Madwoman with a Writing Box: Dragon Con

It's been almost two weeks, and I am just now getting around to writing my Dragon Con post. What can I say? No rest for writers! Especially writers preparing for release.

When my husband and I first decided to go to Dragon Con, I was a bit nervous. We're not exactly very social, and tend to shy away from events that have large crowds. Heck, we go to the movies during the day for that reason. So you can imagine how anxious I was at the thought of sticking us in large crowds packed together like sardines.

Surprisingly enough, it didn't bother us that much. We had a few moments of being completely overwhelmed, but in the grand scheme of things, it didn't matter. It did keep us from certain events, like the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Ball. We tried to go, but the entire bottom floor of the Marriott seemed to packed with people who were trying to get in. We couldn't even discern where the line was through the massive crowd pushing their way towards the door and being redirected by the Dragon Con volunteers (poorly, but in their defense, there were A LOT of people to herd around).

This is me, all smiles as we set out for Atlanta.
I didn't take anymore pictures after we hit traffic.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We started out Thursday to Atlanta, getting a bit more of a late start than we wanted. Pre-registration was until 10pm, so we weren't really worried about it since we'd still be there by four or five o'clock. Well, what was supposed to be a three hour drive turned into seven hours because of a wreck and a GPS that insisted on taking us around our ass to get to our elbow. By the time we finally got to the hotel, the Dragon Con Facebook feed said they were shutting down the pre-registration lines. So we decided we would get an early start in the morning to register and then head to our panels.

We met two really cool people at the MARTA station who were also first timers, Amanda and Joel. We decided to stick together and headed to registration. The line was HUGE. It wrapped around the building twice. We were pretty sure we were going to be there all day. Luckily, the pre-registration and registration system is very effective. We ended up only being in line for I think about an hour or so. We took one look at the John Barrowman line after that, and decided to go grab some lunch instead. I'm kinda bummed that we didn't get to see him, but we were convinced that there was no way that many people in line would fit into the room for his panel. Turns out, we were wrong. I had a friend who jumped into line 15 minutes before the panel started and still got in. Lesson learned: Trust the lines. But our tummies were full and we did a little bit of exploring, having fun with our new friends until we all got in line for Richard Dean Anderson.

I love that guy. I wish I had pictures, but our camera and our phones weren't agreeing with the lighting, so they are all blurry. He was a hoot. We split up with our friends after that (the guys exchanged numbers) with plans to meet up at the Doctor Who ball. We headed to the Timey Wimey Puppet Show, which was hilarious! I seriously suggest you check them out on YouTube.

After that, we headed to Exploring Folklore in Stargate, which was very interesting. We got a message from our friends saying they were pooped and heading back to their hotel, and then we headed to the Doctor Who ball. And then we promptly fled to the MARTA station. Which is a shame, because we were dressed in the style of Doctor Who (I like to call it cosplay light hehe).