I've survived another convention, and I think that's my last public "author" event of the year. Now I go back to being entirely a "writer." The convention was great, I had fun, got to see old friends and make new friends, I learned stuff and had enough of a steady flow of people at the autographing that I never got the chance to feel sad and pathetic. Now I'm utterly exhausted, to the point that the thought of going to the post office makes me whimper. I may hold off until tomorrow. It's a slightly rainy day, which is good for writing, so I may make a pot of tea and settle back to work this afternoon.

I didn't have a really good panel giggle fit at this convention. I had two close calls, but nothing quite in the tears running down my face, needing CPR range. One was in the Whedonverse panel, but I don't remember what it was about. The other was in the spoilers panel, courtesy of A. Lee Martinez (author of the absolutely brilliant The Automatic Detective). Alex is responsible for a lot of my con suite giggle attacks, but I think this may be the first time he's really set me off in a panel. We had a bit of a digression after he asked if it was a spoiler for the Star Wars prequels that Anakin becomes Darth Vader. I said no because those movies are built around the idea that you know his ultimate fate, and there are a lot of little hints that things aren't going to go well with him. You're more likely to notice all the foreshadowing if you have seen the original movies, but there's still plenty of "dum Dum DUM!" level "this is potentially ominous!" meta subtext going on. That then reminded me of an article I'd read that morning about how the Clone Wars movie had pretty much tanked, and about what they were trying to do with the TV series. One of the TV series executives was talking about how they wanted to show that before he became Darth Vader, Anakin was this heroic, fun guy. I said that the fact that we're spoiled about him becoming Darth Vader makes it really hard for us to ever see him as a heroic, fun guy. There's always going to be that sense of foreboding about him, so if they wanted a fun romp of an adventure in the Star Wars universe, he's probably the wrong person to build it around. Then Alex went off on a riff about a "Young Adolf" cartoon series about Hitler in his younger days, that sure he grew up to be a mass-murdering megalomaniac, but he was a fun, heroic guy in his teens, so kids will enjoy watching his adventures. And that set off the giggles, followed by a deeply uncomfortable feeling as I realized that it wasn't really hyperbole. Darth Vader did destroy entire planets and systematically wiped out specific groups of people based on their belief system and culture. So, yeah, they're trying to make the equivalent of "Young Adolf." Something tells me that someone at Skywalker Ranch didn't exactly think this through.

But now I'm running out of words and I need to get to work, so I'll resort to pictures.

One of my friends made an absolutely brilliant (and tasty) TARDIS cake for the con suite, complete with cute little Adipose guests:



And then there was this rather clever costume that totally cracked me up. I guess you could call him MacTrooper: