IllogiCon 2: Day 1

Click here for Day 2, or here for Day 3.

Friday, January 11, 2013

IllogiCon started today. I meant to go down early, and hang out as things were getting started, but of course that didn't happen. I ended up getting there around five.

The con's in a new facility this year: the RDU/Research Triangle Embassy Suites. I asked someone at the registration table why they'd changed facilities, and he said it was for financial reasons. I actually like the new place better, though: the DoubleTree, where it was last year, is a very nice hotel, but it was much further from where I live, and there are all those traffic circles. (I know they're safer than intersections. I still hate them.) This one had no traffic circles, and was right off 40. Very nice!

The space was better, too. Last year we were upstairs, and it kind of felt as if we'd been squished in as an afterthought, though I doubt that was actually true. At this hotel, we're on the main floor--though somehow the guy babysitting the desk had no idea what I was talking about when I asked where the convention was. Once again, there are two panel rooms, a game room, a dealers' room, a registration desk, a con suite, and probably a lot of other stuff that the guests never see.

I ran into friends right away: Jason Peters, his wife Megan, and Ada Milenkovic Brown, whose reading I missed by ten minutes. Oops. (Sorry, Ada. ;_;) I was just in time for the five o'clock panel. I was torn--"The Local Scene" looked pretty interesting--but all my friends were in "The State of Short Fiction," so I went there.