S.G. Browne

You go to ZomBcon…

You fly out on Thursday from SFO and get picked up in Sea-Tac and chauffeured to The Maxwell Hotel, where a ZomBcon concierge checks you in and registers you for the convention and sends you on your way to your hotel room. This is nice. This has never happened to you before. You wonder if they have you confused with someone else. But you don’t say anything. You just smile and enjoy the ride.

The next day you wake up in your hotel room for a leisurely day that includes talking and schmoozing and meeting great people like Roger Ma (The Zombie Combat Manual), Don Roff (Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection), Steve Hockensmith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls), Timothy Long (The Zombie-Wilson Diaries), and Steven Schlozman (The Zombie Autopsies).

You listen to an entertaining and irreverent zombie comics panel with Stephen Lindsay (Jesus Hates Zombies), Steven L. Frank (Zombies vs Cheerleaders), and Mark Rahner (Rotten Comics).  You also listen to a conversation between Chuck Palahniuk and Max Brooks.  You try not to be a fan boy, but you hang around and talk to some other guests until Chuck is done signing so you can talk to him like a normal person.  You find out he’s writing an article for Rolling Stone.  This becomes relevant later.

Saturday you have an intimate coffee chat reading at Barnes & Noble with Jessie Portlock and Roger Ma and a few other lovely people.  Then you meet up with Stacey Graham, a zombie author you met on Twitter and Facebook and who is more delightful in person than is humanly possible.  You also meet Melanie Hooyenga, a zombie newbie, and the same goes for her.  Melanie was also kind enough to interview you before ZomBcon for her blog.

You sit on a panel with Stacey Graham, Jesse Petersen (Married with Zombies), and Scott Kenemore (Zen of Zombie), where you discuss why Zombies Are People, Too – though Jesse is the dissenting opinion since she kills zombies in her books.  We try to convert her without success.  Then we all go out to dinner at Bamboo Garden, a vegetarian Chinese restaurant where all of the meat is TVP (textured vegetable protein) and the dishes have names like Vegetables Treasure in Pearly Pond and Buddha’s Basket with Precious Nuts.

On Sunday (leaving out the two bars you went to on Saturday night), you have one final panel with Stacey Graham and Jesse Petersen, the last panel of the weekend, titled Why We Love Zombies, where you spend an hour bantering with the audience about reanimated corpses.  This panel is also attended by Chuck Palahniuk, who sits in the audience and scribbles down notes for his Rolling Stone article.  You aren’t nervous at all.

Because you have so much fun at the convention, you don’t have time to sit down and blog about it.  Then you drive down to Portland and then back up to Seattle for three signings in four days and have too much fun with friends and signings and fighting off a cold to get this blog post written any sooner than now.

And for the record, fighting off the cold wasn’t really all that much fun.