games

Sunday morning at 9 o’clock as the exhibitors file into the hall. Seven more hours of con.

Booth 1841 with Games Plus. Many-colored coat, bright yellow hair. Can’t miss me. Unless I’ve wandered off.

Yes, yes, I didn’t post last night. Too busy catching up with a dear, dear friend(HI GARY! I had so much fun.  Thank you for making time for me. It was fab to crowd-watch  & sight-see & catch up!) from back in the summer camp days when piling six people into a car and driving from “outside Morgantown,”  to head into Bloomington Indiana was our weekend entertainment. Oh, Waycross-Hickory Hill. Always in my heart, you shaped my life in wonderful ways.

ANYWAY. Con notes. Just a few, because I want to get onto the exhibit floor to wander while the crowds are absent.

• Many thanks to all of you who have been sent by mutual friends to drop by and talk to me about books ‘n stuff. And many, MANY thanks to my supportive friends. I am beyond grateful and thrilled and humbled and all that. Glitter hearts and hugs to all of you.
• Special shout-out to the wonderful Troy Maynard, the Very Vocal Viking, who braved peak Saturday crowds to say hello. (If you haven’t read his book, you should.  WONDERFUL stuff.)
• People are stopping for stickers and then buying books just because they think the stories sound good. How cool is that? SUPER COOL.
• Someone who bought Rough Passages on Friday dropped by to ask a fantastic, thoughtful plot&concept-related question no one else has ever asked me. Filed under “How To Make This Author GIDDY With Book Joy.” (Yes, I answered his question. We had a lovely short convo about it.)
• I’m going to have a proper logo. Daniel Govar, who designed my Dawnrigger Logo & dawn dragon, has it. No idea what it looks like yet, he wanted to surprise me here. So…THAT’s exciting!
• I had dinner last night with the Games Plus crew and it was delicious. Mount Yummy was demolished, drinks and food and stories shared. (key points: dry humor, phrasing, and a bit of gentle mockery.) Good times. I am privileged to be included.

That’s all. I have many photos, but my technology is not cooperating. Later. for now…

ONWARD!

At Booth 1841 with Games Plus. All weekend. Just saying.

It’s 11 PM on Gen Con Friday. Today was equally epic to yesterday in similar ways. My feet hate me. I am dead-dog tired. The con is still going strong. I’ll post some pics at the bottom of the post. ALL the gaming goes on until 2AM. And gaming is welcomed in almost every imaginable spot in the convention center and most of the hotels. SO. COOL.

Today’s things of note:

• The people in the booth next to Games Plus are demo’ing and selling a neat game called Era of the Ninja. I got to chatting, As One Does, and it turns out one of them works in a library in Ohio & likes SF & fantasy, go figure. We talked libraries, and books, and she now has a copy of Rough Passages to take back to her library. So maybe soon people in Ohio will be checking out my book.  That would be sweet!
• I played hooky all morning with my Minneapolis friends & generation-next, tackling my third True Dungeon. Our party reigned victorious, although my elf wizard did not survive the final encounter. Next time, someone needs to be a cleric. When the druid is the only healer and everyone is being zapped & poisoned left & right…yeah.
• But hey. I boosted the team’s initiative to beat the Big Bad to the first punch, AND I bumped up the ranger’s fighting ability before I expired. We rocked the teamwork part. ANYway. The event was fun and it was truly a joy to hang with  good friends I feel instantly comfortable around despite a gap of nearly 10 years…but that isn’t even the big news.
• The BIG news is: a book sold while I wasn’t even at the booth. How ’bout THEM apples, eh, world?  Now if you’re wondering, “Is one whole book sale that exciting?” The answer is, “HELLS YEAH IT IS.” It can’t be a pity sale if I’m not even there, see? I did more sales today than I expected again, and am now sold out of the title I didn’t bring many of because I didn’t expect it would sell, based on past cons.
• I continued to practice good people-engagement and passed out stickers & bookmarks and bitty-little biz cards all day. My smile muscles are so tired.
• Note to self for the next generation of bling: get the website name onto the stickers somehow, and do author-branded bookmarks rather than book-focused ones. Maybe bookmarks to match the banner styling. Also 2 banners, with the full text.

I’m sure there’s more, but I’m wiped and want to wind down with a little more reading in Freelance Familiars before bed.  Here are the pics I promised.

Two whole days yet to go. I’m gonna be soooooo tired by the end of this. But so happy. That’s my prediction right there.

 

1. Reunions and meet-ups are two of my favorite con activities. I got to do lots of both today! Color me with all the happy colors.

• I got to meet someone I’d only known from online interaction, which is a thing I love doing and we had a fantastic chat. Then a wonderful friend from my Borders days (HI TOM!!!) dropped by and that was beyond fabulous too. To top off the fun cake,  a friend of another wonderful friend from Borders (Hi, Nicole!)  came by to deliver greetings and grab books.
• Daniel Govar, the artist who’s done many fine character commissions for me, and who designed my incredible Dawnrigger logo, is here for his first Gen Con, so I visited the “Art Show” to say hello. I’m going to have a real colophon logo for my books soon. HAPPY SQUEE!
• Turns out the fantastic professional editor I hired to do Sharp Edge of Yesterday who I’ve been conversing with by email is here at the con, so today I GOT TO MEET HIM IN PERSON. So cool. He’s as awesome in person as he has been by email, and I was able to have a simple conversation about process details that would have taken me hours to get composed properly into text form.
  And in that “this world is so small, wow” moments, I learned today that one of my friends from the game store (HI RETT) knows my editor (HI JOHN) from another professional venue.
• I got to have a delicious dinner and long, enjoyable evening chatting with my Ghost Town writing parter (HI BILL) and with an author I met at WorldCon a couple of years back but hadn’t seen since (HI MISTY!)
• Friday AM the re-connection with continue. I’m going True Dungeon adventuring with some of the gaming friends responsible for setting my feet on the path to writing my first novel. After that gaming fun, I’ll head over to the vendor floor for the day.

2. Connecting with people brand-new to me is another exciting part of con-going for me, and Gen Con has provided plenty of that too.

• I admired someone’s phenomenal hat of pins and provided her with a sticker, and that led to a great convo about life, the universee, sexuality, contemporary fantasy. I got to recommend books by authors I know (HI HANS & LAUREN) and got some recommendations in return.
• I got asked questions about writing process by another writer, and that conversation was a lot of fun, plus I got to share my love of Habitica as an emotional-load-lifter. Good times indeed.

3. My fancy new book display saw a lot of traffic today. A goodly number of bookmarks went into people’s bags, and I made some people happy with my freebie Unity stickers. I guess the message “Love is Positive” is one folks like to see.

• Thanks to various visits full of kindness, my baseless fears of selling zero books all weekend have been washed away. Onward to the greater challenge of “Can I sell enough that I can empty one of my storage boxes?”
• I forgot to take pictures with anyone. But I DID remember to get emails for sending ebook editions to go with the con sales, so…progress?

4. Other random things I want to remember thinking about.

• There were some nice costumes, but not a lot, at least not on the exhibitor floor. I didn’t get any pics of those either. Maybe tomorrow.
• And I was too busy soaking in all the changes and new things to post anything to social media. Maybe next time when I’m not SQUIRRELing at everything. Maybe.
• This was a lot for one day & tomorrow might be even more action-packed.

Good times indeed.