MileHiCon Day 2

Saturday was to be the crazy day for me, but unfortunately, it didn't turn out to be as crazy as I'd hoped it would be.

I had a 10 am reading with Dan Hoyt. Readings in the morning are always hard to get people to come to. A lot of people party late into the night (or is it early into the morning), and they're not ready for readings at 10 am. Nevertheless, we had about 8-10 people, and I read the first chapter of Red Moon Rising, and the whole time I was wishing that the book had been released so that I would have had copies.

After the reading, I had a signing, which didn't draw much of a crowd. Last year they moved the signings out of the dealer's room and into the atrium. I'm guessing that the logic was that people were more likely to see the writers in the atrium, but I've noticed a definite drop in sales since we've moved to the atrium. I think more people might see the authors, but in the dealers room, more people who want to spend money will see the writers, and I think that works better.

After that I did something called "Speed Date an Author," and no, I was not cheating on Rebecca. The idea behind this was that there was a room full of authors and readers or author-wannabes could come in and talk to us. They had three minutes to talk to us, then a bell went off, and they moved on to the next author. I think it was a great idea, and I had some great (but very short) conversations with a lot of people. I'm hoping that I was able to pass on some good advice to a few of the author wannabes, and I'm hoping I gained a few new readers. I think if they do this next year, they need to lengthen the time to five minutes and have better organization of the movement of the readers.

Later in the day I was on a panel called "DM Bootcamp." This was a panel with Doris Beetem, Laura Givens, and Daniel Peak. As you can probably guess from the title, this was a panel about running RPGs. We had a lot of fun on this panel, and I think we gave out some good information to a rather large crowd. There seems to be one token gaming panel every year, and this is the second year that I've been on it. One thing the large crowd made me realize is that there seems to be a lot of interest in gaming at the Con. I noticed a lot of people playing games throughout the Con, and maybe they need to embrace the gaming aspect a little more...maybe even bring in a gaming guest of honor...if money allows.

After this panel was what I'd really been looking forward to...I was going to run a new adventure of Ephemeris. Unfortunately, a lot of people were grabbing dinner before the masquerade started, and the belly dancers next to the gaming tables seemed to draw a lot of people's attention away from the games, and I couldn't get enough players, so we couldn't debut the new adventure. Since we couldn't play, I was able to watch my oldest in a sword fighting contest. She'd never done anything like this before, but she made it to the third round...where she was knocked out by an adult who teaches sword fighting. Still, we were all very proud of her!

The night ended with us attending the masquerade. There were a few good costumes this year, but not as many as usual.

Rebecca was having a lot of problems during the Con. She wasn't feeling good, and being 38 weeks pregnant, she was very uncomfortable. Still, we did manage to get a few photos taken, which I've posted on my Facebook page. I noticed a lot more cameras flashing around me this year than in years past, so I'm sure more horrible pics of me will show up somewhere in the near future.

I'll post about day 3 tomorrow...