So day two of the convention started with the now typical backache, but on the plus side my sweetie-wife and I had a very pleasant breakfast with a person whom I had only known as an on line poster.
There is a forum for people writing and submitting to the Writers of the Future contest and quite a few of us were attending Chicon 7. I had hoped to breakfast with two of them, but we failed to make the connection with one and so it was just three of us at the breakfast buffet. Still, it was very nice to put a face and voice to the posts and we had a lovely conversation before the start of another busy day.
I’m not going to discuss every panel of every day as this con was loaded back to back with panels I enjoyed, but here are some selected highlights.
Female Villains was fun and interesting, though I was surprised we got through the entire discussion without serious political arguments or a mention of a certain Lannister woman.
My sweetie-wife and I attended a reading by John Scalzi from his Hugo nominated (BWAHAHAHAHAHA) short story Shadow War of The Night Dragons: Book One: The Dead city: Prologue. This story was written as an April fool’s joke and you should really take the time to read it. Afterwards John took Q&A and we learned that some producers in Hollywood had taken the April Fool’s bait and were interested in seeing the full manuscript for possible options.
Military SF Reality vs Writing was a lively panel and one shared with Dragon*Con in Atlanta. (By way of tele-presence half the panelist were in Atlanta and half were in Chicago. The whole thing worked rather well.)
In the evening I did hook up with a grouping of us from the Writers of The Future Forum, we ended up hanging out in the lobby of the hotel, chatting and passing back and forth critiques on stories we had shared. Considering we are all in competition for the same prizes, it is a very supportive group. I approve.
Then it was parties and loads of fun meeting up with all friends from Wisconsin and in general having a blast until past midnight.
