Offbeat Empire at Geek Girl Con

Holy crap, you guys. This weekend was INTENSE! You know how there's that whole concept of good stress and bad stress, but ultimately it's all stress? This weekend was the most POSITIVELY stressful few days I've had in YEARS. Amazing.

I'm going to start with perhaps the easiest thing to talk about, which is the Offbeat Empire's time at Geek Girl Con, including our panel on Sunday, "Rocking the Geek Niche."

This was Geek Girl Con's first year, and although it was a smaller event (1200 attendees over two days, I think?), it was filled with the exactly the kind of nerdy awesomeness you would expect — plenty of Stormtroopers (GO EMPIRE!) and Aayla Securas and at least one Slave Leia.

We also spotted some Friends of the Empire in attendance, including Laura from Rebel Belle Weddings and Jen from Pink Light Images, who came all the way from LA and Texas, respectively.

As for our panel, it was perhaps exactly what you'd expect: riddled with profanity, business strategy, blog monetization, analytics, talk of open source, warm fuzzy empowerment, and a bunny hat that served as a very powerful metaphor. We all wore coordinated harnesses from Clockwork Couture and some of us wore our Offbeat Empire shirts. (I have extras! I might be selling them. Stay tuned.)

Meg from A Practical Wedding kept us all reigned in perfectly, ensuring that those of us with big mouths (*cough* me, Megan *cough*) didn't blabber over those of us who are quieter but have infinitely more interesting things to say (J.M. Dodd). Here was some of the feedback:

And of course, in the nature of panels, the very last question was the one that could have spawned a-WHOLE-nother panel: "How do you deal with editorial controversies?" Maybe we'll get to that next year.

You can see more photos of the panel here, and supposedly Jen from Pink Light Images will have a video online in a few days!

After the panel, I ran over to the U. Bookstore booth in the vendor area to sell/sign books. Apparently, most of the copies of Offbeat Bride that they had in stock had already sold (!!!), so it was kind of a funny scene:

For the rest of the weekend, there was mostly just a lot of dorking out, which took various forms:

So. That's how it went at Geek Girl Con. It was good! It was fun! Our panel was hopefully inspirational/entertaining/informative! But really, it was just one small portion of the weekend. Next week, I'm going to tell you about how I can't believe it took me this long to gather my remote staff face-to-face. Coming in a couple days, I'mma tell you allllll about the Offbeat Empire reception we had Friday night. Here's a one teaser shot, from the lens of Jonas Seaman:

Oh wait, wait. One more, featuring Becca and Coco, plus Kelli from Shindig Events, the planner who wrangled the Empire reception into the Baby Unicorn Birthday Party that it always wanted to be:

More coming Wednesday, after I sleep for about 30 hours.