My Comic-Con report, finally!

Yes, I’ve been back from San Diego for a few weeks now. [insert lame apology for not posting sooner.]

I had a total blast. I walked a lot. Holy crapoly. The convention center is eight blocks long. There were 126,000 people crammed into eight blocks. (Think of half the population of New Orleans crammed into eight blocks. Yeah, there were time when I wanted to curl into the fetal position!)

I sought refuge hung out at the Random House booth quite a bit. I was also featured on the Suvudu website a few times, which was a helluva lot of fun. (Four different links in that last sentence–don’t miss any of them!) Met and re-met all sorts of incredibly awesome people, (see the flickr set!) but I think the absolute coolest experience of the convention was meeting Felicia Day. Not only because Felicia Day is an incredibly cool person, but because of the way I finally managed to meet her.

So, I’ve been a bit of a fangirl about Felicia Day for a while, and it’s a poorly kept secret that in my little delusional world where Mark of the Demon gets made into a movie or TV series (hey, I said it was a delusion, okay?) I think Felicia Day would make an awesome Kara. Plus, she’s a big fan of urban fantasy and paranormal romance, so I wanted to be a pushy bitch find a way to meet her and give her a copy of my book. I quickly discovered that there’d be no way for me to just randomly run into her (yeah, there were a lot of people there. Holy Kamoly.) And, by Saturday, I realized that I needed to be a lot more proactive about stalking finding her. I finally tweeted something to the effect of, “Okay, first person who can hook me up with @feliciaday wins an autographed copy of Mark of the Demon!”

Not two minutes later I had a direct message from @feliciaday, telling me where to find her. SCORE!!

Unfortunately, being that I was new to ComicCon, I got very confused about where I was supposed to go. I ended up walking (jogging?) to the very ass-end of the convention center (five or so blocks away), only to discover that I had been in the right place to begin with. So, another five block walk/jog back and I made it to the Browncoat booth, where Felicia was signing autographs.

She seemed excited that I made it, shook my hand and said she was happy to meet me, at which time I proceeded to act like a spazzing fangirl. (At least it felt that way.) At one point she asked me for my card, and even though I had about a hundred stuffed into my bag I couldn’t find a single one.

Y’know, I used to be a street cop. I’ve chased down crackheads. Been in a shooting and numerous fights. Worked with the most alpha of alpha male cops. And I still managed to turn into a complete blibbering idiot. *facepalm*

But I did manage to give her a copy of Mark of the Demon, and she was incredibly nice and gracious and didn’t call security on me, for which I’m quite grateful.

As far as the rest of Comic-Con goes, I hung out with lots of cool and awesome people (again, see the flickr set!), but mostly Jackie Kessler and Shawn Speakman. Ate breakfast at Richard Walker’s Pancake House almost every morning; it usually had a line to get in, but it was a fast-moving line and always worth the wait. I got to see my friend, Gigi Gridley–who looks AMAZING and has inspired me to stop being a weenie about my diet and exercise. My bandaid giveaways were a huge hit, and I was even complimented on the cleverness of the idea by a Random House VP. (The bandaids were my one utterly brilliant idea for my life, I fear.) I was invited to a lovely little dinner party hosted by Samantha Sommersby–and since Charlaine Harris was also in attendance I was finally able to thank her personally for the wonderful blurb she gave for MotD and give her a signed copy of the book.

Even though Comic-Con wore me out far more than I expected, it was still the most fun I’ve ever had at a convention–possibly because it was absolutely impossible to be bored. I love Worldcon, but there are only so many times you can wander through the dealer’s room before you’ve seen everything, and eventually you end up just sitting in the bar to hang out with your peeps. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) But at Comic-Con there’s no way to see everything, so whenever I got restless I could just make my way to a different zip code in the convention center and see more cool and exciting stuff!

Of course, that’s probably why I was so exhausted by the end of it. [g] Anyway, I definitely want to go again next year!