My First Dragon*Con: Day One

I had been told that Dragon*Con was huge and that it had a lot of fantastic costumes. This did nothing to prepare me.

My flight to Atlanta had no problems, which is something of a record a this point. Arriving in Atlanta, I took MARTA into the city since it was supposed to stop less than a block from my hotel. As soon as I came out of the underground, I saw a Jedi and started grinning. There were other costumes scattered through the folks walking on the sidewalk.

I was at the Westin which only had the alternate history track in it. A cluster of folks in outstanding steampunk garb were standing in the entrance talking. I felt like I’d come home.

I decided that, since I had a reading that I would go ahead and wear one of the Regency outfits I’d brought. After considering and discarding the green silk spencer, due to the heat, I opted for the white sprigged lawn, with a blue moiré sash and matching blue pashmina shawl. Despite my short hair, I’ve figured out how to get it up into something resembling the correct do through the use of fifteen bobby pins.

I trotted off to registration toting a bag of sandalwood fans and my shadow puppet show, intending to go from there to my reading.

I am glad I scheduled extra time. Though I breezed through the guest line, I still had an insane time actually getting to the location of my reading.

Dragon*Con is huge. When people say “huge” they are being coy. It is freaking ginormous and has something like 60,000 people half of which, I’m guessing, are in costume. There are five different hotels. So to get from one to the next, you have to move through vast seas of Riddlers, Klingons, Fairy Princesses,

Transformers, Stormtroopers, and Steampunk Explorers. It is daunting. Daunting, I tell you.

I did find the location for reading, as did an audience. Very exciting.

My routine now is to read a cutting of the first chapter, answer some questions and talk about the writing process, then do the shadow puppet show The Broken Bridge — which I really will do a blog post about — and then sometimes read the part of Chapter 10 where Mr. Vincent performs the shadow play. I think there were twenty or so people in the room but I didn’t get a head count.

After the reading, I went out to dinner with Matthew and Tracy Rotundo, Dan Wells, Alethea Kontis, Joe Branson, Leanna Renee Hieber, and Andrew Williams.  It was fun to have a chance to talk to folks.

After that, I made the mistake of separating from the group not realizing that I would never find anyone ever again in Dragon*Con. The survival strategy is to either have a designated home base with a group or to glom on to people when you find them. Having made no plans, I spent the rest of the weekend glomming on to people when I found them. I felt a bit like the puppy that gets left outside the coffeeshop, endlessly scanning the crowd for his person.

So Day One of Dragon*Con? Fun. Overwhelming. Visual Eye Candy.

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