P.S. What a gentleman; he insisted on picking me up at my apartment rather than just meeting at the restaurant. He also commented on how when we first meatspace met at WriterCon I seemed very shy (in the context of "tonight that's not how you come off at all"), which was actually affirming to me because that's how I'm used to thinking of myself (though I have grown into this "vibrant" persona I seem to present nowadays).
Directing him on the way back at one point I said to go straight. He said that his sister(?) who lives in the Castro says, "We're not going straight; we're going gaily forward." Hee.
Which reminds me, in talking about Harvard Square I used the phrase "pseudo-homeless goth punks," which phrase he gets first claim if he wants to use it in his fic (which reminds me to add Charles de Lint to my To Read list).
I remembered that the author I was thinking of is Dennis Lehane -- Mystic River, etc. I'm hard-pressed to think of other fiction set in the Boston area, which distresses me. For Northampton I can easily think of Tracey Kidder's nonfiction book Home Town and the movie Malice (okay, the latter thanks to j-term, but still).