DragonCon (part 1)

06 Sep 2010

DragonCon (part 1)

This year, I made the long trek from the suburbs of Atlanta to downtown Atlanta to go to DragonCon. This is not much of a trek for me since I do it 4-5 times a week anyway, but I wanted to put the word trek into this post as much as possible.

I’ve wanted to go for a while and was finally able to talk myself (and my wife) into spending the money and giving up most of a holiday weekend because of the Writer’s Workshop that A.C. Crispin holds there every year.

I will say that the Writer’s Workshop was very good. Ms. Crispin packs a lot into two full days of class and then critiques a manuscript (that you send to her prior to the convention). She covers a wide range of topics and does it very well (although it’s not as organized as my anal personality would have liked, that is the danger of taking a class from a creative person).

Now about the convention itself – I was very disappointed in it as a whole. I know they can’t control how many people come to the convention but they should plan appropriately. The lines to get your badge – if you PREPAID – were three to four hours long from Thursday to Saturday. Since I was sitting in the Writer’s class all day Thursday and Friday (and have a life outside of DragonCon) I was unable to ever get my badge. Personally, I’d rather spend time at home than standing in line missing all the panels I wanted to go to. This is too bad because had it been an enjoyable conference, I might have spent some money there and gone back next year – rest assured that’s not going to happen!

I knew I wasn’t going to hit much of the Con this year anyway because I went for the Writer’s Workshop. Even without my badge though I did enjoy listening to the music groups play (I’ll talk about the music in my Part 2 post), and I went to the parade, which is an annual event that draws a big crowd. I’ve posted some of the pictures from the parade below. Some of the costumes were really well done and it’s always fun to see monsters and bounty hunters and starfleet officers and superheroes having a pleasant day on Peachtree Street.