Today’s first tape was a recording of a panel at Dimension Con, March 27, 1982. The panelists included William Gaines, Al Feldstein, Jack Kamen, Marie Severin, and Jack Davis, some of whom hadn’t seen each other for twenty years or more.

If you recognize the names, you know what the panel was about — E.C. Comics.

I was not at that convention, but a reader sent me the tape.

Alas, the sound quality isn’t very good, and I wasn’t able to clean it up very effectively; I suspect an actual sound engineer could have done it, but I can’t.

Still, it’s good to have it.

I also had a tape labeled “Lawrence Watt-Evans RB.” I assumed from that label that it was me on a panel, or being interviewed, or something, but I had no idea what RB meant.

It meant “Reality Break.” It’s a radio interview. From internal evidence I place it in 1994 or ’95, when RB was only on WREK Atlanta, not yet syndicated.

Reality Break was a podcast for a couple of years, I see, but it started out on radio as a half-hour show.

The tape quality is really excellent, though I cranked the volume up a little. The material — well, it’s a pretty good interview, but there were a few things.

For one, the theme song they played at the beginning and end of the show, while clever and very professionally done, is much too long — it takes up at least three or four of the thirty minutes.

For another, I noticed some annoying little mannerisms in how I talk. What’s really annoying about them is that I still have them, and my kids each picked up some of them (though not the same ones).

And finally, I told some flat-out lies in the interview, and I don’t know why. Specifically, I said that my first non-fiction sale was my column in the Comics Buyer’s Guide, that I’d never tried writing any sort of non-fiction for money at all before that.

Which isn’t true. I wrote feature articles for a local newspaper called the Bedford Patriot back in 1972, when I was a senior in high school. Didn’t pay much, but it was actual money for writing non-fiction. I don’t see how I could possibly have forgotten that during the interview.

Very odd.

Anyway, the interview pretty much filled Side 1, and Side 2 was blank, and it’s all neatly filed away on my hard drive now.