More Wizard World Toronto 2012 Memories

Previous memories.

Okay, so – the Vampire Diaries panel was a lot of fun. The panel was just Paul Wesley and Torrey DeVitto – and I think I didn’t realize for a few minutes that they were both married and castmates on the show, but it sounds like that’s a lot of fun for them. I hadn’t actually gotten to see any of Torrey’s episodes of the show at the time, because I was many months behind, though I’ve caught up to her first appearances by now, thanks to a small weekend marathon.

Jeri Ryan’s Q&A was scheduled in the same room next, and I’d heard enough to guess that Wizard World was going to enforce the ‘clear out of the room and let the people waiting in line have first choice of seats’ policy, so I actually took off five minutes early, when the volunteer mentioned that it was going to be last question, just to beat the rush – and that seemed to work pretty well, though I’m not sure if there was any chance of not getting back into the room.

Jeri was a lot of fun, telling stories about what it was like to be the new girl on Voyager and how she almost fell over on the bridge wearing a laser prosthetic piece over one of her eyes, because it took away her depth perception. She talked up her new show ‘Body of Proof’ a lot too, which makes sense because it’s still waiting on news for getting renewed. I asked her about if she felt she was typecast from having been on Voyager – “No, I feel like it gave me a lot of career opportunities that I wouldn’t have had otherwise” – and asked about her favorite role since, which got her talking for several minutes about Leverage. I’ll have to check that series out.

My last event of the day on Saturday was a Doctor Who fan panel, which was a lot of fun. It was put on by a new fan group, the Doctor Who Society of Canada, which was apparently born at Fan Expo 2011, and they said that they’re looking for new members and had events regularly in the Toronto area.

After the panel, I hurried home so quickly I realized on the bus that I’d completely forgotten to collect the photo that I had taken with Amy.

Sunday morning, as I got off the bus at Union station, something unfortunate happened – I slipped on the slightly wet pavement and wrenched my knee. 😦 But I didn’t want to let it ruin my day, so I hurried off towards the convention center as quickly as I could manage, and soon I was in line to get back into the show. I’d inventoried my Buffy and Angel graphic novels Saturday evening, and managed to pick up several new titles, (getting a discount on a slightly worn copy of the last ‘Buffy Season Eight’) and I also remembered to get my Amy Acker photo.

Soon enough, I was headed back down to panel room B. First was the Quantum Leap Panel – Scott Bakula and Dean Stockwell talking about the old days together, which was an awful lot of fun. I kept using the same trick of leaving the audience a few minutes early to get in line for the next one – hobbling actually, on my injured knee, but I managed well enough. Sean Maher’s Q&A session was next, and it was a lot of fun. He talked about some of his favorite bits of filming “The Playboy Club”, and being a part of Joss Whedon’s “Much Ado about Nothing.” I was able to ask him about his favorite moment of working with Jewel Staite – he said that moment in the Movie where Simon tells Kaylee that his one regret is not making time to be with her, and her reaction is ‘Hell with this – I’m gonna live!’ I also asked him if he had any notion of what happened next for Simon and Kaylee after the movie.

“Well, Jewel and I joked a bit about that. She said that if there was a Serenity 2, it should open with Kaylee like eight and a half months pregnant, really big. And she’s shaving Simon’s head, saying that he’s just too damn pretty.”

And the last Q&A panel of the entire con was Amy Acker. She was great, really funny and sweet, talked about Cabin in the Woods, and Much Ado about Nothing, and how she’s going to be guest starring on Person of Interest. That’s about all I can remember now – catch you later!

Somewhat faded memories of Wizard World Toronto 2012 – part 1

Because of the non-stop craziness of the A-Z challenge and continuing to do Six Sentence Sunday, I didn’t get to tell you anything about the Wizard World Toronto Comic Con, which took place April 14th and 15th. I had a really great time, (except for perhaps one moment that I’ll tell you about later,) and want to send a shout-out to the Wizard World team for a very well-run show.

I’ve been to Wizard World Comic Con in Toronto two times before. In 2010, it was actually the first fan convention I ever went to – I won a general admission ticket in a Toronto Browncoats shindig giveaway, and had a really great time, meeting Jewel Staite and Magda Apanowicz. I blogged quite a bit about the 2011 show at the time.

There were a lot of changes to Wizard World Toronto in 2012. They moved from the Direct Energy Center on the CNE grounds to the North building of the Metro Toronto Convention Center, a venue that I haven’t been to since the overcrowded 2010 Fan Expo. They also cut it down to a 2-day show, eliminating the Friday afternoon part of the schedule, and moved into April – the same weekend as the Ad Astra fan-run literary convention, actually. I’m disappointed that I couldn’t go to both Wizard World and Ad Astra this year, but I have no regrets about picking Wizard World.

