UtahSF Community Info

Reviews of Ken Rand's "Pax Dakota"

2007-12-31T06:18:03Z

This is a review (the first review) of Ken Rand's alternate historical dark fantasy-Western novel Pax Dakota. It's written by Utah writer JoSelle Vanderhooft for Pedestal Magazine: And this is an article from the Rapid City Journal that proves that "life imitates art."

Pax Dakota is due out in May 2008 from Five Star.

"Red Dragon Codex" launch party

2007-12-16T00:35:10Z

(Posted on behalf of Ken Rand)

You're invited to the launch party for Red Dragon Codex by West Valley City writer Rebecca Shelley (writing as R.D. Henham), Saturday, January 12, 4-6 p.m. at the West Valley Fitness Center, 5415 West 3100 South, West Valley City. This delightful YA fantasy in the Dragonlance world (from Wizards of the Coast) is Rebecca's first book. Party plans include fun, prizes, and games for kids--bring the whole family. Details and more information on her website or the book website. Contact Rebecca at rebeccashelley@rebeccashelly.com.

Brandon Sanderson to finish Jordan's final "Wheel of Time" novel

2007-12-11T02:03:34Z

It's been a while, but I have some interesting news from the SFWA site (thanks to Charlie for sharing):

Tor Books announced today that novelist Brandon Sanderson has been chosen to finish the final novel in Robert Jordan's best selling Wheel of Time fantasy series. Robert Jordan died September 16th after a battle with the rare blood disease amyloidosis.

The new novel, A Memory of Light, will be the twelfth and final book in the fantasy series which has sold over 14 million copies in North America and over 30 million copies worldwide. The last four books in the series were all #1 New York Times bestsellers, and for over decade fans have been awaiting the final novel that would bring the epic story to its conclusion.

Jordan had known the ending of the series for a long time and, according to a blog posting by his cousin, Wilson W. Grooms, Jr., had a few months ago revealed secret details about the end of the series to close members of his family which he had never discussed before.

Delivery of the manuscript is scheduled for December 2008, with a planned publication in Fall 2009.

Posted December 10, 2007; see full article at the SFWA site.

Good luck, Brandon!

Brandon Sanderson Tour!

2007-10-09T14:11:26Z

(posted on behalf of Brandon Sanderson)

Brandon's Book Tour News!

A quick note here--not a real newsletter--for those of you on the Brandon Sanderson mailing list. I'm on book tour on the west coast right now, and I thought I'd fire off the list of dates. I apologize for not sending this sooner; also, forgive me for blasting some of you with both this and a personal invitation. I'm not trying to spam; I just want to get the word out!

Upcoming dates:

Monday, October 8th: 7 PM: San Francisco
Borderlands Books.
866 Valencia St.
San Francisco CA 94110

Tuesday, October 9th 2 PM: California
Borders Express
6157 Sunrise Mall
Citrus Heights, CA 95610
Phone: 916.969.7877

Wednesday, October 10th 7 PM: Oregon
Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing
3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd.
Beaverton, OR 97005
Phone: 503.352.0665

Thursday, October 11th 7 PM: Washington
Borders Express
8700 NE Vancouver Mall Drive
Vancouver, WA 98662
Phone: 360.892.6677

Friday, October 12th 7 PM: Washington
University Bookstore
4326 University Way NE
Seattle, WA 98105
Phone: 206.634.340 Toll Free: 1.800.335.READ

Saturday, October 13th 1 PM: Washington
Barnes & Noble
5711 Main Street Southwest
Lakewood, WA 98499
Phone: 253.983.0852

Sunday, October 14th: Day Off

Monday, October 15th 7 PM: Idaho
Borders
350 N. Milwaukee St.
Boise, ID 83704
Phone: 208.322.6668

Tuesday, October 16th 4 PM: Idaho
Waldenbooks
Pine Ridge Mall
4155 Yellowstone Ave
Pocatello, ID 83202
Phone: 208.237.9785

Tuesday, October 16th 7 PM: Idaho
Barnes & Noble
Grand Teton Mall
2300 East 17th Street Suite #1101
Idaho Falls, ID 83404
Phone: 208.552.1452

Wednesday, October 17th PM: Utah
Waldenbooks
1300 N Main St
Logan, UT 84341
Phone: 435.753.2590

Wednesday, October 17th 7 PM: Utah
Borders
1050 N Main St
Logan, UT 84341
Phone: 435.787.0678

Thursday, October 18th 7 PM: Utah
Barnes & Noble
1780 Woodland Park Dr
Layton, UT 84041
Phone: 801.773.9973

Friday, October 19th 7 PM: Utah
Barnes & Noble
7157 South Plaza Center Drive
West Jordan, UT 84084
Phone: 801.282.1324

Saturday, October 20th 1 PM: Utah (Brandon only)
Barnes & Noble
University Crossings Plaza
330 East 1300 South
Orem, UT 84058
Phone: 801.229.1611

Like last year, I'm touring with author David Farland, of the Runelords series. East coast folks, I'm sorry to not make it your direction. I'm trying to get out there this Christmas season. We'll see what happens!

