Back from GenCon

I’m home from Gen Con, and working on catching up with everything. The convention was an absolute blast. Most of my time was spent on the Writers Symposium, signing books in Authors Alley, and hanging out with truly excellent people.

Huge thanks to Marc Tassin, who organized the Writers Symposium and did (in my opinion) a tremendous job of it. Thanks also to Don and Molly for all of their work both helping to run the programs and for making sure Marc occasionally stopped to eat or sleep.

There were many Moments of Awesomeness, far too many to list here. But I’m going to share a few highlights.

• Almost a decade after he gave me a most excellent blurb for Goblin Quest, I finally got to meet Wil Wheaton in person. We only chatted for a minute or so, but it was long enough for me to say thanks, and to joke around a little before he went on his way.
• I was on a panel with Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon, and had a blast. Even if Larry kept rubbing my head for luck 😉 They were both wonderfully warm and friendly people.
• On Saturday, Paul Genesse put together a pizza party dinner thing, which I shamelessly crashed. This was a high point of the convention. I laughed harder than I have in ages, thanks to folks like Mary Robinette Kowal, Scott Lynch, Douglas Warrick, Danielle Friedman, Monica Valentinelli, and more.
• I went True Dungeoning! Pat Rothfuss had organized a True Dungeon event for Worldbuilders, and invited me to participate. It was much fun. Though as a newbie, I was a bit lost in the beginning. I ended up being the rogue, solved my three puzzle boxes, and totally looted the corpses of John Scalzi and Pat Rothfuss!

GenCon is a big event, with probably close to 50,000 people this year. This was only my second time attending, and I definitely needed to retreat to the hotel room from time to time to recharge. But this also means there were a lot of people I don’t see very often, or hadn’t yet met in person, and that was the absolute best part of the weekend.

I posted a few more pics on Facebook.

I’m slowly getting to various emails and other work that piled up over the weekend. Not to mention catching up on sleep. But I got to hang out with amazing people, sold 40+ books over in Authors Alley, and generally had an absolute blast.

Totally worth it.

My thanks to everyone who helped to make this weekend so much fun.