Archive for the ‘Conventions’ Category

Yaoi-Con 2011 Write-Up (Part 1 of 3)

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

Bad Decisions, Good Friends, and Gold Label Tequila

Ahhh. Back from Yaoi-Con. So much to report and I don’t want to make the same mistake I did last year (posting my 2010 pics the week before leaving for the 2011 con) so I’m breaking my convention post into three manageable parts.

Part one starts with day one which was filled with liquor. So. Much. Liquor. I arrived on Thursday and had a tall B-52 with T.C. Blue. We had dinner—for me it was oysters and a martini. There may have been fries involved. T.C. gave me some wicked business cards:


Rainbow!
The tat is my favorite part

It sorta gets fuzzy after that. I’m a bit of a weird lush in that I’ll get drunk off a bottle of beer but I can do several shots and still be fairly steady, so when I’m in public I tend to just do hard liquor. This was probably not the best decision, but I do remember being happy and friendly. I got to meet Clare London, Andrew Grey, Mary Calmes, and a circle of other authors that first night. Hopefully they remember me being happy and friendly as well. I traded cards with Mary:


Mary Calmes 2Mary Calmes 1

She’s a Samurai Champloo fan which gives her instant cool cred.

No hangover Friday. I’m told that’s a miracle, but I’ve never had one so I have no comparison. Although to be safe, I didn’t have any more alcohol till my last night in San Francisco. It was absinthe. XD

Back to Friday—registered for the con without mishap. Saturday I got to have dinner with some cool comic book kids:


Hot Synthetic Lovin

Category3 Circle

Alex is a friend I met last year. He is the man of a thousand cards and if you’re not reading his web comic Artifice, why aren’t you? It’s freaking made of awesome.

Met the Category3 Circle for the first time this year. Their comics are brand new-to-me and I bought their Close to you anthology (which includes the story Dentente) at the con. It’s much fun.

I also got to talk with About.com Manga blogger Deb Aoki. And after the convention I crashed on Jen LeBlanc’s floor. Jen LeBlanc is the editor of Viz’s new Boys’ Love imprint SuBLime Manga. SuBLime’s first titles are coming out in December and they are sweet.

Perks of the floor? I got to molest piles of manga. And I got to visit Viz Media. AKA heaven.

So that’s Part One of my convention report. Loved collecting everyone’s cards and loved sharing them here. Had a blast chatting up old friends and meeting new ones. I got a bunch of them to take the seme/uke test at http://semeuke.com and one of them came up “Chibi Seme” which I had never heard of before. I’m an “Opportunistic Seme” in case you were wondering and never saw that bit of info back in the day on my MySpace page. And yeah. Pretty much as bad as it sounds. 😉

This is just off the top of my head. Did not even come close to listing everyone I ran into. This is why if you see me you need to give me your card. Not only do I adore collecting them, but I tend to choke during the write-ups. XD

Next:
Part two: Stuff
Part three: Cosplay

Just a Reminder

Thursday, October 20th, 2011

Heading off for San Francisco today. YaoiCon should be a blast. Hope to see you there!

PS– Not doing the “Where’s Rowan” hide-and-seek this time. But I am bringing the hat, so if you want to meet up, drop me a line on twitter, here, etc, and I’ll be sure to have it on me so that I’m recognizable. 🙂

Goin’ to Yaoi-Con 2011!

Friday, October 7th, 2011

October 21st through 23rd I’ll be at Yaoi-Con in San Francisco! W00t! It’s really short notice but I only found out last week that I would be able to go, then this week my mother ended up in surgery and I ended up in the emergency room for completely unrelated reasons, so things have been a little crazy. After I finish writing up this post I fully intend to stare up at my ceiling fan and listen to Enya for at least an hour.

Are any of you guys going? I’m not sure if I’ll be playing Where’s Rowan this year—Would you be interested in playing again? If so, I might also do an online version this time around where you can look for me via twitter. I’m not sure. It depends on how I feel after Enya stops playing. 😉

In celebration of my trip to Yaoi-Con 2011, I’m posting a few pics from Yaoi-Con 2010, which I never got around to posting because my SD card got corrupted and I lost most of my images. It depressed me, yada yada yada. But some good ones survived, and here are three:


1 - Ichigo and Alex

A friend and I won a bishie in an auction. Here he is in his in all his Ichigo hawtness posing with Alex Woolfson, another friend of mine and writer of a fab webcomic called Artifice.

9 - Butterfly Dances 2

I don’t know who they are, but I love the hell out of butterflies.

Cutest Frog Ever

Cutest. Frog. Ever.
In my head all I could hear was “Kero Kero Keroppi.”



So that’s three snapshots of last year’s Yaoi-Con. If you’d like to see more, check out my flikr account at http://flic.kr/s/aHsjwifMdr. Feel free to leave comments there, and let me know here if you’re going to the con!

Home from Yaoi-Con

Friday, November 5th, 2010

And still recovering, so a longer recap (with pics, hopefully) will be coming later. For now, though, I wanted to list the highlights:

  • Met a bunch of friends, old and new.
  • Gave away all my Where’s Rowan prizes.
  • Got Yamane Ayano’s autograph.
  • Won Best Action at the AMV contest.
  • Won a bishie at an auction.
  • Went to Alcatraz.
  • Bought a busload of stuff.
  • Watched “Ghost Adventures” for the first time. lol.

There was a lot more, I know, but I need a little time to organize my thoughts and sift through the stuff that cannot be told. 😉

Game On!

Friday, October 29th, 2010

Where’s Rowan? Find me at Yaoi-Con wearing this hat:

And follow these rules to win fab prizes. From October 29-31. That’s now!

