NecronomiCon – The First Report

Had an amazing, productive, funky good time at NecronomiCon this weekend.
It was great going to a con that I only had to drive 15 minutes to get to; as opposed to anywhere from 2 to 10 hours. Get on I-275, get off I-275, piece of cake. I will look back on this con commute with misty-eyed wistfulness as I drive the 8 to 10 hours to Atlanta and DragonCon next year.

I got to the hotel about noon and got the coveted Parking Spot In The Hotel Parking Lot. While there was plenty of parking around the hotel, some of it was legal, and some of it was not, as I heard reports of police cars, metering golf carts and tow trucks circling the area pretty much the whole weekend. Sure, it cost me $10 a day, but getting your car out of the impound costs even more.

Met some amazing people. They were kind, funny, supportive and very welcoming to your loyal scribe, who was a first time Guest Author. People such as award winning and best selling horror writer Andrea Dean Van Scoyoc, and her publicist (and maybe soon to be mine) Katrina Stiles, epic Fantasy writer M. B. (Michelle) Weston, well-known horror writer Richard Lee Byers, actor Jeffrey Breslauer, triple threat actor/director/producer Joel Wynkoop (I even filmed a promo for his Wynkoop TV!), and many others.

The above folks have great websites, and are also probably on MySpace and Facebook, so I hope you’ll visit them, support them, find out about their various projects and tell them that Bill sent you. Of course, that will mean nothing, but I’ll think it’s funny.

My Myrddin peeps didn’t make it for the most part, due to illnesses, children and other real world catastrophies, but special thanks go out to Zan and Skip, who did make it. Especially to my girl Zan, who stalked me at every panel I did, and got some great photos of yours truly in action. I hope to post those later.

5 minutes after meeting Andrea, we discovered that we were both self-publishing mavericks and evangelists, and both think that Lulu.com hangs the moon. She was kind enough to invite me to speak and teach with her at her “So You Want To Self Publish” panel. I recorded it for posterity and will hopefully be posting that hour long session here soon in MP3 format for everyone to enjoy and hopefully get empowered and educated and excited about sharing their stories and characters through quality writing and self-publishing.

We also decided that amazon was The Man and The Devil, in that we can’t keep track of our book sales and royalties, so I’ve deleted all the amazon links from my site. All links now go to Lulu, who will provide you faster service, better packaging, and take PayPal, which is very important to folks, I found out this weekend. Con folks love them some PayPal, and Lulu takes PayPal, so there you go. I bow to the wisdom of the masses. Of course, if you still want to purchase the books through amazon, have at it, but it will make the Baby Jesus cry. Just saying.

Oh, and for the folks at the “Creating Memorable Characters” panel I was on, the name of the book that I was struggling to remember is Victoria Schmidt’s 45 Master Characters. As I said, this is an amazing book, and one that there is totally no shame in using when starting to create your main characters or even your secondary characters; start with one of these archetypes and then flip it and spin it and add those great details and quirks that make it your own. Bonus points to anyone who can write me and tell me which archetypes Denton and Monty are. I didn’t use the book to create them, but they happen to fit nicely into two specific archetypes that Schmidt discusses.

As I said above, this was an amazing convention. I didn’t get to do a lot of the stuff that I did as a regular member (read: drinking, carousing, smooching) but I did get a lot of networking done and met some great fellow professionals. That and it’s a tax write-off! Yay!

As soon as the dust settles, I’ll write another update and post photos and the Self Publishing sound files. There will be some great things happening real soon; I can feel it in the air, like a cool brisk December breeze. I’ll keep you up to date, but must close and say a very heartfelt thank you to all of you for your kindness, your support and your friendship.