Liberty Con is here and gone, so fast that I only now realized I forgot to take pictures.  I took notes, but I’ll apologize in advance if I leave out someone’s name or forget who said what, as I said, it was a busy weekend.

The first day was a bit of a blur to me, meeting new people and seeing friends again.  I was on an excellent Fantasy panel with Rob Howell, Jeremy Hicks, S Andrew Swann, and Michael Ault.  While a lot of the focus was on what each author wrote, there was also a lot of discussion about what we like to read and the trends we’re seeing in Fantasy.  There were a lot of great perspectives, especially since we had a variety of writers there who write everything from humor to grim fantasy.  It was interesting to note that those authors focused more on humor don’t feel the need to “ground” their fantasy (sort of in a Prachett style of writing) versus those writing epic fantasy at least want a developed system of rules for internal consistency.

Saturday was a very busy day for me.  I was on a Military Science Fiction panel with Doug Dandridge, Charles Gannon, Peter Grant, and James Young.  We had a hard backstop of the Baen travelling slideshow, so we knew we’d be run over if we ran over on time.  It was a fun discussion, which started out on the topic of whether you need to be an actual combat veteran to write combat in books.  Peter Grant made a good point in that it’s essential to fully understand it, but I felt (and I still do), that it’s not necessary to write good military science fiction.   I think we have plenty of examples of excellent authors who don’t have that experience, but they do talk with those who do and they draw on research to do it well.

After that I had a Space Opera panel with Doug Dandridge, Julie Cochrane, Daniel Hoyt, and Mark Wandrey.  This was a panel that went off the rails a bit as we ended up discussing topics like Game of Thrones.  I’ve got to give props to Dan Hoyt because he did a fantastic job herding cats to try to keep us on topic (especially since he didn’t know he was moderator until he got there).  Special thanks goes to the audience, since we were scheduled opposite to the Baen Travelling Slideshow, thanks all of you for showing up!

I attended a couple of panels Saturday, one on the Noir genre with Larry Correia and several other authors.  I came in a bit late but it was a fun discussion, particularly as they went into cross-genre blending such as in Dresden Files and Grimnoir Chronicles.

The last part of Saturday I was at the Mad Scientist panel.  It was fun, though I think we needed a bit more mad science!  There were a few people there who seemed too limited in their scope, if you ask me.  Dream big, right?

Sunday I didn’t have any panels, but I got to meet several people, both readers and authors, and got a chance to pitch the idea for my YA novel to Toni Weisskopf (Much kudos to Toni, she’s an amazing woman with the patience of a saint and the business acumen of a railroad tycoon).  I was scheduled for a reading in the afternoon, but unfortunately with the time of my flight and the drive to Atlanta, I wasn’t able to do that.

All in all, it was a great convention.  I’m already missing it and I’m preregistered for it next year!