Best,

Brandon

Kevin J. Anderson book signing tour coming to Provo Borders

2007-10-07T04:22:56Z

Kevin J. Anderson is touring for his novel The Last Days of Krypton
and he's coming to Provo!

October 25, 7:00 PM
Borders
4801 N. University Avenue
Provo, UT 84606
801-224-2720

Spread the word and come out. Kevin wants to show his publishers
that Provo/SLC is a valuable stop for future book signing tours, so
the more people that show up, the better. (Especially if you buy a
book!)

Charlie

Quarterly Utah Speculative Fiction Council meeting

2007-10-06T22:57:16Z

(posted on behalf of Heather Monson)

Hello, everyone!

Just a quick reminder--we're meeting this Saturday at 4 p.m. in Conference Room D of the Main Branch of the Salt Lake City Library (found on the southeast corner of 200 East 400 South in Salt Lake City). We'll be sorting out non-profit mailing stuff (have our permit now), getting local event updates, and having fun (I hope). Hope to see you there!

Heather

"Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all." --Douglas Adams

Delvar Pope, husband of the late Betty Pope, passes away

2007-10-04T01:02:25Z

Delvar Pope, husband of Betty Pope, passed away on Monday, October 1, 2007. There was a viewing tonight from 6-8 pm at Berg Mortuary on Center Street in Provo (185 East Center Street, 801-373-1841). The funeral is tomorrow, (Thursday, October 4) at 11 am at an LDS chapel in Orem (225 E. 200 N.). An obituary was published in the Provo Daily Herald on October 2.

Betty was the SF librarian for many years at the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University. She was a long-time supporter of LTUE. Betty passed away a few years ago.

Anime Banzai planning for 2008

2007-10-01T05:15:09Z

Anime Banzai Newsletter

September 30, 2007

In this issue:

Meeting Date
Staff and Volunteers Needed
Mascot Contest
Lost and Found

Meeting Date -

Come discuss the pros and cons of Anime Banzai 07 and help us start planning for Anime Banzai 08!

Date: Saturday, October 6

Time: 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM

Location: Salt Lake City Main Library

210 East 400 South

Salt Lake City, UT 84111

Room: Conference Room A

Staff and Volunteers -

The only way to keep Anime Banzai going is with the help of volunteers. We will be looking for committee heads, security and volunteers to help plan and run Anime Banzai 08. We need all the help we can get! Come to the meetings, visit the message board or e-mail us at animebanzai@gmail.com.

Mascot Contest -

Anime Banzai 2008 Mascot Contest!!

Want to see your artwork on next year's badges, program book, flyers, website, t-shirts or banner ads?

Redesign our mascots Ban (boy) and Sae (girl) in your own style. Lineart, grayscale and color accepted. 300 dpi resolution required. Limit of 3 entries per person. (if plagiarism is suspected entrant will be automatically disqualified)

Winners will get free entry to the 2008 Anime Banzai Convention.

Submit your entries to animebanzai@gmail.com with "AB08 Mascot" as the subject line

Deadline is January 31, 2008

Lost and Found -

Did you lose something at Anime Banzai 07? Check with our AB07 Head Security Ninja, 'mnpchan', on the Anime Banzai message board .

Writers' Symposium Ezine

2007-10-01T04:49:00Z

Posted on behalf of Paul Genesse

Announcing the release of the Writers' Symposium Ezine!

Each issue is dedicated to "Helping Writers Write," and will be
released quarterly via email, or it can be viewed on the web at
www.paulgenesse.com/WritersSymposium. Each issue will feature
articles, tips, and resources that will help you improve your writing,
or let you know about good books.

Sign up by sending email to:
WritersSymposium@paulgenesse .com

The Writers' Symposium is made up of twenty professional writers, game
designers, and editors listed at the end of the issue. Combined we
have sold several dozen books and short stories to major publishers,
primarily in the fantasy and science fiction genre.

