It’s a mis­leading title, as I’m not going to roundup any­thing. Instead, I’ll just lay out some of the cooler anec­dotes and do some name drop­ping. Read­ercon is a panel-heavy con, with a lot of focus given to intel­lec­tual mean­der­ings, lit­erary crit­i­cism and exam­i­na­tion of social issues in lit­er­a­ture. I’ve always been more of a net­worker. I rarely go to con panels unless there’s some­thing of par­tic­ular interest. My goal in attending cons are the con­ver­sa­tions held in hall­ways, the con suite and (most impor­tantly) at the bar. You’ve got to remember that the vast majority of my life is spent shut­tered in my apart­ment or hunched over my laptop in a coffee shop. I pounce on social oppor­tu­ni­ties like a starved lion.

So, cool stuff that hap­pened? I had a 5 year old backup dancer during my reading. This kid was so cute (and his moves so awe­some) that it actu­ally set off my bio­log­ical alarm clock. He had a squat­ting crotch thrust that would have put Bey­once to shame. And all this to klezmer, accor­dian and fiddle music as a back­drop to my story of whirling helo rotors, roaring machine gun fire, and the crackle-boom of Aero­mantic lightning.

I spent the majority of my time hanging around with Peter V. Brett (of course) and John Joseph Adams. It was great to get a chance to catch up with JJA and really talk about the industry and life in gen­eral, so much so that I for­give him for spin­ning tall tales that Mar­jorie Liu (up there with Felicia Day, folks) was in atten­dance. Now I trust JJA in all things, but I’m just saying I didn’t see her.

What I did see a lot of was the text for A DANCE WITH DRAGONS on my iPad screen. On the morning of my depar­ture,  I was sit­ting on the couch reading ADWD and was rather lost in it when Maria Headley shows up. Now, that’s pretty damned famous right there, and I was psy­ched to get into a nice con­ver­sa­tion with her, until it was inter­rupted by the arrival of Amanda Palmer. Not sur­pris­ingly, Headley lost interest in me and I turned back to the book, only to find myself sud­denly lost in a forest of legs. I tur­tled up and begged GRRM to take me away, but there were too many people, so I finally looked up … to see Neil Gaiman leaning over me to say some­thing to Peter Straub. I could have lifted the man’s wallet out of his jacket pocket (I didn’t. I’m with the gov­ern­ment, we use taxes for that). And that is how I came to be com­pletely sur­rounded by very famous people for 5 min­utes before they went off some­where to do what­ever it is famous folk do.

Which reminds me of the other reason I go to cons. You never know what’s going to happen at them.