Giant wolf spider in my office…
Also, I’m back in Seattle after a week in Southern California. Updates soon.
Update (about the spider, not SoCal):
The spider met its demise under Jonathan Lethem’s Men and Cartoons, specifically chosen over the equally handy Bullfinch’s Mythology and Women of Classical Mythology: a Biographical Dictionary because the spider was perched on a tissue box. A heavier book might have collapsed the corner of the box, allowing the spider to escape, possibly via my arm.
Mr. Lethem joins William Gibson in the ranks of effective spider smashers, Mr. Gibson having taken a wolf spider to the face of his author photo on the hardbound (and, fortunately, laminated) library copy of Pattern Recognition some eleven months earlier.
“Giant wolf spider”?
That can’t be good.
…except, I suppose, as story fodder.
This is what I love about the genre: a wolf spider could be a humble member of the family Lycosidae, or it could be a slavering eight-legged lupus-headed beast.
About a year ago I read a story that opened with a character called Ares, and for the first few sentences I was expecting some serious war god action. This even though the story was in the The New Yorker. It takes me a while to switch gears…
A week in southern California near the end of August? Were you at Worldcon? Did I miss seeing you? The place was vast, granted. (I’ve been telling people that walking from a panel in 201A to a panel in 211A was like walking up Pine from the Market to Nordstrom’s.) But I’m just surprised about the people I completely missed, because there were such commonly-trod paths like that hall along the meeting rooms and that walkway between the convention center and the Hilton, to say nothing of the Hilton itself. Well, darn.