The first day of Worldcon was fun! We started with our "free" breakfast— free in the sense that the price is included in our room rate and we don't get anything back if we don't eat it. It's a pretty nice spread, though. There was plenty of bacon! Enough said.

The participant packets were ready, and mine was OK, except my name tent says "Karen Newton" (one of 6,852 in the US alone*) and not "Karen Wester Newton" (to my knowledge, the only one in the world). I may draw myself a new name tent before tomorrow night's panel. My schedule checked out fine; no last minute changes.

We spent some time walking around the old city, and then went to lunch with scottedelman. My friend Karen had spotted a restaurant in Chinatown called Maison de Kam Fung. We went there for excellent dim sum!

After lunch I was on my first Worldcon panel: Ebooks from the reader and writer's perspective. We had pretty good turnout and some very good questions from an interested audience. It was long! An hour and a half is a long time for three panelists to talk.

We hit the dealer's room after the panel, then raced through a sudden rain storm to get back to the hotel for "free drinks" in the hotel bar. After that we went to a panel on "the long tail" with Gary K. Wolf and mindyklasky. Then we had a late dinner at the "Nouveau France" restaurant in the convention center, and then we wrapped up with a trek down the road to the Delta (the party hotel) to drop by the Fast Forward party. We ran into Rani Graff on the way and finally got to say hello.

And then we staggered home. Worldcons are fun.

* I made that number up.