Friday, July 27, 2007

Comic-Con Day 1, in brief

Here's what transpired today, in a nutshell (I'll expound later with a nice long post when I haven't been up all day and it isn't 2am on the West coast):

Left the house around 9:30...took the 11:15 Coaster train (it travels along the coast) to downtown San Diego. Arrive around noon, get our professional badges (oh god the line for on-site registration was atrocious--I cannot imagine going without preregistering), head on in.

It's about 12:30; I manage to catch the end of Cory Doctorow's spotlight event thingie, and afterwards I get his autograph. Really nice guy.

Meet up with Andrew and his friend Michael, who is the reason that we didn't have to wait in any lines at all to get in. We go out for some food that is not worth mentioning.

Get back at 2:10. The Torchwood preview event started at 2:15, and this is when I learn which rooms are which, and that if an even is in a certain size room, you should expect to get there a certain amount of time beforehand. I miss the Torchwood panel.

Meet back up with Andrew and Michael, and we head to the trade floor. HolycrapthereisalotofmerchandiseatthisplaceandplustheconventioncenterisHUGE. It was fun to wander around and see everything. We go literally from one end of the hall to the other, kind of trying to find the booth where we'd pick up our tickets to Stardust, but only kind of, and we do indeed miss it and we end up having to backtrack quite a bit.

We saw a lot of fun things, and I got to meet Kelly Vivanco of Patches and saw several other webcomics artists whose work I am familiar with. Unwittingly met the creator of Sam & Max (whose work I am NOT familiar with) and he said I had "the most charming face" he'd seen today.

Then we went and sat down for Lost; he room was pretty full even an hour before showtime. Fun things happen.

Afterwards, sit in a really poorly moderated panel on internet stardom. Head out for Stardust.

Go see Stardust, though you can't possibly enjoy it as much as I enjoyed getting to listen to Neil Gaiman talk about it afterwards.

I promise, a nice, detailed post later. But--tomorrow!

2 comments:

Rachel B. said...

Cory Doctorow! Were you there long enough to hear what he talked about? With him it could be anything from copyright to sci-fi (although I'm not sure what comes between).

Ayn said...

When I got there, he was reading an excerpt...probably from his new book that is coming out soon.

He didn't talk about any of the copyright stuff directly, just that he isn't the only one who makes work available via CC and is more succesful for it.

People asked him writing successful sci-fi..or was it about getting published? Anyway, he gave a couple tips, like don't be too vague in the very beginnign of your story because the editor is reading your submission while hanging from a handle on the train coming into New York and if he isn't intrigued right away he'll just put it down and pick up the next one.

He talked about the wedding ring he had designed by some major cryptographer, which is cool, and also talked about boingboing.net and how it got started in its current form as a blog (used to be a 'zine) and how the posts he makes there serve as pneumonics for ideas for stories he'll write later.

And then I got to meet him, so all that was quite cool.