It’s that day, the last day of Gencon. The Dealer’s Room has closed, the last of the games are wrapping up, and lots of nerds are congregating at the Indy airport discussing their conquests as they prepare to go home while other nerds are staying an extra night to play off-con games and rest for tomorrow’s journey home. I’m one of the nerds heading home.
I feel pretty good for only having got 2 hours (if that) of sleep last night, and barely 5 hours of sleep the two nights before, though heaven knows I tried to sleep more on Thursday & Friday. The lack will catch up to me when I get home tonight, though. I have grand plans of taking tomorrow (my con recovery day off) to do more rewrites. We’ll see if that happens. Experience tells me I’ll be useless.
Upsides of the con: I finally finished meeting all my editors. Steve Sullivan, Jean Rabe, and Jennifer Brozek. Funny story about Jen. She was online Wednesday tweeting about her second airport trip and I was online tweeting about my journey, and we started DMing. I told her I was Atlanta, and she said "I’m at gate D11A." My response was "OMG. So am I!" We looked around and found ourselves sitting in the exact same row of seats, separated only by her husband. HA! Just goes to show that you really need to be polite to the strangers in airports. They may turn out to be someone important to you. @=)
Jean and Steve are sweethearts and were so nice to me when they met me. It’s amazing how friendly they are. They introduced me to a lot of people this weekend, including Elizabeth Vaughn (whose name I may have misspelled and is just as sweet). I ran into a few old friends, as well, and met a lot of authors whom I know from writers’ groups but have never met face-to-face. I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with them because I was running back and forth doing work for Catalyst Game Labs.
Yes, I was foolish enough to volunteer to GM for CGL at GenCon. But the upside was that I got a free badge into the convention, a certificate for booth comp, and a partial room stipend. CGL likes GM volunteers (you don’t have to be a freelancer) and will give you swag based on the number of hours you pull. Me? I went for a full 24. Maybe not my brightest move. I’m about to be wiped out and didn’t get enough time to do fun stuff. But given all the networking I did, I think it’s worth it.
Speaking of which, I mean my Catalyst editors Peter M. (whose name I will maul if I try to write it at this moment) and Jason Hardy. I also introduced myself to the CGL head honchos and to Battletech devs Ben Rome and Herb Beas. I may be writing for Battletech in the future, but right now the pipeline is so flooded with ready to print BT and SR stuff that if I do work for BT, it’ll be a while before you see my name on any of the product.
Street Legends and Runners Toolkit (Shadowrun stuff) was a HUGE hit. The Toolkit nearly sold out as of yesterday and Street Legends was #1 on DriveThru RPG over the weekend. Street Legends was just released and the final chapter, a fiction novelette about Roger Soaring Owl, was written by me. Two people have told me that my combat scene was awesome, which has me bouncing off the walls. If you get a chance to read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
Regretfully, I did not get to attend much of GenCon’s Writers’ Symposium, but what little I did see of it was majorly awesome. If you are a new writer and are looking for good conventions to attend to learn more about the bits behind the scenes, add GenCon to your list. This track seems on par with the writing tracks offered by Dragon*Con.
Well, I’ve rambled on long enough. There may be more coherent blog posts coming out later about the interesting things I overheard or learned at GenCon. Encouragement would help. Let me know if you’d like to hear more and which part you’d like to hear about.
