Octocon report!

Well, Ted and I were perfect fuddy-duddies on Friday night when we got to the hotel in Maynooth: we flopped up to our hotel room, spent a couple hours reading the graphic novels we’d picked up in Dublin, and went to sleep. :) I have no idea if there was anything going on in the hotel that night, but if there was, we sure as heck missed it!

It did, however, put us in a good position to get up early Saturday and have breakfast, where we met and his better half, whose LJ I don’t know if she’s got one. :) So that was a really nice way to start off the day, I thought! Poor Ted had a headache, though, and went upstairs to lie down while I went off to harrass the panelists attend panels.

I primarily went to comic book panels, since that’s kinda my focus right now as far as Learning Things That Are Other. I’d have to go get the schedule, which I’m much too lazy to do, in order to tell you who was on them. The guest of honor, J.G. Jones was there; I think Rob Curley, who owns the Sub-City comic shop in Dublin (and Galway), and who’s got a quite successful independent comic, Freak Show, may have been on it; there was a pair of young women who’ve had some TokyoPop success there. And I cannot for the life of me remember details of the discussion, or even the first panel’s actual intended topic right now. So perhaps I’ll write about that later when I’ve got the programme with me. :) I did also hit a panel about translation of stories from one medium to another, and wish I’d caught the name of the woman on the panel; she seemed very cool, but I never managed to meet up with her over the weekend.

I did see (literally; we didn’t, sadly, get a chance to talk) , and had a completely splendid time hanging out with and talking with (except for the times when I was amazingly rude and dense and walked away from him as if he wasn’t even there; I hang my head in shame!), and beyond them I’m absolutely incapable of remembering anybody else’s LJ names except and , who shared gossip with me and were generally as splendid as they have always been when I’ve met them. :) This would be a much better entry if I could litter it with all the names of people we met and all the panels I went to, wouldn’t it? How very lame of me. :)

We spent quite a chunk of time hanging out with J.G., who, it turned out, likes to cook, so he and Ted had a great time food geeking, by the end of which I was fairly convinced J.G. needed to move in next door so I didn’t have to cook when Ted’s at work. *laugh* *Lots* of talking, some about–not exactly even so much the comic book business as the business of being a professional creator, and what that took and what it meant. That was great fun.

*laugh* Saturday night we came back from dinner (we went out for Chinese! It was fairly decent Chinese! Yay!) and came around a corner in the hotel, and Ari, who was running the “science fiction fashion show” prior to the casino night, thrust a dress at me as I came ’round and said, “Will this fit you?” I took it, held it up, allowed as how it probably would, and went to see. Which was how I ended up being Wonder Woman Chic at the fashion show. *laugh* I got a prize for most comfortable shoes, since I didn’t have any that went with the dress and opted to go barefoot. *laugh* The remainder of the evening was spent chatting and laughing until we cried as John-I-forget-his-last-name regailed us with screamingly funny stories (there was one point where I was pounding on the table crying, “The duck! Go back to the duck! I must know about the *duck*!”) of his uncle, whom everyone calls Mad Paddy. One of the other artists, Paul (Holden? I forget his last name) did a drawing of Mad Paddy while John was talking, and it turned out to be such a great likeness that John got all agitated and *insisted* he *must* have a copy of the drawing emailed to him. *laugh* And J.G. told a story involving a comic creator, a dude ranch and the shooting of two hundred pounds of red meat, further details of which I shall not disclose, and then there was the story of the Irish priest at the wedding who really wanted to be a stand-up comedian, and a fairly animated discussion of comic book breasts (“Real breasts do such wonderful things. Why would you want to make them into poofy anti-gravity balloons when the real ones look so *nice*?”) and … yes. *laugh* A very good time was had by all. And we foolishly stayed up drinking until two thirty in the morning, although apparently many *other* people stayed up even *more* foolishly until about 5am, so, y’know, we wuz smart. Or something. :)

Smart or not, we barely dragged ourselves out of bed in time to stagger down for breakfast before it closed at 11am, and the only panel I managed to make it to on Sunday was Anne McCaffrey’s. The panel itself was perfectly pleasant, but the neat bit for me was talking to Anne and her assistant afterward and discovering that the copy of URBAN SHAMAN that I’d sent last year *did* make it to her, and not only Anne but everybody in the household/their community had read it (“Oh,” Anne said after a moment, “that was the book that began on the airplane, right?” So she really did remember it! :)) and that they’d bought THUNDERBIRD and were all impatient to read it, but Anne gets first dibs so they had to wait on her reading it. *laugh* So that was pretty neat. :) I’m going to send a copy of WINTER MOON, which they haven’t got, up to them, and Anne’s assistant comes down to Cork regularly, so with any luck we’ll meet up for lunch next month, which would just be really neat. :)

It was, overall, a *completely* enjoyable weekend, and we’re awfully glad we went. I didn’t think about writing *at all*, except in the abstract, and it was *good*. :)

And when we came home, my parents, who love us very much and who deserve a thousand blessings, had cleaned our entire house. Mom says she expects we won’t find our underwear for months, but we’re happy to go commando if it means the house is this wonderfully clean. :)

Oh, con photos, totally un-labeled at the moment, are here. :)