“You seem to fit in here,” Barbara said, her eyes narrowing.
“The Wharf Rats are sort of like an extended family,” Sean said, waggling his head from side to side. “And they’re mostly military oriented. They’re used to… military types. Civilians get all excited when you just tell them what to do and expect it to get done. They used to call me General Marshall when I was working tech support. So I don’t do tech support anymore. And being a field engineer pays better, anyway. Of course, it also meant I was out of town a lot. I’d guess that was one of the reasons… well…”
“Yes. Well.” Barb said. “Do you mostly work in Virginia?”
“Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio,” Sean said. “But things are looking up. I just got a promotion to shift supervisor so I’ll be spending more time close to home. More office time, too, but I can handle that.”
“How’s the girlfriend front look?” Barbara asked, smiling.
“Well, it’s looking up at the moment,” Sean said, smiling at her with a slight humorous leer. “Just joking. I’m not really looking for anything serious. I thought Annette was it. Now I’m not sure I trust women. Honestly, the whole thing with Annette really has me… disliking most females rather intensely. So I’m keeping what few encounters I have with them… limited in scope.” He looked over at her and shrugged. “You’re an obvious exception. You seem like a very nice lady. I’d say you remind me of my mother, but my mom’s a lot meaner. She and Dad were both Marines.”
“Saying that a lady reminds you of your mom isn’t a compliment, anyway,” Barb pointed out acerbically.
“I didn’t mean it that way!” Sean protested.
“I understand,” Barbara said, laying a hand on his arm. She used the opportunity to get a quick read of him and wasn’t sure what she got. He definitely had some very dark areas, but no sniff of necromancy. “Well, thanks for talking to me. I think I’ll be seeing you at that panel. That’s the one with K. Goldberg on it, right?”
“Yes,” Sean said, standing up. “I should say thanks. This has helped in a way.”
“I’m glad,” Barb said, pausing. “Sean, women are as human and fallible as men. Some of them less so, some more so. Don’t… put all women in the same category as your ex-girlfriend. In fact, don’t be so quick to condemn her. Christ tells us to forgive. One of the reasons that he tells us to do so is that until we can forgive others, we cannot forgive ourselves. Until you can forgive Annette, and other women that have hurt you, it will be hard to let go of the darkness in your soul. And it’s eating you up.”
Sean looked at her for a moment and then nodded.
“You’re a very odd lady, Barbara,” Sean said, clearly puzzled.
“So I’m told.”
Chapter Thirteen
The panel room had about twenty people in the audience and five members of the panel including Miz Goldberg, Folsom Duncan, Larry, the publisher from the slush party, David Krake and a redhead Barb didn’t recognize. It started by the five introducing themselves and the topic of the panel which was “Art or Marketing, How to Write.” The panel was moderated by the publisher she’d met last night and he opened the discussion.
“You can write for market all you want,” Larry said. “But if you want to actually get published, you’d better be thinking of your writing as art or you’re never going to get a single thing into print. If you just throw the words down on paper, it invariably turns out to be crap.”
“Larry, you’ve got your head so far up your ass you can see daylight through your throat,” Krake said, bluntly. “Bill Shakespeare didn’t give a damn about art. All he wanted was to get paid.”
That more or less set the tone of the panel and it was a pretty aggressive discussion. Goldberg more or less sat it out, only softly contributing that she thought art was important but so was getting paid and the two weren’t necessarily the same. Duncan felt that being superior in art was useful and he admired those who could write artfully but he just enjoyed telling the story and worried about “style and that” as a distant last after plot and characters. The fifth panel member, the redheaded woman, was firmly on the side of art but stated her position in such a garbled manner Barbara wasn’t sure she could compose a sentence much less a story. She also spent better than half her time promoting her writer’s workshop.
Krake, however, wasn’t hard to understand at all. He stated that anyone who thought first of “art” “might get published but only once and then get dumped into the trash bin.” Oh, and they were “flaming idiots” who would spend their lives “wandering from con to con teaching writing instead of actually trying the hard work of doing it.” The last might or might not have been pointed at the redheaded woman, but whether it was or not she looked poisonous at the comment.
Krake also had a bug up his butt about somebody named Robert who apparently wrote fantasy. Fantasy that was not, in the opinion of most of the panel members, very good. But it did, apparently, sell well, much to their chagrin. That was about the only point on which Krake and Larry the Publisher could agree. Actually, Krake, Larry and the redhead all agreed that this Robert fellow should have his fingers broken. Duncan and Goldberg were somewhat more restrained, Duncan making the point that you couldn’t support market forces and then ignore them when they disagreed with your taste.
She wasn’t sure what she was doing in the panel audience. She supposed that she should be observing her fellow audience members and trying to spot a suspect, but she didn’t have any idea what to look for. More than half the people in the room were male, most of them with brown hair. And she couldn’t tell who was a Goldberg fan and who was there to see the others. Some of the men she’d pegged as possible Goldberg fans seemed to be there to see Larry the Publisher and most of the rest seemed to be there to see the other male panelists. She finally realized that she and a couple of other females were the only ones interested in hearing Miz Goldberg’s opinion.
Of the five, however, she had to admit that the one she liked the most was probably Duncan. When he spoke he had an aura of authority. He never seemed to cut people down, except in the most humorous way, and when he spoke people tended to fall silent. The term she was looking for was “charisma.” He wasn’t particularly handsome or dominating, but he had a gift for presenting things in ways that people could understand and enjoy listening to. She thought he would have made a great teacher. A few of the people present seemed to absolutely loathe him and she wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t what they said, the questions they asked, but how they said it. Most of the rest, those who clearly were his “fans” and others who clearly didn’t know him very well, however, seemed to really enjoy hearing his thoughts.
After the panel she waited to talk to him again. He was listening to a young man talk about one of his books. Barb couldn’t make heads or tails of what they were talking about and the young man… wasn’t charismatic. He tended to stutter and repeat himself but Duncan simply nodded and seemed honestly interested in what he was saying, even smiling at a couple of very lame attempts at jokes on the part of the fan. She realized that was part of what made him so interesting; he had the ability to listen as well as talk. To really listen and pay attention to what the other person was saying, to make reasonable comments that proved he was paying attention and cared about what was being said. She’d dealt with a few people who were relatively famous and they tended to only hear their own words and thoughts. It was clear that however well known Duncan was, and he was clearly famous at least within this group, he hadn’t let it go entirely to his head.