ConFusion 2008: The Con Report

Wow what a great con.

Great Idea #1: Volunteering. Had a blast doing some scut work for my friend Jeff, which meant a number of crazy interactions with a certain dude named Brian. I’d met him the year before at Penguicon and had heard 10 words out of the guy. Not nearly so reticent this time around. I suspect caffeine was involved.

Great Idea #2: Leaving the kids with my folks. Last year, both cons had become a major trial as a result of chasing a very inquisitive child all over hither and yon, as the saying goes. So it was very nice to be able to relax and let the whim carry.

Great Idea #3: After being approached by Jeff to be on panels, tossing out Merrie Haskell’s name. Her contribution may well go down in con lore. The best bit was seeing her asked by some Guests of Honor for an encore performance Saturday night in the bar, watching Patrick Nielsen Hayden walk near the table on an unrelated errand, and then seeing his head whip around and shoulders shake at the crucial moment.

At least, that’s how it went in my mind. I couldn’t hear the conversation from our own raucous vantage, but the fate of the Keeper of Gaia is the only thing I can imagine eliciting that kind of reaction.

Overall, the con was a blast. The sports panel with Justine Larbalestier, Scott Westerfeld, Doselle Young, Steve Ainsworth, and Catherine Shaffer was spectacular and fun; I didn’t use a tenth of the material I received as a result of my recent plea for information, but I had a much better background for the discussion than I had when I first got the panel info. One of the surprises was how much cricket was involved, but perhaps not that surprising given that it was the moderator’s personal sports passion.

An unhappy coda to that panel was how disruptive some members of a youth hockey team tried to be; as 8-12-year-olds, I can somewhat understand that they were fascinated/amused by the spectacle of a con going on around them as they hung out with some of the parents in the hotel bar between games, but I would have felt better about the whole thing if those same parents had not been tolerating and/or encouraging their disruptive behavior. I think the hotel eventually stepped in on behalf of the con, but not before they’d disrupted a concert and torn down the flyers posted in the elevators.

Other than that blemish, though…

I ended up not sitting on the Feminism panel, since John Scalzi asked if I would be on the short fiction panel with him at the same time. Seems he wanted the perspective of “little guy looking up the mountain” for the panel. Over all it went well, though with Mike Resnick, editor for Jim Baen’s Universe and Bill Schafer, top dawg at Subterranean Press, plus the aforementioned Scalzi, who famously does not own a printer, there was not a lot of love for traditional print short fiction markets being tossed around. We did our best to be fair, of course, but it seemed to be clear to everyone there that the paradigm is a-shiftin’, and there wasn’t that much that could be said for the old way of doing things.

Didn’t get to talk to some people as much as I would like, but did get to talk to almost everyone there that I had hoped to see. I spent both evenings in the way I usually do, in roving or bar-based conversation with friends (and a sibling or two), and then a wander around the remnants of room parties. Steve Buchheit cemented his reputation as a really awesome dude, and I hope to see him on the con circuit more.

Awesome people there that I did not yet mention: my sister Mary Lou, and my sorta-sister Julie, plus their friend Julie, Tobias Buckell and his wife Emily, Paul Melko and his family, Jim Hines, Jim Frenkel, Yanni Kuznia, Suzanne Church, and a truckload of people I can’t remember. Also got to meet and work with Aaron Thule, who ran registration this year, and showed up Saturday night as the purple Power Ranger.

Next year, I need to take pictures or something.

Crossposted with klech.net