One of the best things about summer: 4-day cons. PlayOnCon takes place this weekend in Birmingham, Alabama, and we’ll be there all four days. Zachary Steele and Barbara Friend Ish will be participating in panels and other fun. We’ll have a table in the Dealers Room–where you can check out, among other things, Zach’s forthcoming Flutter, the hilarious sequel to his Anointed, and pre-order your copy. (And don’t miss the Fairy Catmother t-shirts, on loan from friend of the house Diana Bastine.) And we’ll be hosting the very first public playtest of the Tarot-based card game Cliche Studios is developing for Barbara’s next novel, War-Lord of the Gods.
This is going to be an action-packed weekend! For this year, Faerie Escape: Atlanta has teamed up with PlayOnCon, so in addition to the usual fun at PlayOn there will also be programming for lovers of Faerie. We’ll be participating in some of it, including a workshop on bringing fresh air and fresh ideas to stories inspired by Faerie (6 pm Friday). We’ll also be hosting a program of faerie storytelling, including readings from Zach and Barbara, some of which will be sneak peeks at forthcoming works, as well as a reading from Ed Morris’s There Was a Crooked Man (performed by Sales Diva Rachael, since Ed can’t be with us this weekend).
PlayOn is also hosting a number of open-to-the-public meetups at the convention hotel, which we’ve already talked about here. Barbara will be hosting the writers’ meetup, and Zach plans to be present too; we’ll probably kick things off there with a couple readings there, too. Unless everybody just gets right into the spirit of the meeting without prompting; then we’ll just hang out.
Anybody who follows the play-by-play around here knows how excited we’ve been getting about gaming recently; we’ll be hosting a workshop on using game development to enrich the story world, Saturday at noon with James & Ant from Cliche Studio. This will be a very hands-on workshop, so if you’ve ever wanted to get advice from a live game developer, this is a good chance to do that.
There will be a lot more fun there this weekend, and of course we’ll be in the thick of it, including much more writing, publishing, and gaming programming. Hope to see you there!