I stuck with the same strategy I used in the March comic con of taking the GO bus into Toronto each day, rather than getting a hotel room downtown. I was also able to drive to the Hamilton bus station this time, in my new car, which actually made the commute a lot less stressful. I got to the South building pretty early on Saturday morning, armed with my barcode ticket printouts. It didn’t take too long to get one of the barcodes scanned and an official wristband sealed onto my person. Then helpful volunteers directed me up an escalator…

To wait in line, with the rest of the general admission peons, for the doors to the show floor to open. (Behind the advance VIP line, but they had to line up too, at least.)

But around 10 am the line started moving, and I went straight for the celebrity autograph area along the back of the floor. Not many stars were there yet, but I think there was a volunteer at Sean Maher’s booth, saying that he was on his way, so I waited around and got him to sign the two items that I’m trying to get signed by the whole Firefly cast – my Serenity blueprints book, and the graphic novel of ‘Those Left Behind.’ Waited a bit longer for somebody to show up at Amy Acker’s booth – eventually heard from somebody that her flight was delayed and she’d be half an hour – or an hour.

The rest of that morning went pretty quickly. Lining up for the photo op with Sean, by that time the word was in that Amy was on her way and a line was forming at her booth, so I joined the line, got her to sign an Angel comic and a head shot, then lined up to get my photo taken with her. I think around this point I must have grabbed a slice of pizza from the ubiquitous Pizza Pizza concession, and wandered the sales floor, looking for anything really cool I had to buy, Picked up some ‘Firefly’ promotional cards, wandered through the comic book stands looking at all the Buffy and Angel graphic novels, and realized that I had very little certainty of which titles I already owned, so I didn’t buy any that day.

I don’t really remember anything else before three in the afternoon on Saturday, which was the Vampire Diaries panel. Actually, I remember lining up for the panel shortly after two. And I think that I’ve rambled long enough for one post, so I’ll pick it up there next time!

My Wizard world diary – day three

Crusader spotlight has been pre-empted tonight to bring you the conclusion of my Wizard World series. I expect that I’ll have plenty of plug posts in April – especially featuring blogs that start with letters that are otherwise hard to come up with A-Z posts for!

After buffet breakfast, (including some sadly uninspiring french toast,) and working on some editing in my hotel room, I packed my things and checked out of the hotel a little before 11am. Carried my suitcase over to the streetcar, and so on to the convention, where I gratefully left it under the care of friends at the Can’t stop the Serenity table, and making a ‘donation to their charitable society’ as thanks. (They were collecting for Equality Now, I’m not sure if I mentioned that last time.)

I enjoyed the Battlestar Galactica panel with the chief and Ellen Tigh – even though there were lots of spoilers about cylons, since I’m still not very far through Galactica season one.

Then the big Buffyfest panel.

My Wizard World diary, day Two

I arrived not long after 11. Went down the row of Buffy stars for autographs, and Julie Benz and Mark Metcalf were both there. Julie had a long line of people (twisting hack and forth,) but there were only a half-dozen people waiting for Mark.

Some of those guys ahead of me in the line were apparently from a video blog or small tv show, and they wanted to do two seperate interviews with him. I waited patiently, and got him to sign my Buffy RPG book when they were done. Then grabbed a slice of pizza and water, and brought it into Julie’s Q&A.

It was very cool having the VIP pass to get into the front rows of the Buffy fan Q&As. I remember thinking that the reserved seating wasn’t worth much for me, when I was considering getting the VIP upgrade, but it was definitely much appreciated. The MC was a guy from this Stan Lee superhero reality show – he was also there at Nicholas’ Q&A and the costume contests, and was very funny.

Back to Julie’s Q&A.

My Wizard World diary, day One

I wrote down most of these notes on Friday night, after getting back to the hotel after my first evening at Wizard World Toronto Comic Con, but they’ve been somewhat edited for clarity:

I’m starting to get the hang of planning my time for this convention stuff – remembering to anticipate plenty of time for getting from place to place and waiting in lines and so on is key.

I left from work around 2 in the afternoon, pulling my suitcase behind me down Fairview street to the GO train station. Got some editing done on the train, using the Aspire netbook, and when I got off the train, I headed over to the Via rail concourse, planning to grab a double burger at the Harvey’s.

Whoops. The Harvey’s location on the Via rail concourse has apparently closed forever. There was a little sign letting me know that their nearest location was only minutes away, but I didn’t bother looking for it – headed back to the GO concourse to grab a Big Mac, then headed off onto the CN Tower skywalk, and from there south to Queen’s Quay and checked into my hotel.

After taking a few minutes to unpack a few things from my gray laptop bag, (including the netbook,) it was off via streetcar to the Direct Energy center. Paid for the upgrade from an ordinary weekend ticket to Buffyfest VIP pass, got my fancy lithograph VIP souvenir, and out onto the convention floor.

I didn’t do that much wandering

Wizard World Toronto Comic Con flashback

I’ve mostly finished packing for Wizard World, starting tomorrow, and so I’d like to spend a little time down on memory lane with my memories of Wizard World last year, since I wasn’t blogging then to tell you all about it.

Wizard World Toronto Comic Con 2010 was the first fandom convention I ever went to, really. I won the weekend pass at one of the Toronto fan clubs – I can’t even remember if it was Buffy or Firefly, and I loved the whole trip.

Possibly the highlight of the entire weekend was meeting Magda Apanowicz, who I’d never really heard of before I got there. I attended the Galactica/Caprica panel on Friday night because it sounded like fun, though at that point I had only:

1. Seen the miniseries and a few episodes of S1 of Battlestar Galactica (still true, though it’s a few more by now.)
2. Not even started watching Caprica
3. Forgotten to set my DVR to record Caprica half the time, because I wasn’t used to actually going up to the Space channel when looking to see “Hey, it’s Friday night, is anything good on?”
4. Particularly forgotten to set the DVR to record Caprica before I left for work Friday morning the day that Wizard World started.

National Novel Editing Month update, week 2

Total time logged so far: 23 hours, 38 minutes

I guess EdMo is still going fairly well for me, though I’d hoped to be already past the halfway point, especially as I probably won’t be able to do much catchup this coming weekend, as I’m going to the Wizard World Toronto Comic Con Convention! But still, I’ll figure out some way I’m sure.

Being able to go back and forth between several different projects helps to keep my energy levels up for editing, I’ve noticed. Over the past seven days, I have:

1. Finished reading ‘The Chosen’ Novel manuscript.
2. Put together my overall critique comments ‘The Chosen’ to accompany the inline notes I made as I was reading.
3. Also wrote some overall thoughts for a fanfic that I finished reading through in February, “A Kiss to build a dream on.”
4. Completed a short story critique for critters, and read through another critters entry making notes as I went.
5. Spell-checked and proofread 6 chapters of my Nanowrimo 2010 manuscript, ‘The Angel’s Charlie’.
6. Made a few more tweaks and revisions to ‘The Landing’ in preparation to submit it for Odyssey.
7. Went through a critique of ‘The Long Way Home,’ made most of the minor changes, and started thinking about the issues raised that would take more serious reworking.

The thought of making more serious changes to ‘Long Way Home’ is somewhat daunting – this critique has brought up several items that I think could really make the book better, including:

• Revising certain scenes to make sure that the characters all have unique voices and the dialog flows with style.
• Changing the way I handle some of the flashbacks – the reader thought that the way I was always going into flashback when my MC was knocked out or went to sleep was confusing.
• Raising the dramatic stakes by torturing my main characters a little and having them go through more hardships, because the current storyline actually has a lot of breaks going their way from the start.

I do want to tackle some of this before March is over, so maybe I should be careful to not spend all of my time on the more minor revisions and critiquing other people’s work.

I know that there are a few of you crusaders out there editing – any updates from your part of the world?

Travelling writer… sometimes.

Well, I’ve been thinking about travel for a little while now. It’s only a week and a half since I got back from Hidden Valley – and Elizabeth Twist wanted to hear more about that, after my somewhat ranty blog ramble about the reservation issues I ran into the first day. Yes, I had an amazing time up in Muskoka. The area around Hidden Valley was beautiful and peaceful – I’ll try to post a few of the pictures that I took. I walked around a lot – the Deerhurst resort, down the road, had better selection of restaurants, so I was heading over there for lunch and dinner by the end of my trip.

Saturday evening, I went down to the docks for a sunset cruise on the lake. I was the only one who’d come for the trip, but the old guy running the boat was happy to take me out on the water, and we chatted for a while – he seemed to know all about the whole Huntsville area, especially the parts of it that could be seen from the water.

I had in mind last New Year’s that I wanted to not be so much of a homebody and to travel more, which I guess I’ve done, though like a lot of resolutions it didn’t quite work out like I’d planned. I went to Wizard world Comic-con and Polaris in Toronto, and I’m planning to hit a few more weekend conventions. (Fan Expo is in less than a week!) And in late November, I’m going to be flying back to San Francisco and attending the National Novel Writing Month ‘Night of Writing Dangerously.’ for the second time. I’m so excited and it’s still around three months away.

The NOWD, if you haven’t heard of it, is a big fundraiser and gathering for Nanowrimo-ers from all over. I made it the centerpiece of a five-night trip to San Fran last year, and I found that I didn’t have nearly enough time to do all the touristy stuff that I wanted, so this time I’ll be spending nearly two weeks in the Bay area. Whoo-hoo. Wish me luck!

And we have pictures from Muskoka…