Sunday, my last real day at Dragon*Con

I’m feeling sad about having to leave Atlanta behind so early today – next year I’ll seriously have to plan to arrive on Thursday and leave on Monday, so that I really have four full days at the Con.

Here are just some of the highlights from yesterday:

• The Red Dwarf Q&A with the voice of the toaster, which had hints about the new series to be filmed this winter.
• Getting my picture taken with Autumn Reeser.
• The Browncoats Redemption wrap panel. (I still have to watch that DVD.)
• Trying to answer Anne McCaffrey trivia questions, (mostly NOT Pern trivia,) and eat a cheeseburger and fries in the same time slot.
• The Anne McCaffrey art panel with Michael Whelan, who apparently put Pern onto the New York Times Best-seller list with the cover for “The White Dragon”, which I didn’t know.
• A fan panel discussing Chuck and the upcoming new season, which reminded me of a lot of things that I love about that show.
• The Doctor Who season six review panel, and asking a question about the missing pieces and unanswered questions of Melody Pond’s life.
• The ‘Big Bang Theory’ discussion panel, which had a guy dressed up as Howard Wolowitz in the audience.

One thing that wasn’t particularly a highlight was not getting into the ‘Stars of Buffy’ Q&A, after leaving the Michael Whelan Q&A to wait most of an hour for it. Oh well.

I also thought it was interesting that most of the fans on the Doctor Who review panel had such hate for the little Amy Pond intro spiel on the North American broadcasts this season. (I think it originated with BBC America, but the Space channel in Canada airs it too.) They really seemed offended about how it introduced the Doctor as ‘The Imaginary Friend.’

Myself, I don’t really think that intro is necessary, but I rather like it anyway – mostly as a little recap of some of the basics of the current state of canon for anybody who’s checking out a new episode and needs those basics. “I ran away with him, and we’ve been running ever since.” Come on – what’s wrong with that?

Saturday at Dragon*Con

I had a very busy day.

Breakfast at the Holiday, then the shuttle over to the Hilton. Armed with my ‘Buffy Omnibus Seven’ and ‘Dollhouse one-shot’ comics, I got two signatures from Felicia Day and one from James Marsters. The extra Felicia signature was on a ‘Doctor Horrible’ glossy photo.

The ‘Is the Doctor a meddler’ panel was standing room only, and not much of that, so I wandered over to Kate Mulgrew’s Q&A for a while, and then pulled out at the half-hour mark to get into line for the big Smallville Q&A session.

I’m not sure if anybody else does that, though I suspect it’s more common than you might think. There’s a half hour break between panels and other items on the schedule, to let people go from place to place, but really popular panels get lines starting up more than hour early. So, if you leave one panel half-way through, you can get to the site of the next and have nearly an hour, which should be enough to get you a pretty good seat. Obviously, you wouldn’t bother unless the second panel is a lot better than the first.

So, Smallville Q&A, was a lot of fun, we heard from Laura Vandervoort about her superhero poses and got a lot of fun stories from the villain guys, and heard about what everybody’s up to now. I got into line with a question that was mostly for James and partly also for Sam Witwer, about how much they knew about their character’s dark sides when they first started, because we met Brainiac and Doomsday through their secret identities first. But when I was second in line to ask, James had to leave early, so I decided not to bother and went back to my seat.

Making travel plans

I’ve been doing a lot of travel planning over the past few weeks, and the anticipation can be almost as much fun as the actual travelling. (It can also be a bit frustrating.)

• There’s the big trip, of course, to Lawrence, Kansas for the CSSF workshop, last week of June and first week of July.
• Dragon*Con 2011, Labor day weekend in Atlanta!
• Fan Expo 2011, the week before in Toronto. Going up to Toronto for a day or an evening doesn’t really count as a trip on the same level as flying to the states, but when I’m booking a hotel room in the city for the weekend, then I tend to count it.
• And, I’ve just made the arrangements to go back to San Francisco in November, to attend the Night of Writing Dangerously for my third straight year!

I’m planning to go to Polaris as well, wouldn’t miss my chance to go and see Adam Baldwin, but haven’t actually booked the ticket or the hotel yet. I’ll need to do that soon, as the online ticket sales deadline is in just a few days.

And I think that when all of that is done, I’ll still have some vacation time left, because my boss confirmed that I qualify for four weeks off this year. Where else should I go – any ideas?

There’s no place like… Kansas?

So I got into the CSSF Short fiction workshop – I’ll be spending two weeks in Lawrence, Kansas this summer! I’m really excited, and you’ll definitely be hearing more from me about this.

In other travel and vacation news, I found a vacancy in an Atlanta hotel for Labor day weekend and registered for DragonCon 2011!

Been running around all evening, need to go to bed soon. Blog more tomorrow.

The waiting list

At this point, I have officially been on the waiting list for the Odyssey workshop for nearly a month.

I’d love to get a chance to attend, but it’s been oddly stressful waiting for news. At this point, I think I’d appreciate finding out for sure that I’m not getting in nearly as much as an acceptance, just so that the waiting is over, and I can go ahead and make other plans for my vacation time. Dragoncon 2011 is looking like it would be a lot of fun, and Atlanta area hotels are already booking up for labor day weekend.

And then, in looking for ‘writer’s conferences’, I found some interesting events that look like Odyssey-lite or Clarion-lite; again fairly small events so I wouldn’t necessarily get a spot, but only 1 week or 2 weeks long. Viable Paradise is one that looks really good, and the CSSF Writer’s workshop

There are lots of people who I’d love a chance to get to see at a sci-fi convention or something similar, (Nathan Filion?) but haven’t seen an opportunity so far.