I do love a good convention and FantasyCon is one of my favourites. This year, once again, the event was held in Brighton at The Royal Albion hotel. I was lucky enough to be an attendee and I had a pretty spectacular time. Panels and Launches The event organisers always go out of their way to try and accommodate as wide a variety of discussions, launches and readings as they possibly can and this year was no exception. It’s great, you can attend as much or as little as you like. I sat in on panels covering topics on book blogging, apocalyptic fiction and interviews with guest of honour Mark Gatiss and Brent Weeks. Every session was fun, informative and in one memorable moment embarrassing enough that my face was the same colour as my hair. Books Obviously a big part of FantasyCon every year are the books themselves. I came back with 14 titles that I am looking forward to devouring. Here they are (in no particular order) Tomorrow the Killing by Daniel Polansky The Red Knight by KT Davies Zombie Apocalypse! Fightback edited by Stephen Jones Ecko Rising by Danie Ware Coldbrook by Tim Lebbon Seven Princes by John…

Last weekend Fantasycon 2011 took place at The Royal Albion Hotel in a swelteringly hot Brighton. I was lucky enough to attend with the lovely Mrs Cheesecake. Panels and Signings This year I attended many more readings than I have in the past. By a strange twist of fate, they all took place in the same location. Weirdly, it was a hotel bedroom (yes I thought that was a bit odd too but hey quirky is good. Actually, in hindsight, this may have just been me invading someone else’s stay in the hotel I honestly can’t be sure now). Seriously though, every single reader was exceptional.  Kudos to – Guy Adams, Lou Morgan, Adam Christopher, Tom Pollock, Mike Shevdon, Vincent Holland-Keen, MD Lachlan and James Barclay. All I can say is that there are going to be some great books out next year.   One personal highlight was when Guy Adams proceeded to tell the assembled group at his reading about one poor, deluded reviewer who had read Guy’s novel Restoration (the second book in a series) without reading the first even after expressly being told that this would make understanding the intricate plot tricky. I had to come clean…

When I decided to launch The Eloquent Page I made a conscious decision to try and post only book reviews. Less than three months in and here’s my third non book review related post. Didn’t take me long to jump that shark did it? I’ve lived in Nottingham for the last four and a half years but only discovered FantasyCon in 2009. In fact Mrs Cheesecake and I only discovered FantasyCon 2009 the week before and  so only managed one full day last year. This year we were better prepared, booked some time off work, and managed all three days. On Friday night after the opening of the convention we went to the Heavy Metal karaoke hosted by Abaddon Books. I finally managed to meet some of those lovely people from Twitter who comment on my inane ramblings. A genuine pleasure to meet @ALRutter, @Ghostfinder, @Sandra_nz. @GavinGSmith was very pleasant too and I do hope he didn’t end up in a ditch as I didn’t see him again for the rest of the convention. The only disappointment of the evening was that due to all the booze consumed I misplaced my copy of I,Zombie. Over the course of the weekend…