The second part of a long series about my adventure at Shore-Leave 44, the country’s oldest fan run convention.
Day 2 (Saturday!) started super early with a panel at 9am about cover designs and how cover art can tell it’s own story. Panelists included JK Woodward, Mike McPhail, Susan Olsen, Laura Ware, and Aaron Rosenberg. There was a great discussion about how the price for cover art is all over the place with consideration to how badly the artist wants to eat that month vs how much they want to be a part of a specific project. It’s a concern that I’ve had myself with my own web dev work, so I felt their pain!
10am was a panel about the 20th anniversary of “Tales of the Dominion War“, with most of the authors of the stories in the anthology present to talk about their contributions, including Howard Weinstein, Keith DeCandido, Dayton Ward (who was the only panelist with no beard), David Mack, Michael Jan Friedman, and Greg Cox. It was Mr Cox’s story that surprised me to hear that it was actually a chapter of a completely different book (Q-Continuum) and it was only edited slightly to fit the purposes of the Dominion anthology.
11am was a Science Track panel about the Hubble, Webb, and Roman Space observatories, with a ton of hard science that I’m not going to go into here, but please be assured I took a ton of notes.
After that panel? It was time for vendors! They had a large room that was confusingly underneath the main theater, but it was large and well lit, so other than having to take yet another set of stairs (this time down), it was a great set up. I ended up buying a keychain for my backpack, a sign for my wife, a couple posters from JK Woodward (did you know there was almost a Xenomorph / Borg / TNG cross over? I have the poster to prove it!), some fudge, a stack of Trek related notepads, a “Star Trek Log” book set, a couple books from David Gerrold, and finally a Voyager style comm badge that I was told about a dozen times from the vendor that it was “jewelry quality”. I just hope it looks ok on whatever thing I eventually stick it on. 
After I cycled through the vendor room a few times I still had plenty of time until the next panel that I was interested in, so I took a little day trip out to a few local comic shops to buy some Trek comics. I visited The Comic Store, 4th Wall Comics, and Vortex Comics (they’re having Armin Shimerman at their store soon!). I was able to buy books at all three and got a pretty dope sticker from the guys at 4th wall.
Proof I was there!
I made it back to the Wyndham in time to attend the panel for “The Sisko Day”, with some great insight by the author of the recent “Autobiography of Benjamin Sisko”. I was about halfway through the book at this point and was worried that I would get some spoilers, but that never actually happened, though plenty of people tried it. Moderators didn’t allow it though!
At 3pm was a “Hubble at 34” panel discussing how elderly the platform is getting and what’s currently breaking or broken on it, which is a depressingly large number of things. As sad as that was though, it was fun to see a couple Trek authors in the audience and I even got to sit next to Adeena Mignogna and chat about her experiences at the con.
Next up was a break to visit the vendors again, there was still some stuff that I hadn’t had the opportunity to check out. A few hours later and I sat in on a panel about Star Trek’s expanding universe and what is and isn’t canon in table top games, video games, and rpg mixtures. Then it was off to a “How to Watch Star Trek” with Keith DeCandido and Dave McOwen. This panel ended up being a much more intimate affair with the two panelists sitting at the same tables as the audience and talking to everyone about the intimidating amount of content that can be watched, about 877 hours, which includes movies and tv shows. There were a few very good suggestions on watch orders, with my favorite being watching select episodes from each of the series to get the basic feel for them, then delving deeper if you like what you see.
8:30pm Saturday night was the Masquerade which was obviously a fun tradition for both the show runners and the attendees, but this was the one event that I could see both that they were very new to the space and it wasn’t a professional team running everything with barefoot techs running broken microphones back and forth, yelling at each other from the back of the theater, and cosplayers not finding their marks because of the lack of lighting. It’s a small quibble to be sure and I’m just as sure that they’ll refine things for next year. I didn’t take any photos because they asked for no photography, but I assure you that if I had pictures, you’d see some great cosplay with some great executions of clever concepts.
The final panel was a “Writer Brain vs Editor Brain” panel that got really into the weeds of editing both your own work and others work and there were some really well thought out take aways that I’m going to steal for my own purposes.
I was out of the hotel by 10:10pm on Saturday night and boy howdy my feet were absolutely killing me and I was dead tired. I made it back to my hotel room and after eating some Sheets for the first time (spicy chicken sandwich!) I got to bed by like 11 and slept like a log.
