China reading.

He gets up there a stack of a man, all weighty at the top and slender from his waist to his toes. He begins to read from something he’s working on, a short chapter condensed by articulated syllables. He throws that vast body into the text, his forehead creasing into a deep V, like the frog of horses's foot and powerful-looking like that. He conducts the narrative with his hands and these gestures are so intimately timed with the illustrations that I think he is unconsciously acting out the scene as he experienced it when he wrote it.

It reminds me that the body, above all, remembers every moment lived. You can listen to a person tell about an emotionally profound event and whatever their affect during the retelling, you can carefully observe as their body illustrates how they actually experienced it. People are selective when they retell, but their bodies give it straight every time.

It reminds me of that day the substitute yogi said that yoga was about teaching the body, and I wanted to say that I thought yoga was more about teaching the mind to let go so that the body could do what it remembers.

Andrew says that hearing an author read their own stuff feels like riding their mind as they wrote it.

I like that.

China barrels toward the chapter's end twisting up his face and intermittently spraying spittle. He proceeds to take questions. He talks like he writes: language effusive and forceful, filled with blunt phonemes and an astonishing array of vocuabulary, all of it issued with a tantalizingly exotic yet tidy brogue.

He's got fans in the audience, none of them "medium people," as Andrew puts it. Most are old-school speculative fiction fans with overgrown and greying hair that smothers giant, stretched out T-shirts. The others are younger, steampunk wannabes replete with tattoos, big black clothing, and some intensely colored shave-dos. (All that was left of one woman's hair was an orange wick, which she endlessly twiddled and fondled.)

Anita's there, Maureen and Jennifer, too.

Anita says China's popular with women, which is easy to understand. He's something manifest out of their fantasy worlds.

Maureen calls China a wanker, but only because she's jealous.

Someone asks China what he would do if he were invisible for a day. China answers that he'd probably be on the phone to his doctor, worrying about what had happened to him. He says that things like that, if they happened in real life, wouldn't be as cool as they at first seem. (Douglas Coupland's answer to the same question—Is this some kind of standard question for authors? Or a standard question of dorky fans?—was that he would immediately turn himself visible again.)

Someone asks if he charts his stories and he answers that he does, meticulously. He's got notes and diagrams all over his walls. Some people seem surprised, but I feel validated because I guessed as much. You can't write a book with that much detail about non-human characters and different worlds and not have diagrams to refer to.

There's some talk about politics and trends in fantasy fiction, the divide between Tolkien-based fiction and all other fantasy in particular (SCA, too, I guess). I don't know the specifics of this debate or why it seems so important to those involved in the sci-fi/fantasy industry. In fact, it's difficult for me to discern a reason for the debate because the two camps seem almost like different genres: pre-industrial versus post-industrial. I suppose that's obvious, though. I must be missing something.

I'm on this meet-the-author kick so I stand in line behind Maureen and wait to have my copy of The Scar signed. When it's my turn, I tell him that bit about how I'm inspired that he continued to write while he pursued an academic career. He says, with one corner of his mouth curled, "Yeah, but at the expense of my social life."