Mysticon once more

So last weekend, as I have for the past two or three years, I went up to Mysticon in Roanoke. I actually debated whether to cancel because I was still feeling sick, and I know from experience a weekend of talking can make things much worse. But I stayed the course, and I’m glad I did.

From Wednesday to Friday I stayed, as usual, with my friends Dori and Sam Koogler about an hour away. This is their cat.She looks a lot like Wisp in coloration, but she’s not as friendly, at least to strangers.

Friday Dori drove me in to the hotel, but declined to be my free Plus One (so did Sam). I was exhausted, having been kept awake the previous weekend by either my or TYG’s hacking cough, and my throat was sore. Fortunately I brought my miniature steam bath up with me and used that a lot. It helped.

I saw several authors I know, including Jason Gilbert, John Hartness, Stuart Jaffe, Rod Belcher and Darin Kennedy. Jason gave me good advice on hawking my books, but with my voice struggling, I was in no shape to take advantage of it. And my efforts to reserve a signing table fell afoul of emailing the wrong person (it went to the IT form organizing the schedule online, not to the organizers). This created the slight problem that having mailed a bunch of my books to the Kooglers and only selling one (but yay one! Thank you for that purchase!) I had a lot more to take home than I’d anticipated. It made for a tight fit with the books I bought, but I managed to get everything home. Good thing TYG let me take her new, larger suitcase.

Panels included “Food and Drink in Fantasy Fiction,” “Writing Up Close and Personal” (a POV discussion) and Writing Contemporary Fantasy. There was some good discussion and my moderating went fine despite my throat. I picked up some earrings for TYG and as mentioned, books for myself. And they have the same coffee truck out in front of the hotel as last year, and it served tea too. That was nice.

I almost freaked out on the ride home when the plane out of Roanoke was an hour late, seeing as I had only a 45 minute period in Charlotte (no, I can’t go straight from Durham to Roanoke) to catch my connection. Fortunately it was one of those cases where the airline had padded the travel time so even an hour late, I was fine.

And hey, the view out of the airport window has mountains.

I like this curbside sign too.I leave you with photos from the con.#SFWApro.