Finding Fraser(7)

“Oh, yes,” I assured her. “That is—if published writers get a discount …?”

They did indeed.

I handed over the thirty-five bucks for membership, and decided a city bus would do just as well as a taxi in the morning.

“… And as a member, you only have to pay twenty-five dollars to attend the conference!” she said, exuding charm and delight from every pore.

I’ve heard Philadelphia is a lovely city to walk through. Guess I’m going to find out soon enough.





Forever Fan…

Noon, February 21

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA



Seventeen blocks through downtown Philadelphia in February. NOT for the faint of heart or the unscarved of face. And yeah, it was seventeen. Seems I miscounted on the local map yesterday. But I’m here at last. I have my lanyard declaring me a writer in good standing. I have my dog-eared copy of OUTLANDER, for Herself to sign. (Glory!) AND I have access to the hotel’s free Wi-Fi on the main floor, which is where I am sitting as I type this. Literally. On the floor. Because the line-up for the signing was already three hundred people long when I got here at 9 a.m.

There are other conference events throughout the day, but the author, it turns out, will not be speaking here. She’ll sign books, accept the award and be spirited away by sometime this evening.

Clearly, the gods of time travel shine on me today. Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser might have been a somewhat unwilling inter-dimensional wanderer, but I am not. I plan to sit here on the floor and trace out Claire’s journey on the map inside the cover of my copy of the book. It will be the blueprint for my journey. I shall walk in her footsteps.

For that reason, I will not be attending the panel on The Value of Vivid Verbs, nor the likely very instructive talk on Whipping up Sex Scenes by Adding Leather.

I am in line for a chance to meet the author of the man of my dreams.

The organizers here tell me I may only have time for one question.

The agony…



- ES



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Full Failure…

11:15 pm, February 21

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA



Totally, totally blew it.

Complete and utter failure.

I don’t deserve to live…

And now, she’s gone for good. I saw the whole ontourage entouraje group pack up and leave over an hour ago. There was no sadness in her wake, however. All night this bar has been filled with cheery women bubbling with joy over their encounters with her. How sweet she is. How considerate. Great sense of humor——joking about her writer’s cramp after five hundred signatures——imagine!

My only hope is that the river of eager faces demanding signatures obliterates her memory of the encounter with me forever.

I wonder if anyone has ever managed to actually drown in a martini?



- ES



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“Well, that’s a long face. Howie, I swear that’s the longest face we’ve seen tonight, wouldn’t you say?” The woman leered cheerfully at me as she balanced two beers in one hand and slapped her companion on the shoulder with the other.

I smiled guiltily, swiveled my stool in the other direction and slid my laptop into my bag. The woman was not put off by my chilliness. In fact, she appeared to take it as a challenge.

“I’m guessing you got here too late for the autograph line. Am I right? AMIRIGHT?” She nudged me with an elbow, which had the effect of spinning me back into her presence.

I swirled the olive around in my glass, but there was no escape. The woman downed her beer in a single gulp and beamed at me.

I took a shaky breath. “No—no. She signed my book. She was lovely.”

The woman slapped the empty mug onto the bar, and, using only that same right elbow, slid the other beer to the man known as Howie with impressive agility. She was a bear of a woman, six feet tall in her stocking feet—which I can entirely attest to, since for some reason she was not actually wearing shoes—with a halo of gray wiry hair that reminded me somewhat endearingly of a dead dandelion. She wore an enormous cross between a caftan and a housedress in an eye-searing combination of green, purple and pink plaid.

Her companion was a tidy little man perhaps half a foot shorter, with four or five strands of hair neatly pasted across the crown of his head. He stood out not for his height or his shiny baldness, but simply for his gender. Apart from the busboy, he was the only male I could discern in the vicinity.

“Then why so glum?” the woman shouted, easily drowning out the vaguely Celtic Muzak that had begun emanating from somewhere in the ceiling. She slapped her hand on the bar. “Give this lady another martini,” she demanded. The bartender had a new glass in my hand before my ears stopped ringing from the command.