Mile Hi Con this weekend was a tremendous amount of fun. This is the first time I’ve gotten to be on panels at that convention, which was exciting. On Saturday I got to participate in a panel where we basically got to bitch for an hour about horrible movie science.
(Spoiler: What I find most annoying is, mundanely enough, movies putting GEOLOGISTS in white lab coats.)
I got to have a good rant in that panel as well, when someone asked if movie makers should be held responsible to not put crap science in their movies. I have opinions about this, but it deserves its own entry. Hopefully later this week!
Saturday there was also a panel called the Stop the Apocalypse Now game show, which was hilarious. The panelists (Dan Dvorkin and CJ Henderson) plus an audience volunteer were each given a random item on a card (eg: golf clubs, an abandoned mine, an x-ray spectrometer) and then given one minute to figure out a story to tell about how they could stop a Syfy-worthy cheesy apocalypse scenario with that item. I used my x-ray spectrometer to mutate a gibbon into something the size of King Kong so it could kill giant condors. Because in the age old battle between monkeys and birds, monkeys WIN.
So yes. That was incredibly fun. I told the panel moderators that they should make a real game of it, or do PDFs that people could print up like Cards Against Humanity because it was hilarious. Best story of the panel was CJ Henderson using the Dead Sea Scrolls to defeat an army of evil Peeps that had been animated by the Necronomicon, rendering the Peeps kosher in the process.
Sunday I was on the NaNoWriMo support panel. Hopefully some good advice was dispensed. Mostly it just made me miss NaNo. Soon, my pretty… soon. Once I’m not in school any more, I’ll finally have time to hammer at writing like that again.
And then after… I HAD A READING. LIKE A REAL WRITER. OMG.
I shared the reading time with Carrie Vaughn, and because of her the room was packed. It was utterly terrifying. But Carrie was incredibly sweet and supportive and wonderful. She also let me go first, for which I will forever be grateful.
I read two short stories for the crowd – The Jade Tiger first since I realized it would be smart to tell everyone that hey, I have Steampunk novellas coming out next year! And since it’s all the same characters, hopefully people liked them and will want to read more. And actually, at the end of the reading when we opened up for questions, someone in the crowd actually did ask me a question! And it was about when the first novella would come out, and what it would be called. So exciting! (Answers: Murder on the Titania and in March if memory serves.)
Then I read Comes the Huntsman. That story is so difficult to read aloud for so many reasons. But I did it! And I didn’t actually cry, though I got choked up. Goddamnit it’s always section 10 than gets me, every time. I guess I sounded so shaken up that when it was done Carrie told me to have some chocolate. (I’d brought Halloween candy because I know it’s smart to bribe your audience.) Everyone was immensely kind.
I hope I get to do it again.