What a week!

This picture could serve to sum up my time at WorldCon:

On the Iron Throne at WorldCon

This was my second WorldCon, once again attending in my Angry Robot guise. Senior Editor Lee Harris and I rocked the AR booth all weekend, connecting readers to their new favorite books, introducing our 10 attending authors to new readers, and waving the flag.

We also announced the US Clonefiles program, which you’ll be hearing much more about soon. Mostly, I want to make sure everyone knows that we got there first, and that Amazon almost certainly but at least possibly stole our idea. 🙂

Other highlights included meeting a flobbidy-jillion writers, readers, and fans, participating on panels with friends, colleagues, and exemplars of fandom, drinking many margaritas (!!!), as well as several incredible parties. I’ll talk about those individually below.

BookSworn – The Booksworn are a group of Fantasy & Science Fiction authors, including several friends. Their WorldCon party had one special theme – eat a bug, get a book! I think it’s a great idea to have a special Thing for a party, something that’s not just ‘This group is cool! Come drink our booze!’ I ended up eating two bugs, since the Official Photographer Writer of Record didn’t get a pic of the first bug I ate. Perhaps it was just bad luck, or John Hornor Jacobs decided to torture me. 😉 I also got the chance to meet several writers I’ve been following and/or impressed by, including Katy Stauber (whose book REVOLUTION WORLD is super-fun), Zachary Jernigan, and others who I have clearly forgotten in my post-WorldCon haze.

Drinks With Authors – This party was the fever dream of author Myke Cole, blogger Justin Landon, and r/Fantasy overlord Steve Drew, and was my favorite party of the weekend. Here’s why – it was all about introducing authors with new readers. In addition to raffles for big stacks of books, the co-hosts were also roving the party with a giant inflatable d20, using a D&D combat frame as an excuse to give away free books and introduce the books’ authors to the winners. It also helped that the party was completely hopping, and full of very cool people.