My Second Day in Discworld

Morning came all too soon and I thought, was I crazy signing up to do crafts first thing in the morning? Again, yes to the crazy, no to the wrong. It was actually quite relaxing and calm. At first my friend Jess and I where thinking, oh, this looks lame, just pieces of paper to color. But no! It was vinyl! So cool and colored really well. My Igor (seen above) is a very dandy Igor. A fop if you would. The gentleman's gentleman of the undead. After our Igor session, which being our first craft session made us realize that the sessions needed to be far longer to get anything done. I didn't even finish my Igor! But Jess and I had a lot of fun switching and trading body parts.

After this I went to a book signing with Stephen Player. Stephen Player is the artist who did the art for the Discworld and Ankh-Morpork maps as well as all the art for the illustrated Wee Free Men. Stephen was incredibly nice and I got to share a little story with him, because his poster he did for the con had the Wisconsin State Capital on it, I said that he probably doesn't know that it's the second largest in the US, it was the first, but it had to be rebuilt because there can not be a capital building taller than the one in Washington D.C. Take that history classes! Make me tour that Capital repeatedly, I will retain something.

After a long lunch and a little shopping we got there nice and early for Terry's panel on his new book series, The Long Earth, being written with Stephen Baxter. Some of the book is even set in Madison! The basic idea is that there are any number of earths, but say you want to go to earth 50, you have to go through earth 1-49 to get to it. In essence, chain parallel worlds. Could be an interesting concept. Stephen works with the sciencey bits and Terry works with the storytelling bits. Should be out in 2012, and I'll be sure to pick up a copy.

After this we had an hour till the "Talk with Terry." Aka, Rob and Terry just chatting. In that time Jess bravely kept the seats, which where multiply attacked by invading forces, including a cameraman! I went to see Patrick Rothfuss, which was something that caused a bit of a to-do. The problem was, the website stated all "Kaffee Klatches" (of which this was one) where going to be lottery to determine the 15 people to attend. This was not the case, it was first come first serve. I, being older, wiser, and more willing to make people stick to what they say, raised a bit of a kerfuffle. I was going and that was that. In the end I won. I thank the people at the con for working with me and admitting there was a mistake and letting me participate and not giving me something to look back on and be pissed about. The Klatch ran long so I was a few minutes late to the talk... oops.

Rob and Terry just sat and talked about their normal kind of day while Rob fought to keep Terry talking into the microphone. They reminisced about this little town they found in New Zealand that was straight out of another time, which ironically was on the same day they went to visit Hobbiton, which is out of a different world. Rob said that he never wanted to leave Hobbiton and he was sad he couldn't post or share any of the pictures he took, but he said it was still worth it. They also discussed that Terry has never let Rob be employee of the month, that honor always being bestowed on the cat, because she never talks about her grandma. For picture of said employee click here. It was also rumored that Terry is planing on writing his autobiography and that most days he feels like a cat with a really long tail in a room full of rocking chairs.

Instead of staying for the Masque, we went out for Chinese food, some book browsing and a game of skittles, which is a wicked awesome British pub game that everyone should play and which I shouldn't have taught to Matt because he got way too good too fast.