JordanCon 2021

Wow, the last month has been BUSY!!! So sorry I haven’t posted but I’ve been all over the place. Like, literally. Flew to Georgia and back, then took a road trip from Utah to New York state and back with my family. It was fantastic. Being out of the house was great. Being in the car that much… I hope to never do again! It was just under 5000 miles of driving fun. We saw lots of fun friends and family, some cool things (including Niagara Falls!), and had 5-6 different days of 12 hours driving. But more on that later. Let’s go back to the first part of the paragraph, where I said I flew to Georgia and start from there.

JordanCon is a small convention dedicated to Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. It happens every year in Atlanta, GA. Well, except for last year when we had JordanConLine (which won awards for best online convention during the pandemic). Usually, the Con happens in April but they pushed it to July this year so that everyone could be vaccinated. So July 15 (how has it been a whole month?) I flew out from the brand new SLC airport to see people and have a fantastic weekend (literally, I got to fangirl; they had both Marie Brennan and Brandon Sanderson as guests!).

It was AMAZING to see friends again. It had been way too long! But the first thing when I walked into the hotel was a friend. And then in the line to check in at the hotel were more friends. At the registration desk to pick up my badge? More friends! And it was totally awkward at first: do we hug? Do we NOT hug? Do I even remember these people? Do they remember me? By the end of the first evening though, everything was just fine.

Friday morning I delivered the JordanCon Charity Quilt (which was supposed to be for 2020) to Hopper at the Charity Auction and spent most of the morning at Registration handing out badges and saying hi to everyone. And collecting badge ribbons, of course. That’s a huge thing and a great icebreaker at JCon. (pics to come, promise). The afternoon was spent helping set up the booth with my work friends, attempting (And failing) to get into a couple panels, and visiting in the lobby. CouchCon was huge this year, with smaller numbers allowed in the track rooms. I also handed out a bunch of face fans. Yes, I was insane and bought 3 dozen fans based on Brandon Sanderson’s and Marie Brennan’s faces. It was hilarious and timely (July in Atlanta is STEAMY!!) and totally worth it to see the look on Brandon’s face when I asked him to sign it. For dinner I went with the Ahlstroms and others to a Korean-ish place that was delicious and visited with people in the lobby for several hours before dragging myself off to bed.

Saturday morning I spent mostly at the Charity Auction, encouraging people to bid on my quilt (and the other cool stuff they had there). All proceeds from the auction go to the Mayo Clinic and other charities dear to the hearts of attendees. They get awesome stuff donated, let people bid, and give the money away. Super awesome, right? After that, I got to listen to Marie Brennan’s guest of honor panel and then scurried off to teach my quilting panel. It went fine. Not perfect, not terrible. Most everyone got the hang of it in an hour. And it was fun to share with people how I did the quilting on the gorgeous quilt they’d been walking past for two days now. The evening was a huge dinner for all the people associated with Dragonsteel, from employees to betas to Brandon and Emily. It was amazingly delicious and the food was good too lol. To top it off, Jane had won the amazing WoT cake in the auction and we got to eat it! Penny did a wonderful job with it, inside and out. To end the evening, Brandon did an almost-impromptu semi-secret panel where he read from the new Mistborn book that had us rolling in the aisles it was so funny and then he got into a great Q&A which has already been transcribed and you can find on the Shard if you want.

Sunday was a little slower, as it generally is. I went to 1 panel (on White Sand), helped the final takedown of the booth, finished shopping, did my ‘pre-packing’ for going home, and had one last Dragonsteel employee dinner. It was fantastic. I keep saying that, maybe I need a thesaurus or perhaps it really was that good…. Anyway, I sat at the Brandon and Emily table and chatted/ate for close to 3 hours. It was pretty darn awesome, if I say so myself. Also, Brandon does put salt on everything and it’s kinda gross but who am I to judge. That night I sat up talking until some quite late time (maybe 3am? I’m not quite sure anymore), trying to stretch the time with friends before we had to go back to real life.

Monday morning was all about packing and heading out. 1pm flights come quick when you’ve stayed up way too late. Traveling by train back to the airport (MartaCon) it was nice to be with a group of friends. And then we went to our own waiting areas/security lines/whatever and it was all over.

Loading pictures on here is more difficult than it should be, but I hope you can see a little bit of how fun the weekend really is. It’s my favorite weekend of the entire year, unless maybe Christmas is on a weekend and then it’s a close second lol. With the show coming out between now and next JordanCon, it will be interesting to see how things change (or how they stay the same), but I know I’ll be there; I already have my ticket for next year!

Also, the post after this will be the notes/slideshow I used for my class. Just in case anyone is interested. I was going to get them up later that day, but other things were more important. Sorry if you’ve been waiting for that and it hasn’t shown up yet!

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