So we arrived at the Sheraton a little before 7:30 on Friday. We hung out in the car for a few minutes looking at the schedule and trying to determine if there was anything we were desperate to see early in the morning. (It turned out the answer was no.) <\/p>\n
And this is fortunate! Because we got out to go and wait for the shuttle bus from the Sheraton (which is in Danvers) to Salem (which is in… Salem) and joined a large crowd that soon grew even larger. And larger. And was very very large by the time the bus showed up, 45 minutes later. Considering this was the first full day of the con and a lot of people would have missed Thursday registration, having a bus show up right at 8am would seem to have been key. But unfortunately, this did not happen.<\/p>\n
When a bus finally came, we missed getting on it by about 5 people and had to wait a few minutes for another one to arrive. Then followed the long and winding trip to Salem. We finally arrived around 9:30 and bopped into registration which, I will say, was quite organized and fast. At that point we had some time to kill while we waited for anything of interest to start. After taking advantage of one of the nearby Dunkin Donuts (thick on the ground even in Salem, which does not have any traditional fast food joints in the historic district) we went to our first panel, which was several published authors and an editor from Penguin talking about their experiences with editors and publishing houses. Quite interesting. One author told a very amusing anecdote: she had written some books for Harlequin, and when it came time to deal with the cover art, she was sent by them to a website, where she had to describe her characters and important scenes via a series of pull-down menus. The main character is: male\/female. The character’s hair is: blue\/green\/brown\/blond\/red\/black\/etc. The character’s eyes are: and so on. Apparently it was a rather surreal experience, especially when it got down to things like Job and Personality, all of which had to be described via these menus.<\/p>\n
After this panel was done, we went to try an activity called “Quest”, but which most of you reading this will probably more easily understand if I say Amazing Race. We got clues that sent us to various locations in Salem and had to solve puzzles to find out where to go next. The puzzles weren’t hard, but were challenging if your brain didn’t work that way, or you weren’t… well, good at puzzles. J and I are, however, and we were out in the front of the pack until about halfway through. At that point the heat (it was in the 80s) and the humidity (very high — it was working up to a steady rain that started later that night) got to J, and I have to admit it was getting to me too. So we made the executive decision to stop, since passing out was not on the agenda.<\/p>\n
At that point we decided to head back to the Sheraton, because there were some things over there we wanted to check out. We found to our pleasure that the bus situation had been corrected since the morning, and there was now a steady stream of buses going back and forth between the two locations. We hopped aboard and zipped (really slowly) back to Danvers. <\/p>\n
After a shower I was feeling more human, so J and I decided to go and get some food before the start of the panel she was interested in attending. Route 1 was handy, so we drove along that until we agreed on a spot (Friendly’s). Dinner was good, and I can now recommend the peanut brittle ice cream.<\/p>\n
Back at the hotel J went to the panel and I hung out at the “book fair” in the Sheraton’s living room. In actuality this “book fair” was a table set up by one coming soon local bookstore. It was nice, but there was nothing really special on the table, and though a couple of the authors from earlier came by and were signing books, they were not authors in which I was interested. By the time J got out of the panel, I was falling asleep in my chair — getting up at 6:30 combined with having had about 3 hours sleep the night before was just killing me.<\/p>\n
So, since I knew I had to be somewhere at 8 the next day, I went to bed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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