The Writers' Symposium has its origins back in the 1990's when it was
founded by editor and author Jean Rabe--famous for her Dragonlance
novels. She started giving seminars on writing at the Gen Con Game
Fair in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Gen Con has moved to Indianapolis,
Indiana, but Jean and her crew are still there.

Many writers have helped her present the panels over the years and the
seminars are almost always packed with people who want to learn more
about writing. I was one of those writers who wanted to break in. By
following Jean's advice I've sold eight short stories and my first
novel is coming out in hardcover in April of 2008. This first issue is
dedicated to Jean, a fantastic person and a great writer.

The first is made up of articles titled:

From the Editor
Feature Article: Creating Characters and a link to an online article
Bio on Jean Rabe--The Founder of the Writers' Symposium
Feature Article: Writers' Groups by Don Bingle
List of Current Writers' Symposium Members & Contact Info
Final Thought and link to the Writers' Symposium Blog

Paul Genesse,
Coordinating Editor of the Writers' Symposium Ezine

Website: http://www.paulgenesse.com/
Blog: http://paulgenesse.blogspot .com/

Author of The Golden Cord
Book One of the Iron Dragon Series
(Five Star Books, April 2008)

Mountain-Con III report

2007-10-01T01:43:52Z

As many of you know (since I saw you there), Mountain-Con III was held about a week ago (September 21-23) at the University Park Marriott in Salt Lake City. Major guests included Garrett Wang, Felix Silla, David Prowse, BarBara Luna, Femi Taylor, Cynthia Cummens, Chase Masterson, and Craig Richard Nelson (returning for his third appearance).

Local guests included Diana Pharaoh Francis, Jake Black, Andrew Dabb (don't recal seeing him there, though), Paul Genesse, Ken Rand, Eric James Stone, Karen Anne Webb, Dan Willis,Tyler Kirkham, and Howard Tayler.

The convention was mostly on the first (lower) floor of the hotel, with the main convention rooms surrounding a central area with club tables and tables for various guests for signing and chatting with fans. All of the guests were very friendly toward the fans, and all but one were very open to fans taking photos of them and with them.

Wang seemed to fit right into the fans, and could likely blend in without such a well known face. Silla enjoyed joking with people as well. Nelson even helped out with making announcements throughout the con.

Mountain-Con had their first Masquerade, which had 14 entries (pretty good for a first time!). Everyone seemed to be having fun, and their were some excellent costumes and acts. Charlie and Steve Harmon reprised their "Mirror, Mirror (Part II)" act, the perennially updated Borg was a favorite, and Dr. Frank-N-Furter even put in a crowd-pleasing (or shocking, perhaps) appearance.

KSL did a story about the con, and they were featured on a segment with Big Buddha on Fox 13.

Looking forward to next year. I'll be posting some pictures later.

Mountain-Con III starts today

2007-09-21T17:09:45Z

Mountain-Con III starts today at the University Park Marriott (480 Wakara Way, Salt Lake City). I'll be posting reports on the con over the weekend. Hope to see you all there!

DragonCon Day Four

2007-09-07T23:49:31Z

We got back Tuesday. Things have been a bit preoccupied since, so this final day report is a bit late.

Monday morning I thought I'd see if I could get tickets for the last two game sessions. If not, there were other things I could do, instead. As it happened I managed to find gaming registration (many signs giving directions had already been taken down, and one hotel employee told me I was welcome to remove the one I had found leaning against the railing), and there were tickets left to buy. So I played another session of Living Greyhawk.

At the end I was awarded the table prize, which I had to exchange for a DragonCon coin at the gaming registration desk before 2 pm. The coin in turn was supposed to be worth $5 in the dealer room. Who would pass up $5? Not me. I hurried to gaming registration, exchanged the prize for the coin, found there was still enough time to run to the Peachtree Center food court and buy something to eat, and made it back in time for the second session.

I was looking forward to the second session when those of us waiting there were told that the module we had signed up for was only available in APL 6 and higher. However, there was another APL 2 module available, and we were told to go play that one, instead. I had sat down and the game master started reading the module's pre-amble. It sounded familiar to me. Oops. I had already played it.

So back to the fellow in charge to explain my predicament. He told me that there were no other Living Greyhawk modules for that session, but if I was up for playing something different there was a table of Witch Hunter I could join. It sounded like fun to me, so that's what I did for the next four hours. Witch Hunter is set in an alternate history 17th Century, with a gothic horror flavor. The game system was easy enough to learn. I had a good time.

