This year the Nebulas were a local event (see last week's post) and so I ended up with "cons" on back-to-back weekends. I went to Balticon on Friday and stayed though half of Sunday. It's only about 60 miles from my house and should take less than an hour a half to get there in good traffic but Saturday was NOT a good traffic day, so I was glad we had booked a hotel room for Friday and Saturday nights. I was also glad they opened a Wegman's right near the con; we ate several meals there because for a grocery store they had an excellent selection of prepared food.

Balticon is not a huge con, but they do run several programming tracks at once.  There's an active gaming contingent, and this year hall costumes were very popular. I didn't get that many pictures but I loved this little bitty pirate (right). There were a numbers of kids running around in costume. Grownups, too. One time I stepped on the elevator only to be confronted by an alien! He seemed quite peaceable, even though he's gesturing wildly in this photo (below). 



Readings are run in triplicate, three authors in one 50-minute time slot, which improves an authors chances of having listeners. I went to one triple reading (which included most of a story byscottedelman), and some interesting panels: e-publishing, self-publishing (they overlapped a lot but not completely), book covers, and The Walking Dead (mostly the TV show but a little bit about the comics). The room was cold enough to have kept zombies, but fortunately, I had a sweater. I'm not really into zombies but a friend was on the panel, so I went. The panel was almost all male but ranged in age from teenagers to gray-hairs,  The knowledge of the show demonstrated by both the panel members and the audience was an testament to its appeal.  I snapped one last photo of the panel to show I had not merely wandered the halls of Balticon. 

And of course, we hit the Wegman's on the way out of town!