food, and settled for a drink of water. (not exactly exciting, but good for the stomach.)

I managed to sit with Toni Kelner, Dana Cameron, and my agent, Janet Reid, who I had not met before in person. While that may seem odd, so much communication is done over the phone and email that meeting might not happen for years. I was fortunate to meet her within my first year with her.

Thinking myself prosaic, I hadn’t written a speech. I truly believed that someone else would win. So I sat quietly in my seat as they called the name for the award. It took me nearly 30 seconds to realize that it was me and that I was supposed to get up.

I did. Of course I had no speech, so I winged it. I told the crowd how I thought the best way to win an award was to write about the namesake of the convention. PW actually picked up that commented and wrote about it in their review. I thanked my agent, Brian Skupin and Kate Stine who sadly weren’t there, and my spouse who puts up with way too much.

I’m still floating, but I’m thrilled with the award and it’s renewed my effort on the new book.