Note: this post may be updated throughout the day.

Ah, the conference. Eerily empty as expected, though there’s still some presses that I’m excited to see and still some people I fully intend to run into (and/or have seen from afar). Did the customary walkabout of the book fair and am now waiting for a first session, doing the ‘prep writing’ as thought about, wondering if the amount of coffee I drank this morning was enough, which is to say, I have already drunk my daily allotment of coffee but we’ll see, we’ll see. A. sent me with teabags for if I could find (free) hot water and so I can always recourse to that. There are hand sanitizer stations all about as expected. The tote bag is the same pretty-good one as last year, the art nice (I say “pretty good” because the 2013 one from Boston had a pretty slick semi-water-resistant liner, but then again, Boston in the winter. Also this is much more environmentally friendly, if it is indeed cotton canvas as I suspect). And so the tote bag I brought goes into that one, and we proceed.

After a nice breakfast we entered the convention center the wrong way through the back of the theater(?) But in doing so ran into someone who turned out to be also from Boston (an agent) and so we made friends and exchanged info and maybe now we’ll have a new friend to have at readings and parties. The point of this whole thing is to party and talk about art, I think.

I semi-goofed up and left my revision materials back at the AirBnB which I don’t think I’ll be returning to until later on this evening but I have enough work to do, still have access to the files on my device, I suppose. There are two sessions I want to go to today in addition to doing some early book fair buys (i.e., things I was already planning on) and then this afternoon I will find some corner in which to work.

(I still cannot get over how empty this is, feels. It feels like late Saturday afternoon at the other conferences: the booths empty or left with just a few things laid out, only a few people left milling around.)

Nevertheless, it’s still good people watching (the fashion!) and eavesdropping (the quips!) and I am still reasonably excited to be here. I probably have things I also ought to be doing aside from attending and writing (i.e., grading), but kinda just fuck it, you know? There will be plenty of time for that later.

For now–