Yay, WiFi

Here at writercon, slowly decompressing. So far, impressions of Atlanta are limited - restaurants seem to close early, and the hotel has no night menu (!), but it does have free HBO (omg, Tales of Riddick!) and, as per this post's title, WiFi (hopefully free - I'll check). But the brushes with fandom fame are already reducing me to a serious puddle of babble - I caught the train from the airport with irfikos, whose fic Chain is one of my all time favorites, then split a pizza with willowgreen and the famous herself_nyc, all of whom I only met in person for the first time tonight, and man, do I run on at the mouth when I'm nervous and/or excited? You bet. But geekery is indeed what we're here for, so hopefully I won't scare everyone away. (I expect I'll sound more normal in the morning. Because, to recap: eeee, excited. And nervous. And talking too much.)

Cute sound bite on the plane: the flight attendant, picking up rubbish from passengers before landing, worked her way down the aisle sing-songing, "empties, trash, garbage," with that nice little touch of Europe in the pronunciation. For some reason, it struck me as funny. Probably because she said it the same way every time, over and over.

MARTA: looks just like BART, or the Bay Area Rapid Transit, for San Francisco locals. Only it's a bit cleaner, so possibly newer. Easy and fast, so that part of the trip was a breeze. I love trains.

Starbucks!: As in, agh, where is it? Atlanta is perhaps the first airport I've been to in some time that didn't have a Starbucks immediately visible at the gate. Apparently, according to the airport services map, they do exist, but the upshot is that I did not get a coffee tonight. Probably for the best. I don't suppose I needed to be more wired.

Now to get some sleep. Hoepfully. I'm three hours off time zone and still wide awake. But I'm here. It's on!

Hello From Writercon, Part 2

More General Georgia Observations: People are terribly nice. The hotel courtesy van driver last night said, "drop your loads there, ladies, that's my job. You just relax, I got this. Don't you worry about a thing." At the front desk, at the grocery store, they call you "sweetie." I guess this would be the famed Southern hospitality at work (it's very pleasant, I have to say, for a traveler.)

Viewed in daylight, the architecture is basic modern prefab, everything very new-looking. If you judged soley by the strip mall near the hotel, it's virtual identical to, say, Palo Alto, CA, with the putty-colored neo-Spanish adobe connected structures, the neo-Early American hotel suites, the Subway and the Kroger and the Starbucks (note: those three establishments are likely to be getting a lot of business from me this weekend, by way of keeping this trip as cheap as possible - thank god for a grocery store I can walk to!). The greenery, though, is very lush, a thick carpet of trees cut through by eight-lane highways (the con hotel is right near a freeway exchange). There's a rather impressive amount of truck traffic on said highway, although points for still having a sidewalk along the road and a pedestrian crossing button for the on/off ramps. (And yes, the State highway signs do feature Georgia peaches.)

The coffee is awful, though, which is about what I remember of the Midwestern style, too. Watery. A little burned tasting. So glad I brought my own Peets.

Panels: Had both mine today, and am done, although husband Toys is probably going to be very sad with me for forgetting to record the panels like I'd originally intended to. (Forgive me honey!) Both went well, I think, thanks to terrific fellow panelists denny_dc, avrelia, ascian3, lordshiva, Anna Genoese, Rachel Caine, and Susan Sizemore. Tonight's big event still to come is the erotica panel and its smaller subpanels, which I get to just sit back and enjoy. Ahh.

Overall, I can't get over how friendly and wondeful everyone is. Damn, fanfic writers are cool!