ell, I did it. I survived Further Confusion 09. For those who haven't been keeping up with "the news" around here, I was invited to the convention by the event organizers to speak on a few of their writing panels. I was pleased that after only three officially completed works that people had already recognized me. It was a pretty big achievement if I do say so myself, if this were a 360 game a little chime would have sounded and I would have gotten 50 points for it. Anyways I am now back and this blog update is more or less my little place to retell my misadventures and whatnot.

left on Friday the 23rd from my lair in the South to venture all the way to San Jose, California. I drove to San Antonio, Texas to catch a flight to the Dallas-Forth Worth airport, and on the way there I managed to hit a coyote. It was singlehandedly the most hilariously ironic thing I have ever witnessed. I arrived at the airport in due time, caught my flight, and then caught my second flight into San Jose, California. A shuttle came to take me to the hotel I was staying at (not the DoubleTree, this other one was close though) and I unpacked my crap and was shuttled straight to the convention.

he normality of my weekend ended at the very moment I said "DoubleTree Hotel" to the driver.

"he... The DoubleTree?" he asked with a hint of confusion in his voice. "Isn't there something going on there this weekend or something?"

"t the DoubleTree? Yeah. There's a convention going on there - I'm one of the guest speakers there." I replied. As I said this we passed up a group of furries walking down the sidewalk, all in costume, all having a rainbow of some kind on them.

he driver made an introspective "hmm" noise and didn't say anything else for the whole trip.

riday I didn't have anything planned for the convention, I was just going to show up and have a look around and get acquainted and whatnot. I've never been to one of these before, yeah? I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing; I just knew I had pre-registered for the convention. I ended up waiting in that registration line at least four times, once to pick up my badge, once to pick up a program and stuff (because my name in size 10 Times New Roman in the brochure was pretty awesome), once again to get another one of those for Meuniere, and then finally one more time because apparently they issued me a "blank tag" as it was put by the guy supervising the video game room. I bought most of my stuff on Friday from the Dealer's Room - I ended up, dollar-wise, spending more money on Meuniere (who was unable to attend) than I did on myself. Whoops.

got to meet the guys from Bad Dragon, minus Narse because he was being antisocial that day according to Athus. They're a group of cool guys I suppose you could say - although I did feel grossly left out, likely because I'm supposedly the new Administrator of Herpy (Varka's old website - when and if it ever comes back up) and I'm not actually from Bad Dragon. I kind of got the feeling they wanted nothing to do with me though, because I wasn't that highly regarded online... being a new face and all. It was a pretty bad letdown, really, because them being there was one of the driving reasons that I agreed to fly all the way to California to come talk about writing reptile porn. I can't say I wasn't looking forward to hanging out with them for a while, maybe grabbing a bite to eat or something like that. Needless to say it didn't fan out like that, but I had fun doing other things.

riday night I spent the late-nite portion of my outing in the video game room making friends playing Rock Band. I guess that's one of my unknown talents, I'm not too bad at that game. I played the guitar on Hard for the most part, a few furs convinced me to take the mic for a couple of songs (Epic and Spoonman) but I have a pretty crappy singing voice, so I went back to what I was good at doing. They also had a 360 set up with The Legend of Spyro, and you can bet I played the hell out of that for a while, haha.

aturday was one of the days I had panels, just one but it was the one about creating characters for writings. I shared the panel with Clare Bell, Baphijmm, and Hilary Ayer (Baph I know I probably spelled your name wrong I'm sorry). This was the first time, ever, that I had appeared in person with a name tag emblazoned with "DRACOKON". It was kind of daunting really, this is me, and now these guys know me. I hope my pants are zippered up, that would be really inappropriate if they weren't. The panel went really well and I shared the wisdom of people watching with the crowd while giving examples for developing characters across several short stories. Saturday night I was invited to a vore party; yes you heard that right a vore party. I was intrigued, really. This really quick guy was passing out these flyers/invitations to people, but I think he was doing it only to dragons and reptiles because I decided to show up and there were a lot of them.

efore I get into the party itself let me backpedal just a bit. Vore is not my thing, really. However it is an inside joke Meuniere and I have together so as soon as I got this invitation I called her up and said "you're not going to believe what I was just invited to". I also touched base with Empty Shadow and gave him the same speech. Both of them said I should go just to see what in the hell it was all about, but of course to exercise caution with it being a room party and all. I was already mildly frightened by the physical appearance that I would give to "average furry", so the possibility of being with "average" in an area with a deadbolt on the door was a little discomforting. Regardless I showed up at the time it said on the paper and was greeted by a handful of furries whom I can assume were naturally into vore... among other things.

hey weren't scary people, and I really felt like a prejudice asshole. I mean, I can only expect they thought "great look at this goddamn zoophile that's gross" when I came into town. The party was a really fun get together of people complete with snacks and drinks, age-appropriate ones too. I made friends with a handful of them and got caught up chatting with another fur whose name I unfortunately cannot remember for the life of me. He's the extremely well versed writing expert who usually speaks at Anthrocon. He complimented me on my "budding talent" and my ideas and examples I shared at the panel, and then went on to explain he's not here for vore either his boyfriend dragged him here. Afterwards I had been invited to Varka's Bad Dragon party, which was starting soon. I stopped by the room but things were incredibly packed and security wasn't too happy about it, so I quietly ducked out. I'm fairly certain my presence wouldn't have been noticed regardless.

unday I cut things close, I had a couple of panels to speak at regarding my favorite stories and writings and another on artistic inspiration. Both ended up being critique pools largely driven by the audience, especially the one on artistic inspiration. I shared the favorite writings panel with Hilary again and I of course had to namedrop Raptor Red and also plug the hell out of my favorite pieces by Shimrod and Empty Shadow, and also the short fiction story A Sound of Thunder. The artistic inspiration panel was one I shared with Baphijmm and Hafoc, and afterwards I had to split to get to the airport pronto because that plane was going to take off with or without me on it, and I'd prefer it had me on it.

ou tend to forget a lot of the intricacies of airport security until you actually get there, like the thing about liquids and whatnot. They get mad when you have something more than 3oz in one bottle. It just so happens among all of the artwork, freebies, buttons, and figurines I picked up I had also snagged a small bottle of lube from the Bad Dragon table. 4oz to be exact. They caught it on the X-ray machine thing, and it was then I realized what had set it off. You know that feeling of dread you get when you know something bad is going to happen? That feeling where your gut gets all cold and you're just a trifle dizzy? Yeah, I had that going on - because Bad Dragon isn't conservative with what they do. "CUM LUBE" is emblazoned on that label.

"ust be cool about it Draco." I said to myself.

he attendant took it out and asked me what it was. I didn't hold back, looked him straight in the eye, and explained exactly what it was and what it was for. There was a second or so of incredibly awkward silence and he said "okay, well hold on for one second I just need to check the ingredients". Thankfully Varka put them on the side of the label and after a few moments of the attendant seeing if the fake dragon jizz was an explosive or not (technically it IS, just not in the "oh my god this plane is on fire" sense of explosion, haha) he came back, put it in my bag, and said "don't let it happen again" with a smile. To this day I don't know if he was "one of us" or if he was just being friendly. Regardless it was totally badass knowing that I had an extra ounce of awesome. I arrived home on time (for WORK yay) and from there it's been business as usual.

'd like to thank Further Confusion though, for setting up a wonderful convention. It was my first one so technically I wouldn't even know what to complain about but I'll just say if they were all like this I'd be happy. I hope to see everyone again next year.

Much love,