We set out Thursday morning in the officially unofficial WTF van owned by the mighty Dan & Karen. The WTF van has just enough room for four folks to ride comfortably with all the assorted baggage and copies of the book for sale and WELCOME TO THE VOID t-shirts and it even comes equipped with St. Dan, who drove the whole way, and Navigating Action Karen who made sure that we didn’t get lost (except for that one stretch where they’d covered up all of the road signs - I still don’t know what was up with that?!?).
On the road, I got a chance to finish Personal Demons by Stacia Kane (see the mini-review below) and read most of Heart of Stone by C. E. Murphy.
Until I recently, Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse was pretty much the only psychic I was interested in reading books about. This was recently expanded to include Anton Strout’s Simon Canderous from Dead To Me (I’ll be picking up the next book in the series, you can count on that) and now Dr. Megan Chase has joined that list as well. It’s got more romance to it than I usually read, but that didn’t bother me at all. It’s funny, scary… definitely the beginning of a series that I want to keep reading. I’d have to say that my favorite characters were the demonic body guards (Malleus, Maleficarum, and …. The unfortunately named Spud). They filled the same enjoyable niche for me that Nuncio and Guido do in Robert Asprin’s Myth series, without turning Personal Demons into a comedy. Anyone who has read Staked knows that I’m fond of the funny, but I like it not to overwhelm the action and Stacia balanced both wonderfully.
Stacia Kane is a member of the League of Reluctant Adults as are Mark Henry (the author of the zany zombie-fest that is Happy Hour of the Damned) and the aforementioned Anton Strout. I definitely plan of checking out the books of the other “Leaguers” and you should too.
Saturday, I got to share an author table with Gail Z. Martin, author of The Chronicles of the Necromancer series. I’ve just started reading Book One: The Summoner. As Gail might say, “it’s got ghosts, vampires, and a necromancer as the good guy.” If you check out her ConCarolinas video blog for Saturday, you’ll even be “treated” to a snippet of me near the beginning.
A group of us went to dinner together, which was cool. Thanks for the invite, folks! And special thanks to David Coe for not killing me when I accidentally stomped on his foot while reaching for the copy of Staked that I sat under the table. Again, mea culpa, David!
I think my favorite panel on Saturday was “Rogues: Why We Love Our Bad Boys” (though David B. Coe never did explain why he loves bad boys which gave Faith Hunter the giggles… ) Hmmm, maybe it was just the lateness of the panel. We got into darker territory than originally expected, but other than that we decided Han Solo is one of the perfect examples of a modern rogue (which I think I’ll delve into a little deeper in another blog) and the attendees seemed to enjoy things until we were drowned out by Klingon Karaoke.
My only regret about the entire con was that I had to vanish before dawn on Sunday so that I could catch my flight to Disney World. I hope they invite me back. It was a blast!
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