Prompt: FaerieCon Sunday Report

…Continued from yesterday

FaerieCon East, Hunt Valley MD

My travel crew had determined that we needed to leave by about 12:30pm in order to make everyone’s schedules work. This meant we had to get up and going in the morning to pack up and make our final rounds visiting dealers, exhibitors, and guests.

Daughter and I made our way downstairs, only to see Princess Author Alethea Kontis in the Children’s Book area at the very entrance to the lower realm. We chatted while she personalized books for Daughter and travel companion. I highly recommend Alethea’s new Woodcutter’s Daughters series, beginning with Enchanted and Hero. Retold fairy tales, with more capable heroines than the traditional sort you may recall from your youth.

While chatting with Alethea, we met another author, Annette Curtis Klause, and bought her 20^th anniversary reissue of The Silver Kiss. Then we headed through the realm to find Charles de Lint, who had cheerfully promised to sign the last of our books, including Tanglewood Cats. Since this was our final visit with him and Mary Ann, we bought their CDs to enjoy on the way home.

We continued our farewell round of the realm, saying goodbye to new friends including

·      Michelle Heffner of brightandshining.com, who painted my face so beautifully the day before,

·      Robert Quill, the talented artist from whom I commissioned my first portrait, and

·      James, who sold Daughter her first costume dress (thereby earning hourly hugs for the duration of the con).

Unfortunately, the biggest disappointment of the convention was that we weren’t able to stay long enough to see Charles Vess, who was one of the primary reasons I had wanted to attend. That makes me very sad, of course, but Daughter sensibly suggested that we should simply plan to attend another con where he will in the coming year. :)

Our trip home took even longer than the trip north, but we finally made it safe and sound, much to the bounding happiness of the dog and the loud purring of the cat.

So I think the upshot is that we probably won’t plan to attend FaerieCon East again – it’s a little far out of our travelling orbit, and not the most well-organized event, but we’re very glad that we did attend at least this once. The costuming was magnificent, and we made several new friends whom we hope to see again at some of our adopted Virginia cons in 2014 and beyond. All in all, a successful weekend.

Dogs in house	Houdini
Time writing:	~30 minutes
October word count:	10,102