Dragon On Home

And a good time was had by all.

Let's see... DragonCon 2006...

Got to plug InterGalactic Medicine Show here and there (which was kind of the point of going).

Got to hang out with a good group of writers.

Got to meet a few editors, including book editors from Tor and one from Penguin, as well as Jason Sizemore of Apex Digest and Jetse de Vries of Interzone.

Got to see some crazy people in crazy costumes (they tell me one woman was wearing a bikini made entirely of duct tape, though I never saw her myself). I did see somethings I could have lived without seeing, but they that one room full of 25 to 30 Princess Leia's in slave girl outfits more than made up for it.

Got interviewed for a podcast called "I Should Be Writing," produced by Mur Lafferty (I'll tell you when and where to find that as soon as I know myself).

Got invited to have a story in an upcoming anthology called Crypto-Critters II (I ran into the editor of the first Crypto-Critters antho (cryptozoology - the study of 'unknown' creatures, which, yeah, is really quite the oxymoron when you think about it)) and mentioned to said editor that I had read and enjoyed Crypto I. He told me it was such a success that he was doing another, but one of the writers had had to cancel out, so he gave me that guy's slot. That didn't suck.

What else...?

Here's a fun moment: I'm sitting in a dinner with a group of people, waiting for a table to open up. We've been waiting a while, so I start reading poetry to the group (and anyone else unfortunate enough to be sitting near by)(one of our group is in grad school and happened to have a bunch of poetry with her (this is why hanging out with writers is so much fun)(okay, okay, enough parenthetical enclosures already; on with the story...))) anyway... my cell phone rings. I see that it's from another one from our group, Alethea, who we've been trying to reach, so I answer the phone saying, "Ed's dinner and poetry reading corner, how may I help you?" Only it wasn't Alethea; it was Kevin J. Anderson (the Kevin J. Anderson who's written a gazillion books, you ask? The one whose next Dune novel is set to debut at #3 on the New York Best Sellers List when it comes out in a few weeks? Why yes, that's the one...) Apparently he had dinner with Alethea the night before and had her cell phone. It’s somewhat embarrassing to get your first call from someone like that and answer the phone that way, but embarrassing stories are the best ones, so the next time I see Alethea (and ask her if she'd gotten her cell phone back), I tell her this story. She tells me she's already heard it. Apparently Mr. Anderson was telling it, too. I haven’t decided yet if I’m amused or mortified (which, you’ll note does not prevent me from telling it again here).

I’m sure there’s more, but as I’ve said before, I despise con reports that go on for 20 pages. DragonCon was DragonCon (if you’ve ever been, you know what I mean; if you haven’t ever been, you’ll just have to go see for yourself). Special thanks to my con partners in crime, Alethea Kontis, Steve Saville, James Maxey, Eric James Stone, Jason Sizemore, Oliver Hanson (m-bop), Ada Brown, Gary Rinehart, Helena Bell, and Allen Moore, who made a good weekend great.