We travelled up with the awesome Priya Sharma - it's the fourth convention that we've all attended together and it makes it more fun and a heck of a lot easier for little old shy me. As always, Priya won over everyone she met. It's a skill (it probably helps that she's naturally lovely). We arrived just in time to catch the first panel about horrors, thrillers and chillers, which had (if memory serves me right) Sarah Pinborough, Victoria Leslie, Johnny Mains and Marie O'Regan. I threw away the programme and my memory is atrocious. Then we attended the Boo Books and Exaggerated Press launch. Wine at eleven o'clock in the morning. That's new.
We then escaped to the bar and sat with Jess Jordan and Ray Cluley, Lynda Rucker and Sean Hogan, Gary Couzens, we met the fabulous madness that is Johnny Mains, cue selfie....
....and briefly got rained on - by actual rain and not by Johnny. Then we caught the tail-end of Gary McMahon's launch and saw Alexandra Benedict there. In the afternoon I spent three hours back to back attending panels and then had to escape as my brain was fried. A shame as I just missed out on the crime panel. Not that I write crime but my little Bestwick does. Then it was hang around the bar again chatting to wonderful folk such as Sophie Essex, Phil Sloman, James Everington, a lovely new writer whose name I've forgotten and who looked so young I was reminded I am soooooooo old, Nina Allan and so many more folk but my pea-brain has forgotten.
We had a meal in Ask Italian, which is across from the Quad, and then I spent the next forty-eight hours moaning to the Bestwick about how we should have gone to Nando's because I'm not a fan of pasta or pizza and only had garlic bread for tea and was fekking starving. A starving Cate is a dangerous beast to be around.
We ended the day at the Quad by watching Alexandra Benedict interview Johnny Mains, and then we picked up the Dead Funny books, which must not go to seed on my TBR pile. A final catch up with Victoria Leslie, Tracy Fahey, James Everington and Nina Allan and then it was back home to the Wirral via roadworks and Crewe.
I shall end this post with pretty people...
Next up, FantasyCon in Scarborough. Candy Floss!!!
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