Afterwards I visited the dealer room. It was in the Hilton. It seemed large, but because it was laid out in a kind of horse shoe shape with the stairwell taking up the space in the center I couldn't really say how it compared to other dealer rooms. I was amazed at the variety of product, though. It ranged from tables for comics artists to jewelry. I bought a very pretty jade pendant for Elysa, a CD of Midnight Syndicate's DnD gaming music, a copy of Haibane Renmei, and then I spotted Goro Miyazaki's Tales from Earth Sea.

The movie hasn't been released in the States, yet. (If you go to imdb.com you'll find that it's been released in a lot of places besides the US. According to the woman at that table there are legal disputes. Aren't there always.) It's been dubbed in English, but apparently there are no subtitles on this copy. No matter. I bought it, too. (I've watched it since then. As often happens I'm not happy with the dubbing voice actors, who phoned in their performances, but without subtitles I had to put up with that. Yes, the actors are well known. Their performances still didn't impress me.)

I wandered around the dealer room for a while. Eventually the dealer room closed and I made my way back to the hotel. Elysa had decided to sleep in, so she was rested and we went to my son's one more time to spend the evening there at a front porch barbecue.

The trip home was remarkable only to the extent that I only got lost once on the way to return the car to the rental agency, and our plane was held in Denver for about two hours while they first worked on a mechanical problem, and then waited for the storm in Salt Lake City to calm down enough to allow planes to land again.

DragonCon had a record 56,000 attendees this year. Part of the planned convention space wasn't available because the Marriott was under construction, and the resulting crowding tended to be awesome when it wasn't awful. Next year I would expect similar crowds, but different problems, since the Marriott's construction is supposed to be done, but the Hyatt will be making renovations, instead. However, if you can make it, go. It's loads of fun!

DragonCon Day Three

2007-09-03T03:57:47Z

I did sign off last night saying I had to be at the con by 8:30 so I could get lost.

I did get lost. Well, not quite. I went ahead without Elysa because she wasn't feeling well, and while on the train I was reading. I noticed Civic Center station going by. I didn't remember that Peachtree Center is right after Civic Center, so at the next stop I asked which stop it was. I wasn't wearing my hearing aids, so by the time I figured out that was Peachtree Center the train's doors were already closed. I had to get off at Five Points and backtrack to Peachtree. Luckily the wait wasn't long, and I did make it to my planned gaming session.

I haven't been gaming in a long while. It was fun to do it again. I also learned that Wizards of the Coast is planning on forcing all of the RPGA Living Campaigns to Edition 4. 2008 is the last year for Living Greyhawk. In 2009 they will start Living Forgotten Realms with edition 4 rules. So play like there's no tomorrow!

I honestly don't know how I'll handle that. I've not really bought all that many 3.5th edition books. I've got the three basic ones, and a few others, but hardly the dozens that I could own. Switching to 4th edition wouldn't be such a great deal of "look at all these books I won't be using anymore" for me. But I do know some people who have a small fortune invested in 3.5th edition, and switching will be painful for them.

In a way it's testimony to the amazing quality of the product since 3rd edition. When TSR owned the franchise there were very few well produced books. The main books were in fact amazingly inferior productions. And there weren't that many of them, mostly because of TSR's counterproductive attitudes to issues of copyright, which kept a lot of people from writing or making art for them. Switching from one edition to the next under TSR was never an issue. Wizards changed all that, and that is really the only reason why people now even have a reason to complain about all that money they've already spent.

Anyway, I suspect my own gaming group will stick with 3.5, but I'll also play 4th edition because of the RPGA. Sure, RPGA is a marketing tool for Wizards. But RPGA is also fun, which is the whole point of this hobby.

(Above I used the word "invest" intentionally. If you're "investing" in your hobby by buying stuff, then you've got the wrong attitude entirely. Invest in stocks or bonds or gold or whatever you think you can count on creating an income for you. Buying DnD books will never do that. They are not an investment. Collecting them compulsively will never get you anything but a hole in your bank account. Thus endeth Helge's Wallstreet Minute.)

The modules they play here in Georgia (Grand Marche in Living Greyhawk) are very militaristic in tone. This time was no different. The first module was along the lines of "explore this hole in the ground and report back" - APL 2 (for low level characters), with a finish that involved a confrontation with uniformed bad guys. The second was a double sized interactive combat scenario, complete with some LARPing. It started with a regatta and ended up with taking back a town from some bandits. I had a great time.

