Octocon Day 1

Hello and welcome to Octocon weekend!

For those of you that don’t know Octocon is a National Irish Science Fiction Convention. It’s a weekend celebration of favourite stories from books, comics, TV, films and games. This is my first year going and I’m pretty excited, I’ve been to Cons before but never stayed over for a full weekend. It first started back in 1990 and the guest of honour then was Terry Pratchett!

I arrived today, got here early so I could meet up with my Aunty Gwen who is a Con Pro so we could get settled in and do a bit of shopping first.. as you do! We kicked off with registration and got our badges, I was very happy I brought my Sherlock lanyard, then Gwen held a Geocaching event while I went to the opening ceremony.

The opening ceremony was hosted by Octocon Chairperson Janet O’Sullivan and she introduced us to the Guests of Honour Pat Cadigan and Colleen Doran.

I then attended my first panel Myths, Legends and Fairytales: Retelling and Reshaping hosted by Deirdre Thornton with Ruth Frances Long, Gerry McEvoy, Karina Steffens and Deirdre Sullivan on the panel. I really enjoyed the talk and was particularly interested in Karina’s mentions of Russian fairytales, I look forward to her book coming out.

I went straight into the panel From Hammer to Blumhouse hosted by Lucy Siggins with Robert JE Simpson and John Vaughan on the panel. A good one for classic horror fans, I hadn’t seen many of the movies mentioned but it was still interesting to hear how horror differs from the 60s/70s to now and what audiences expect when they go to see a horror.

I was really tired after that so I didn’t go to the last panels and hung out with friends down in the lobby instead having the chats. Tomorrow is going to be full on, panels all day, the traders hall will be open AND the Monster Ball!!! I will try to get my Day 2 post up tomorrow at some stage we shall see how the day pans out.

I hope you enjoyed hearing about Octocon, you can keep up to date with me over on Twitter @saraWIMM.

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