Editorial: A Conning We Will Go

By the time you read this, a healthy — well, maybe not so healthy — portion of the Crescent Blues staff will be whooping it up at Dragoncon, our favorite summer camp for wayward adults. We do cons the way a lot of women do spas. Even major surgery couldn’t keep our assistant editor Teri Smith away from the siren call of Klingons, Jules Verne and the Scooby Gang. Teri says she needs to protect the unwary from the Theresa Miller and me. But we know better.

The cast of con characters will vary from years past. The return of Dragoncon to the Labor Day weekend after to years as a Fourth of July event forced many of the usual suspects two choose between “the Dragon” and Worldcon 2001 in Philadelphia.

We’ll miss everyone who chose Philadelphia over Atlanta, and they swear they’ll miss us. I plan to make them prove it by sending exhaustive reports.

Thog, the infamous master of Thog’s Master Class in the venerable fanzine Ansible agreed to share his skewed view of the “Millennium Philcon” in return for a similarly warped report of my experiences at Dragoncon for the October issue of Paper Snarl. (You will notice that Teri felt no need to protect the innocent readers of either publication from the fruits of this exchange. So much for Teri’s vaunted altruism.)

Thog’s report and Crescent Blues‘ own Dragoncon features should begin to appear by mid-month. Meanwhile, you can kick back and indulge in your passion for mystery and romance with a twist.

Meet Charlaine Harris and a vampire named “Bill.” Take an air-conditioned trip to one of the hottest hells in Texas with the characters of Katherine Sutcliffe‘s first romantic suspense novel, Darkling I Listen. And learn what Elaine Viets neglected to tell us in her first Crescent Blues interview

Jean Marie Ward

In addition to editing Crescent Blues, Jean Marie Ward writes for a number of Web-based and print magazines, including Science Fiction Weekly. She is the author of Illumina: the Art of Jean Pierre Targete (Paper Tiger) and several short stories, including “Most Dead Bodies in a Confined Space” in Strange Pleasures 2 (Prime Books). Her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with Teri Smith, is scheduled to be released by Samhain Publishing in late 2006..