DragonCon apparently has some kind of arrangement with the hotels, because no one got yelled at for bringing in outside food. Knowing that I brought a bagel for lunch to eat at the table. They did have a 1 hour break for dinner, and I met up with Elysa in the food court.

At the end of the second half I collected Elysa and we returned to the hotel without mishap.

Tomorrow Elysa plans on spending with Devan's stepsons. I'm going back to the convention. I was originally planning on going to robot wars, but I'm thinking of changing my mind and playing some more RPGA. I'll have to see if I can get tickets.

Anime Banzai report

2007-09-02T22:36:44Z

Well, Anime Banzai 2007 is over now, and I think it was very successful third year convention. All of the people I talked to there enjoyed themselves, and we are all looking forward to next year. Despite a doubling of the at the door rate from last year (to $30/person), the numbers at the con were still almost what they were last year. The amount of activities and the amount of time were also doubled (since they could start about 12 hours earlier than they could while at Salt Lake Community College), and they took advantage of all the extra time.

The dealers room was about the same, though at least one of the dealers had less merchandise available than last year due to flying to the con instead of driving. Many of the dealers were familiar from past years, too. There was no art show this year, from lack of interest I'm guessing. The art show last year was smaller than the one the first year. It may be that they just need someone very dedicated to running one. We'll see if they bring it back again.

This was the first year Anime Banzai was held in a hotel (specifically, the Sheraton City Centre Hotel on 500 South), and while there were some rough edges due to inexperience on the part of the con staff and dealing with hotel issues, I think they did an admirable job overall. I even talked to some of the other hotel guests who asked me what was going on, and some of them seemed genuinely interested instead of amused or scared by all the weirdos running around in strange costumes. The hotel staff seemed more friendly than when CONduit was there.

The guests this year included Artbeat and Michael Dobson. Artbeat was very well received, and had an encore performance on Saturday night in addition to their scheduled Friday night concert, pushing back the cosplay contest an hour. After their concerts, they sold copies of their CDs, signed them, and posed for pictures with their fans. From my perspective, they were very gracious throughout.

Artbeat is an unusual group, being a Jrock group from the United States rather than Japan. The members of the group speak both Japanese and English, and have released three independent albums. They have been making the rounds to various conventions, and have even begun being noticed in Japan.

Michael Dobson is a well-known English-language voice actor working for the Ocean Group. He's voiced Starscream (Transformers), as well as many other anime and non-anime roles. He gave a presentation about what it was like to be a voice actor, covering some of his experiences over the last many years.

I participated on two panels, one about classic anime (1980s and earlier) and one about the difference between reality and the portrayal of life in Japan in anime. Both were very well attended (probably not due to me, but I can hope), and those attending asked a lot of good questions which we answered. You can get the handout for the classic anime panel here:

Recommended Classic Anime.pdf

If you like anime, or even just curious about it, I highly recommend attending next year. It's great fun!I'll be posting some pictures later.

DragonCon Day Two

2007-09-02T04:34:09Z

Today went a lot more according to plan. We woke up around 7:30, ate a quick breakfast (apples and bagles), and were off. About an hour later we were waiting for the parade to start on Peachtree Road outside of Peachtree Center. I posted over 80 pictures to flickr, which you can look at here.

I have comments in my pictures, but I'll mention this one point here, as well. If you're going to shop for a digital camera, buy one that has the fastest possible processing rate. My dinky 2 Mpixel HP takes forever, because it's old, and because it insists on converting every image to JPG format. As a result I missed a lot of great shots.

Anyway, after the parade I went to Podcasting in the Classroom, where I talked to Michael Stackpole. I still need to email him. He seems very nice. The podcasting panel kind of walked a narrow line between unbridled enthusiasm and cautious pessimism. Most everyone agreed that it's a cool technology, but also everyone agreed that technology is expensive (podcasting not so much), difficult to learn (not everyone is a computer junky), takes time (oh, you had something else planned for your weekend?), and sometimes even interferes with the real business of learning (replacing the old film strip with a podcast kind of misses the point).

Tomorrow is my gaming day. I haven't played Living Greyhawk for about a year or more, and none of my characters have really been upgraded to 3.5. So I spent the next little while grabbing a bite to eat and creating a new character. Glossol Inter Alia, a fast talking halforc barbarian who shouts things like "Do not suffer the descenderation of swinebeasts to erodify you!" I figure he has Asperger's Syndrome.

