Friday, Sept. 24
We arrived at the con, and immediately headed up to the Gallaghers' room party. selenite handed us key cards to our room next door, where we discovered that some oh-so-sneaky individual had tried to circumvent the "no smoking" classification of the room by--how clever!--smoking in the bathroom. Yech. We changed this later on that evening, but for the moment we were content to get a fresh change of clothes and socialize next door.

There we were greeted by selenite and celticdragonfly, filkferengi, Dawn, kd5mdk and his lovely new lady-friend jazz007, and a host of others whom I've forgotten by now due to our fried après-flying state. Jazz spent a good lot of the weekend blushing and exclaiming, "Andrew!" in an "oh my god, I can't believe you said that!" voice. Methinks the lady either doth protest too much or didn't know what she was getting into...Another thing I'll blame on post-flight friedness is the lack of pictures from this congenial gathering. I was so tired forgot to grab the camera, but that didn't prevent me from enjoying the good company.

I have to say, this was the first room party I've been to with door prizes. Aaron somehow contrived to win the XXXenophile comic book--why doesn't this surprise me?

One of the highlights of the party was a spontaneous reading by Andrew of the Song of Solomon.
Quote of the evening: "Get back to the breasts!" (Followed by an exclamation of "Andrew!")


Saturday, Sept. 25
After breakfast, we took a turn through the dealers' room, and then I was torn between the Elizabeth Moon interview and the Carla Ulbrich concert going on right next door. Argh, decisions! I finally opted for Elizabeth, but snuck out halfway through for Carla. Trying to have my cake and eat it too...I apparently missed the best moment of the concert, when the line "Pancakes are short and sweet, just like me," was followed by a shout of "And stacked!" The things I sacrifice for literature...

Elizabeth Moon quotes:

"I think I'm just naturally long-winded."

About characters: "Sometimes they lie...it really ticks me off."

About her Nebula-winning novel, Speed of Dark: Her agent told her before the Nebula awards ceremony, "Be prepared for the fact that it's not going to win, because it's a weird book." (It is a weird book. Also terrifying, evocative, inspiring, uplifting, and comforting. But weird.)

After this we had lunch at the hotel restaurant with the Gallaghers, Andrew, and Jazz. I got to tell the Wankidu story to a fresh audience, eliciting delightful blushes from Jazz, and roaring laughter from the whole group. I'm wondering how much people at other tables caught, and what they thought I was talking about...

I ran off to catch the 2nd half of Pat Elrod's writing workshop. The most important point I took away with me was: Don't self-publish. Don't publish on line, or for a print-on-demand service, or a vanity press. There are three reasons for this: it's not professional, you won't make any money, and Pat will make fun of you in her workshops. There was other good information here too, about how to work with publishers, how to market your manuscript, etc., but this point was really hammered home.

Around then Aaron decided he couldn't function without coffee, so we convinced tygerr to give us a ride out to Starbucks, along with cawingcrow and ravendiana. This latter left us shortly to meet her sister, but the rest of us hit Jason's Deli for some second lunch (if you can have second breakfast, why not?). It's here that tygerr accuses me of "eating strawberries in front of him," but I have pointed out that it was not a deliberate strawberry-eating; I was merely eating strawberries while he was in the same room. Not the same thing at all.

We got back in time to catch the end of the Michael Longcor concert, and then it was time for Larry Niven's GOH address, moderated by Elizabeth Moon. I know I must have heard some of this, because I was there, but all I really remember was glancing at the time so I could slip out early enough to go upstairs and get changed for the Masquerade.


Masquerade
celticdragonfly was a wonderful help, French braiding my hair and helping me get dressed. I realized with horror that I'd forgotten my bumroll! We tried to improvise with the boppy baby pillow, and a rolled-up towel, but the skirts wouldn't hang right, and I had to go bumless. It hung a bit low in the back, but it looked like a train; at least, that's what I kept telling myself.

The missing bumroll turned out not to be a problem--I'll put the end of the story first and admit that I won the grand prize! Exciting, yes, but let's not neglect to mention that there were only 6 other contestants, most of whom had been recruited out of the hallway a few hours previously. "Hey, you're in a costume, come be in the masquerade!" I think only two others besides myself had actually shown up planning to be in the show; the rest had been ruthlessly shanghaied by the con committee.

Like all events, there was a lot of hurry-up-and wait involved with the Masquerade. We got to the green room just barely on time, and were the only ones there. Aaron helped me get into the rest of my outfit as the other entrants trickled in:

A gentleman in a very good pirate outfit made by his wife;

A lady in renaissance garb, with a green cloak and one of those long chain mail headdresses. One of the shanghaied, she lamented that she didn't have her formerly award-winning creation, a two-person Jabba the Hutt costume that had been too expensive to ship home with her. ("We couldn't afford the U-Haul trailer.")

Another pair in Renaissance garb with long pink leine sleeves;

A woman dressed as Shawn of the Dead;

A woman dressed as a Farscape character named Chiana, with white body makeup, a silver wig, and a gun made of foam rubber painted black;

And a woman in a black and gold gown topped by a black lace veil, and carrying a skull-headed staff. She had some kind of presentation where she lifted the veil to reveal a monster mask and then read a poem, but of course I missed that backstage.

My entry went quite well. The stage was up three steps and through a narrow door, so I had to spend a few seconds rearranging my skirts after entering. I used the Elizerator sound track again (thank you to my prince of a husband and my wonderful friend Brian for setting that up for me!). The voice-over is only 50 seconds long, but boy did it seem longer. I was up there thinking, "Ok, I did the the thing with the fan, I did the royal wave, um, now what do I do??"

The show opened with a magic show and two belly dancing succubi, and wound up with a filk concert while the judges deliberated and someone ran down to the hotel's business center to print up award certificates. We missed all this; no one had thought to let us poor costumers out of our cage so we could come attend the festivities. We got a profuse apology for that later, and I'm sure they'll rethink that next year; can't think of everything the first time around. (Although, may I say, I seriously resent missing out on Larry Niven belly dancing.)

My prize was two free memberships for next year's con, so it looks like I'll be back in Dallas about this time next year; which means I'll have to come up with something to top the Lizgown...

After changing into something that weighed less than a small child, the plan was to order some food and then go filking, but I started to feel icky. Once I laid down to let the ickiness pass, the bed trapped me in its field of doziness, and I decided to call it a night. I'm sad I missed the filking and party-hopping, though. :-(


Sunday, Sept. 26
Breakfast, packing, checkout, shopping...and an afternoon workshop on "Improvisation and the Art of Storytelling." Very interesting, and possibly even inpsiring...More shopping (Aaron bought me a lovely green necklace in the dealers' room, which perfectly matched the dress I was wearing), and a feedback panel for the con. celticdragonfly wants to run some dance next year, so I may help her out with that if they decide they want Renaissance. I'd greatly enjoy teaching dance again.

Our weekend ended with a very enjoyable lunch out with the Gallaghers, Andrew, and Jazz; but the fun hadn't ended yet, because we were going home with the Gallaghers for pizza and hot tubbing. In fact, the fun went on for another two days, because of this minor hurricane that closed the Atlanta airport. We got rebooked on a flight the next day; our luggage got rebooked on a completely different flight, causing me to go pale at the thought of the Lizgown possibly lost to the caprices of fate and airline luggage services. Luckily, all ended well; we had a welcome place to stay with the Gallaghers, the next day's flight was only (heh) delayed an hour, and our bags were sitting right there for us in the baggage office when we landed. Lizgown survived the ordeal, and all is well.

On to the next adventure!

Pictures here!