LeoCon

This weekend I was a guest of honor at LeoCon, a small one-day convention at Texas A&M University at Commerce. It's only their third year, but it was a great convention. It's run and organized by a student committee, and sponsored by the university, and it had a young, diverse crowd interested in books, anime, comics, TV and movies, and lots of people in costume. (It reminded me a lot of what AggieCon used to be like when I was a student.)

It's organized a bit like an academic conference, with some SF-related academic presentations. I did a reading (from the third Raksura short novella, "The Dead City") and did a drawing to give away some free books, and did a Q and A session on publishing in general. I also sat in on the digital publishing panel in the afternoon. Artist Bryan Brinlee was also a guest and did a presentation on how to do comic pages, and Nathan Arbuckle, a technical director and visual effects artist, showed his demo reel from some of the movies he'd worked on (The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, etc). And at the end of the day (before the costume contest and dance) there was a raffle drawing for a bunch of prizes.

I had an awesome time.

Also if you live nearby, the university literary journal, The Mayo Review, is going to be having a launch party on April 18th with author Pat Carr, with a workshop and reading.

Here's some pictures from the convention: (taken with a phone, so not that great)