I was going to the panel "The Hydrogen Myth," but that was standing room only when I got there. After that I wanted to go to "Contour Drawing," another art workshop. I decided to just go there and sit and wait. I did some reading and watched a couple of kids drive their parents to distraction. The panel itself was OK. The artist teaching the workshop kind of didn't plan her time well, and didn't realize that she could only use 60 minutes of the 90 minute slot. When you have to slog from the Hyatt to the Hilton, 30 minutes are barely enough.

Anyway, that's what I had to do next. Luckily getting to the drawing workshop meant that I discovered that the adjoining room where the next panel I wanted to attend was scheduled was no longer the correct room. That had been moved to the Hilton. (No one had noted that on the board, so I wrote it there myself.) At the Hilton I found that the panel had been moved to yet another room. All the same, I got there in plenty of time to get a front row seat for what turned out to be one hell of a great panel: "Smackdown! Skeptics vs True Believers."

On the panel were Patrick Burns (an investigator of paranormal claims and founder of the Ghosthounds Paranormal Investigators Network), some guy from the Rhine Institute who was not actually in the program or I'd be able to tell you more about him, Dr Michael Shermer (founder of The Skeptics Society), and Alison Smith (a private investigator who works for the James Randi challenge thing). Both of the "true believers" described themselves as skeptics...

The whole business started out kind of tame, and I decided to mix things up. I asked them to define exactly what it was they were doing: looking for naturalistic explanations of phenomena, or looking for supernatural explanations. I pointed out that science doesn't accept the proposition that there are supernatural explanations: that's a fundamental postulate of science. If a scientist cannot explain something in terms of natural causes, she just keeps looking.

That worked only for a very short while before the true believers tried to twist out of the discussion by saying they weren't investigating the paranormal or supernatural, but "unusual phenomena."

A little later a young man got up and tried holding their feet to the fire again. If the true believers were in dualists (believers in something other than naturalistic explanations), why cloak their work in the paradigm of science (which does not allow a non-naturalistic explanation)? If they were materialists then what was their paradigm of investigation? What were they looking for?

Yes, the crowd was definitely hostile to the true believers. There was a fellow wearing a kippah who wanted to know what the religion of the skeptics was. Alison Smith said she was not an atheist, but she also said she did not hold her personal religion to the same standard of evidence that she expected of science. She acknowledged that was hypocritical of her. Michael Shermer pointed out that the copy of Skeptical Inquirer he had before him had a picture of Richard Dawkins on the cover. It wasn't a direct answer, I guess, but he went on to point out that faith, belief, or religion were what made people feel good. Science is not about making people feel good.

Someone else asked why the skeptics didn't admit the use of statistics when considering the evidence for the paranormal. Both Smith and Shermer pointed out that statistics were at the very heart of science, and very much the reason why skeptics do not agree that there is anything to claims for the paranormal.

But that's pretty much all the challenges they got. The crowd was cheering and hooting through the entire thing, and the two true believers eventually got so frustrated that one resorted to calling James Randi a fraud and the moderator had to calm things down a bit.

I had a great time! If professional wrestling were this exciting I'd be a fan.

Well, after that I had to get back to the Hyatt to join Elysa for the awards banquet. I rushed out into the street, trotted up to Peachtree Center, stormed up the stairs to the food court, ran through the connecting tunnel, through the lobby, down the escalator, and realized I'd run into the wrong hotel. Back up the escalator, through the lobby, connecting tunnel, food court, and now for the correct connecting tunnel (to the Hyatt, not the Marriott) and down to the Ballroom level. I'd got the map turned around so at first I looked for the Regency ballroom at the wrong side. I swear, I can get lost in my own house.

Finally I was trotting down the line of people waiting to get in to the banquet. No Elysa. I get out my cell phone. Good, a signal. Call Elysa, and she's waving at me from the head of the line.

The banquet was OK. A small jazz band (horn, electric fiddle, electric bass, and drum set) entertained us. Peter David was the MC. He's funny. Nichel Nichols presented a little music video from a movie they're screening here. The food was forgettable. The main course was ziti pasta and cheese ravioli and mixed vegetables. The veggies were OK, but heavy on the onions. Two pasta dishes? What's with that? It was served family style, with the food brought out on large platters which we had to pass around to help ourselves. Dessert was a very nice chocolate cake. The entire thing cost ~~$50~~ $35 per person. Not something I'd do again if it was just for the food.

OK, enough blathering. I have to be at the con tomorrow by 8:30 so I can get lost before finding the gaming area.