open
Upgrade to a better browser, please.

Worlds Without End Blog

Worldcon: Day 5 (Wicked late.) Posted at 9:29 AM by Dave Post

Dave Post

Allen Steele with his Hugo and John Scalzi[After I got back from Worldcon I immediately got sick so I’ve been a bit too lazy to wrap this up until now. I’m not sure anybody still cares more than a week later but here ya go.]

Day 5 at Worldcon came much too early. Saturday at the convention was really fun but took a lot out of all of us. We attended the Hugo Award directly after and then went out to the parties etc. so we didn’t get much sleep. Add to that we had to get up early and pack for the return trip. We were ready to take it easy for the few hours we had left at the table and decided we’d just put out some bookmarks and spend the day wandering the hall.

Hugo trophy close upOne of the first people we saw when we got to the convention center was Connie Willis. I wanted to get her signature on my Blackout/All Clear bookmark but she was having breakfast with some friends so I decided to wait for a better chance. I’m sure she would have been happy to talk to me – you could tell she was still riding high on her Hugo win – but I didn’t want to disturb her whole table. There were plenty of people already hitting her up in any case.

Speaking of riding high, we next ran into Allen Steele with his Hugo. He was drawing a nice crowd of well-wishers – including one of my favorite authors John Scalzi – and he was just beaming with pleasure. Everyone wanted a picture and a closer look at the Hugo trophy which is freakin’ awesome in person. He was quite willing to let folks hold the trophy, which is pretty darn nice if you ask me. He must have posed for dozens of pictures in the few minutes we were there.

Seanan McGuire a.k.a. Mira GrantWe all split up to take care of last minute stuff and Chris and I went off to get some stuff for our wives and kids. I had already gotten my girls an awesome comic book adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz but my wife had told me I better bring back some toys after being gone for so long. Fair enough. I eventually settled on some nice, but expensive, stuffed animal puppets while my wife just wanted a convention T-shirt. Easy peasy. With that done we decided to go see the art show which was very nice. I loved seeing the original art for so many of the book covers I’ve admired over the years.

After that, Rico and I hooked up in the autograph line for Seanan McGuire, a.k.a. Mira Grant, author of Feed. She was very pleasant and did not seem disappointed in not winning the Hugo though we met plenty of fans who really love her book who I’m sure were plenty aggrieved on her behalf. With her autograph in the bag all I had left to do was find Connie Willis before we had to leave for the airport.

Connie WillisI found Chris chilling out back at the table and told him I needed to find Connie fast. He just grinned and said: "Turn around, Dude." And there she was walking past. I flagged her down, got a pic and my final autograph and congratulated her on her win. A very pleasant lady to be sure and a great final note on our trip to Reno!

All in all it was a marvelous trip. It was my first Worldcon and aside from the expense and some minor bungles on our part it went off very smoothly. We didn’t really know what to expect but I think we did pretty good with the fan table. We got to show off the site to hundreds of people and even a few authors which was extremely cool. The response was very positive, to both the site and the bookmarks, with lots of people promising to help spread the word about WWEnd when they got home. We got to meet some of our favorite authors and many great people and spent the better part of a week talking nothing but science fiction and fantasy. Not bad at all. We’ll take what we learned in Reno and do it better next year in Chicago! It’s only 366 days away. Hope to see you all there!

No comments yet.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.