heidi | (no subject)

I'm awake and dressed, and ready to go back into town for my presentation with

idlerat and others this morning. Roommate

slytherincess has just woken up so she can come with, for her stint in the beta booth, and

tea_and_toast are still asleep, having turned in something close to three last night.
It's been a whirlwind of a 24 hours, and even though I have to leave in seven, I am so glad I came. The FictionAlley party yesterday was my first event, and a wonderful experience, as about 60 FA mods, coders, writers, artists and visitors, a sweet service doggie named Puck, and founding FA-ers

malachan and

owlman partook of yummy fries, onion rings and chips and salsa, and a lot of people ordered lunch, too. I mostly had diet coke, and it was good.
We had FA nametags with bright Sharpie pens, and everyone got their choice of what I am happily calling SNAPE BALM (photo coming soon) - packaging created by

ani_bester from various FA covers. If you see me at TWH and you don't have your lip balm yet, just let me know and I'll give you a tube of the cherry flavour.
After that, I came back to the hotel, t00bed around for about fifteen minutes, then went to

blackholly's panel with

cassandraclaire,

jlh, my roommates,

smilie117,

gwendolyngrace and

etakyma. After that, I changed and we headed back into Salem for a yummy Southwestern dinner and an amazing "tequila cosmo" at Cillantro, then I briefly went to Tamora Pierce's reading (and oh THANK YOU

hermorrine for the signed books!) and then to my own presentation on old school fanfic.

We read portions from:
Surfeit of Curses
Psychic Serpent
Paradigm of Uncertainty
Ancient Prophecy
After the End
His Majesty's Secret Service
I Am Lord Voldemort
An Unlikely Coven
Boys Own Camping Adventure
Call of the Wild
Alternity

For all apart from the fics that we ourselves had written, we had a challenge - whoever could guess the fic first would win a hat, or lip balm. Roz McClure took top honours, getting multiple fics, and we had some brief discussions about concepts found in the pre-GoF stories, like the fact that we didn't know wnat an Unforgivable was, or even what Voldemort's followers were called, until post-GoF, which makes things like the "burn" curse in Alternity all the more interesting to me. Nobody actually guessed Alternity, btw, but IIRC the rest were guessed.

And despite the fact that I had planned to read A Marriage of True Minds and Speculum Curse, both by Hyphen, we were sort of out of time, as it was pushing midnight, so Rob, spouse of

pegkerr, drove us back to the hotel amid some drippy rain. And then there was a room party, and

blackholly and

longtimegone and I took a break to go down to the movie and visit briefly with

melissa_tlc,

cheesy_jeffer, Chris Rankin and a few others (although we missed seeing

owlman in the back of the room), then returned upstairs whereupon I finally collapsed just after 2am. And now it's almost eight and I'm about to head back into town...

Ok, Barb is at the door. Time to flee. Probably won't update again until I'm at the airport around fourish... Don't forget to come to the TLC podcast, if you're reading this from Salem, over at FINZ at 130ish.