I’m treating this as a semi-weekend day to recover from essentially working all weekend. I got mostly better from last week’s cold, but then the weather got in the way. We got record amounts of rain, more than 7 inches in one night, and it was more than the hotel conference center roof could handle. A few leaks let water pool in the ceiling tiles until the ceiling tiles couldn’t handle it, and you can imagine the fun stuff that exploded into the air along with bits of ceiling tile and all that water that had been pooling in there. I wasn’t there when it happened, but I’m fairly sure the entire place was contaminated the rest of the weekend. I’d be okay at home, then couldn’t stop coughing while I was at the convention. I managed to get through my panels then beat a hasty retreat for home.

I’d thought that the panel on evil overlords would be about writing villains, but instead it was more of an improv exercise in which we were essentially creating evil overlords on the spot, answering questions about our lairs, wardrobe, minions, etc. It was a ton of fun. I’ve never been a villain-centric writer, so it was an interesting exercise in putting myself in that viewpoint, but since the idea was to be funny with this, I got to create a villain who was a spoof of the Maleficent type. My chosen lair was a castle with a moat. I went with formal wear in basic black for public appearances (unless I was pretending to be a captive princess to lure heroes to my lair), but for casual wear just hanging around the castle, I preferred yoga pants and sweatshirts. I may get a couple of fun stories out of that exercise because I kind of liked the character I created. To some extent, I suspect she just put on the evil overlord front to keep the villagers away from the castle so she could get some peace and quiet.

I’m also tempted to create the costume for this character and wear it next year.

Meanwhile, I went to a couple of Marian Call’s concerts and bought some more CDs. She’s an Alaska-based singer/songwriter who does geeky stuff along with more mainstream topics. I saw her in concert a few years ago and she was the music guest of honor this weekend. And from a conversation after her Saturday concert we both came away with writing prompts for something that needs to be addressed.

Now I need to catch up on life and all the stuff that didn’t get done while I was sick or busy with the convention. My kitchen is a disaster, I have to do laundry, and there’s a lot of admin work I need to tackle. Then tomorrow I start the proofreading pass on my book.