Where’s Rowan? (Yaoi-Con 2010 edition)

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

Katrina Strauss was way generous and sent me a bunch of stuff to give away along with mine, so I figured now was as good a time as any to post the rules of this year’s “Where’s Rowan” game. But first, the glorious hat that is the key to victory and–dare I say it–seventh level happiness. I speak, of course, of the Urahara/chibi-Gaara impossible to match with anything baseball cap:

Oh yes, it’s spiffy. It even has quite the extensive backstory in that it was made during a phase where for some reason people were sending me plushies left and right, chibi-Gaara got the traditional bucket hat, drama ensued, and eventually there was even a photo taken with Gaara wearing THIS hat. It’s convoluted and only really makes sense in my mind, but the bottom line is that this hat possesses magical powers and can win you prizes. These prizes, in fact:

Where's

I tried to make sure I put one of each in there, but I’ve got a *lot* of prints in varying sizes. You may have noticed some sparkling Blue Ruin and Sleight of Hand love mixed in there– those are what Katrina sent. 😀

The CDs I’m giving out are “first chapter” CDs, in they contain the first chapter of all my currently published works, plus a copy of my short story “A Picture’s Worth.” I’m also giving away one trade paperback copy each of Lone, Warm Rush: Chasing Winter, and Want Me.

Nice, yeah?

Rules:

  1. Finding the hat is pretty much it. Look for it at Yaoi-Con 2010 either on my head or attached to my messenger bag.
  2. Once you find the hat, walk up to the person with it and ask politely “Are you Rowan McBride?” If they say no, keep walkin’ because it means my idea wasn’t as original as I thought and someone else painted their own Urahara baseball cap. If it *is* me, then I’ll probably flash a big goofy grin and you’ll win one of the fabulous prizes listed above.
  3. I’ll be posting many of my locations in real time via twitter, so keep an eye on that page for an advantage.
  4. Contest begins when I yell “Game On!” on this blog, my website, twitter, and on my newsletter Friday, October 29th 2010 and ends Halloween day.
  5. Have fun!

Yaoi-Con musings

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

This Halloween weekend I’ll be in San Francisco for Yaoi-Con. Gotta say, looking forward to it. Fate has set it up so that I get to meet up with an old friend I haven’t seen since college. I also have plans to meet a lot of new friends face-to-face for the first time. Plus there’s an impressive list of people I plan to outright stalk. Conventions rock.

And, yes, I do plan to play Where’s Rowan? while I’m there. The rules will be similar to last year when we played at DragonCon. Yaoi-Con’s a lot smaller so I won’t be posting every move I make on twitter, but I’ll tweet the highlights because I have a lot of prizes to give away and this is the…what?…third or fourth year we’ve played and no one’s ever found Rowan. I have high hopes that the streak will be broken this year. With my luck it will be while I’m letting someone else try on the hat.

What prizes have I got this time around? I’ll list the details in a later post, but good ones. Plus author and friend Katrina Strauss is sending me some swag and how cool is that?

So, any of you guys going to the con? What events are you looking forward to?

Yaoi-Con

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Yeah, it looks like I’m going. XD

I’m even thinking of picking a day and playing Where’s Rowan, so if you’re going to be in San Francisco on Halloween weekend, maybe we’ll have some fun.

You can learn more about the convention at http://yaoicon.com/.

Dragon*Con summary

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

I’m way late with this, but it turns out I took well over three hundred pictures at D*Con and it took a lot longer than expected to sort and resize them. 🙂

The convention was a blast. Met a lot of interesting people, attended some wicked events (Rave? Me? Nooo), and saw a lot of truly amazing cosplayers. The high points for me were The Mad Scientists’ Ball, the AMV showing, and the Exploring the Final Taboo writing panel. At the panel I got to meet a lot of authors I respect for the first time in real life, including Kayelle Allen, Kiernan Kelly, and Ally Blue. I also got to meet new-to-me authors Fiona Zedde and Sascha Illyvich.

I’d never had the opportunity to attend a writing panel before, so I was sitting in the audience, avidly taking notes as well as txting Katrina Strauss (who couldn’t attend this year) bits and pieces of the subjects covered. I was surprised as hell when Kayelle Allen spotted me and announced me to the room as “the best M/M writer in the world.” I’m sure the expression on my face was very deer caught in the headlights as I walked to the front of the room and told the audience a little bit about my stuff. A friend of mine told me I sounded calm and collected, but that’s what friends do so I’m unsure.

My favorite moment of the entire convention happened at that panel. When I stood up, Kiernan Kelly pointed to me and yelled “I’ve been looking for that damned hat all weekend!”

I still smile when I think about it.

Aside from that moment, no one spotted the Where’s Rowan hat. I did get to give away most of the prizes, though, so that was a lot of fun.

The entire weekend still feels like one long day, and as such is a bit blurry. The sweet-tea peach vodka I tried for the first time had nothing to do with that at all, I’m sure—oh my god I LOVE Georgia!—but luckily I took tons of pictures. Sharing a few below:

Kratos

Kratos

***

Dr. Manhattan

Dr. Manhattan

***

A bishounen in leather

Bishounen

***

The Question

The Question

***

Mmm, Spartans

Spartans

***

Doctor Who

Doctor Who

***

Hatta

Hatta

Cool, yeah? Those were just some of my favorites. If you’d like to view the public gallery I’ve created for more of them, click over to my flickr account. There, a lot of the images have captions. It’s currently 5am and I *just* finished that project, so it’ll be interesting to see if I’m as clever as I thought I was after I’ve gotten some sleep. lol.