WordCON Day Whatever

Ooh! Today I saw lots of cool things.

First off, I sat in line with a friend for a Kaffenklatch something or other for about an hour this morning. After we turned around in our spot a few times, kicked up the carpet and sat down, a handful of budding, hopeful authors came and sat down behind us. (I am not a budding anything—too old. These were children. Children in twenty year old bodies with far too much intellect and a lack of personal hygiene.)

Their conversations were, to say the least, hysterically absurd. One of them, I am happy to report, has been living off the free food in the CON suite and all of the parties at night for the entire week. The smell he emitted led me to wonder if he'd been sleeping under someone's bed. Go geeks.

Once that, er, ordeal came to a close, I went to a weapons class. Normally the people demonstrating with weapons are amateurs that have done a little bit of play sword fighting at Renescance fairs. This guy, however, knew his stuff. He had some really cool weapons, including an 18lb, 6 ½ foot tall sword that made me want to jump up and take it from him. No matter that it's over a foot taller than me. Or that the guy outweighed me by at least 100lbs. Nope, I just wanted to play with the sword.

Seriously though, he really knew his stuff. I only know some hand to hand fighting, but he applied pretty much the same techniques I would when going against a tall/long opponent when he talked about defending against this giant sword. Very cool.

Let me think, what else? I actually pitched to an agent while I was standing in the hall. That was a fun. I managed to pull off a good pitch as well, which made me feel better.

I met a few other hopeful, Utah writers and we had dinner at the pub. Not very nice of us to bring twenty people to the pub and not buy one alcoholic beverage. That would probably explain the horrible service.

Tonight we went to the Hugo Awards Ceremony. I'm sorry to say, that without being extremely familiar with all of the nominees and their work the ceremony got boring very fast. Plus, to a few of the winners it didn't feel like they much cared. None of the Utah people that were nominated won, which made me sad. So I probably won't go to that again. Unless someone from the writing group I'm here with gets nominated. That's the pact.

Then, after the after party we felt like we needed some ice cream, so we walked through the Carl's Junior drive through and begged them for a shake. Our pitiful cries for chocolate broke down their resistant walls, and we soon had happiness in our hands, and straws to deliver it to our mouths.

Tomorrow, the drive home . . .