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ten . . . . . Working for the Man Our honeymoon with the TPTB began in earnest after Comic Con. True to their word, our prospective publishers put us in touch with the editor of Supernatural Magazine. Suddenly, instead of writing fanfiction about our favorite show, we were hired to write articles for its “official” magazine. We’d gone from underground, secret, and subversive to sold-at-every-bookstore mainstream. We were legitimate! Our first assignment for Supernatural Magazine was covering a convention. Oddly, the magazine had offered no con coverage at all, so we pitched the idea and they agreed. What better way to bring the convention experience to the fans who weren’t able to attend? And who better to do it? Conventions are a rare opportunity to get up close and personal with the actors as well as a chance finally to meet in person the friends you’ve made online. But conventions are expensive, so the majority of fans never get a chance to go. There’s the ticket itself, and who can resist adding in a few photo ops for the chance to sandwich yourself in between the boys? (The only way, alas, actually to experience how tall Jared is or how firm Jensen’s shoulders are.) Or an autograph ticket that will allow you to stammer a couple of overly rehearsed compliments and be rewarded with the boys’ blinding smiles. Then there’s the cost of getting there—which for some fans means flying halfway around the world. Most people also pay to stay at the convention hotel—otherwise they might miss out on Misha Collins grabbing a Starbucks in the lobby. Finally, there’s the “stuff”: an entire room of stuff, all of it decorated with mouth-watering Winchester boys. If you don’t find what you want in the merchandise room, you might not be able to resist bidding in the auction, where fans have been known to bid 186 chapter ten hundreds or more for an eight-foot Dean-in-a-tux banner. This all adds up to an impressive total. And while the Supernatural fandom is composed of fewer teenage girls depending on babysitting money and more professional women taking home paychecks from law firms and libraries and medical practices, many fans don’t have the disposable income to shell out a grand or more for a weekend with Jared and Jensen. They do, however, eagerly await every tidbit of information. So we knew that fans were desperately curious to know what goes on at the cons, especially behind the scenes. It was a perfect opportunity for us to share. It was also the perfect opportunity to snag interviews with seven or eight guests, without having to raise a finger. Now that we were “official,” the guests would be brought to us. Weren’t we special? We may have been caught up in our own magnificence, but our friends weren’t. This was to be another “girls’ weekend” with Lana and Kate, and we had good reason to fear that our friendship wouldn’t survive the weekend. Lana was responsible for hooking us on Supernatural in the first place, but the gulf between us had continued to widen over the past year. There was jealousy (over the time we were spending together more than the fact that we were meeting actors) and disapproval (over the ways we were doing fandom wrong and the fan fiction we wrote) and plenty of misunderstanding all around, because we all continued to follow the rule of “good girls don’t disagree, and if they do they sure as hell don’t talk about it.” On the airport shuttle, we tried to tell ourselves that it would be okay, that we’d be able to “fix” our frayed relationships now that we were all in the same place. We chatted with the other people headed to our hotel, who all turned out to be convention attendees (we’d gotten pretty good at identifying our own kind, even if Kathy still resisted admitting it) from five different states and three different countries. We arrived on Thursday, the original Supernatural broadcast night. The hotel had been prepped to expect an invasion of enthusiastic fangirls, so every television set in the restaurant was tuned to the CW Network, and the bar was once again serving up purple nurples. Lynn wasted no time in ordering one, which the bartender informed us was made with decade-old blackberry brandy. This...

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