This is just to say . . .

. . . thanks to everyone who's expressed their condolences via comments, email, and phone calls. Roger's funeral is on Saturday, so I have another weekend of travel ahead of me. Perhaps after that I'll be ready to talk about him coherently. In the meantime, I'm taking a lot of comfort in looking at pictures and blog entries about WisCon. I love my friends, and I feel truly lucky to have stumbled into this circle of awesomeness. Take care of yourselves.

Over the weekend Christopher Rowe paid me a very kind compliment which I hope he won't mind me repeating. He said that I do something in my stories where everything is funny and light, and then there's a jab of something painful to remind you that life really does suck sometimes, and a pause as if to say "And you were just laughing, weren't you?" I tell you this because something is imitating something. Yesterday afternoon on the way back from the best WisCon evar my dad called to say that my uncle Roger had died the night before. It's a sucker punch from the universe. He was in his mid-50's and this was completely unexpected.

My parents knew I was at the con and wanted to wait until I was home to tell me, but Memorial Day traffic conspired against that. Luckily Ms. McCarron was there to counsel me through the drive and the rest of the evening. So I'm not really up for a con report, except to say that I think all of you people are wonderful and I love you dearly and I wish that I had collected a few more hugs.

The upshot is that I may be a bit sporadic in my communications for a bit. At some point I'll see if I can express a little bit of why Roger was (that past tense is so hard to type) such a wonderful guy, and how I'm going to miss him.