Going to be at WorldCon? My reading is tomorrow night — Friday — at 5PM, in the Convention Center, room 203A. I'm going to be reading from the new 21,000-word novella I wrote last week — your only chance to get at this story between now and its eventual publication, likely a year away.
Trish gathered her staff in the board room and wrote the following in glowing letters on the wall with her fingertip, leaving the text in her expressive schoolmarm's handwriting rather than converting it to some sterile font: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."
Her staff, all five of them, chuckled softly. "Recognize it?" she asked, looking round at them.
"Pee-Wee Herman?" said the grassroots guy, who was so young it ached to look at him, but who could fire a cannonload of email into any congressional office on 12 hours' notice. He never stopped joking.
The lawyer cocked an eyebrow at him and stroked her moustache, a distinctive gesture that you could see in any number of courtv archives of famous civil-rights battles, typically just before she unloaded both barrels at the jury-box and set one or another of her many precedents. "It's Martin Luther King, right?"
"Close," Trish said.
"Geronimo," guessed the paralegal, who probably wasn't going to work out after all, being something of a giant flake who spent more time on the phone to her girlfriend than filing papers and looking up precedents.
"Nope," Trish said, looking at the other two staffers — the office manager and the media guy — who shrugged and shook their heads. "It's Gandhi," she said.
They all went, "Ohhhh," except the grassroots guy, who crossed to the wall and used his fingertip to add, "And then they assassinate you."
"I'm too tough to die," the lawyer said. "And you're all too young. So I think we're safe."
