There and Back Again…

Well, I’m back from Trinocon.


The trip started out on a pretty bad note, when James bit into some prime rib, hit a bone splinter, and cracked a molar. (Ow.) This was, naturally, on a Friday, and since North Carolina has not heard of things like “24-hour dentists,” the con chair, his wife and I spent an hour calling around to every dentist in a forty mile radius, discovered no dentist was working before Monday, before finally bundling him off to the emergency room on a hotel shuttle. (The hotel was great about the whole thing.) The doctor came in, looked at it, said “Well, look at that,” poked it, winced, confessed that this was just not her field, (I’m sure she’d have been great with a sucking chest wound, mind you) wrote him up a prescription for Vicodin and told him to chew on the other side, and sent us back to the hotel.

Now, at this point, I’d like to say that my husband is an absolute trooper. He could easily have taken his drugs and retreated to the hotel room for the weekend, emerging only to demand Jello, and nobody’d blame him. Instead he was right there working the table, bringing me coffee during my panels, and generally bein’ cool. He even participated in the party the Con staff threw for the Nallwug. You remember, the painting of the critter that lived in hopes that today was the day someone would throw it a surprise party? Well, they did. Noisemakers and all. It was both touching and bizarre. I must’ve looked like a stunned flounder when they marched in waving balloons. The Nallwug was the badge art for the con, and the original sold in the art show (hung about with noisemakers and balloons) so it was cool, and the high bidder gave it to the second high bidder as a gift, which was very cool. Of course, now I have to paint a happy Nallwug at a party…

Anyway, after that initial horror, it was a fabulous Con. Was on a couple of panels. Didn’t discover until I’d picked up my schedule that I was moderating the panels. That was scary, given that I’d been on one other panel in my life. But it went well, overall. Most of the people on the panels were fabulous–we had a lot of good discussions about art, digital art, etc. There was one slightly alarming woman who talked with. Lots of. Dramat. Ic pauses. It was not unlike being on a panel with William Shatner. But overall, it was a blast.

Met a lot of very cool people. My friend Kathy was fabulous, and dove right in to man the table when James was groggified from drugs, even managing to navigate my eccentric print filing system. Dave, the con chair, was fantastic, as was Margaret, the con president. And, of course, met a lot of neat people in general–cool artists, people from LJ (Damnable Mario Party! Arrgh!), entertaining writers…all in all, great con, hopefully some good networking opportunities. Print sales were moderate (it is, after all, quite a small conference) but art show sales were very good. And I had fun, damnit.

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