I am clearly getting old. How else to explain my intent to write this post-con report up on Sunday evening, and here it is Tuesday with the relatively brief recap still in progress? Bah!
Anyway, here's my Cliff's Notes version: I attended
Armadillocon 43 this past weekend. It was a pleasant, yet odd experience. I attended no conventions in 2020 because of the pandemic, obviously. In 2019 I was only able to attend Armadillocon one day, and participated in no programming, so being back in the thick of things was not unlike trying to relearn atrophied muscle memory. Other factors contributed to the slightly out-of-sync vibe of the weekend: Because of COVID (naturally) attendance was depressed. There were fewer attendees this year, and many long-time program participants chose to not attend. For a convention that thrives in no small part on annual reunions of friends and acquaintances who don't see each other for the remainder of the year, this was a significant absence. Fortunately, Armadillocon partially made up for this with an aggressive outreach effort to authors who'd never attended before, so I got to see a bunch of fresh new faces that were as insightful and clever as they were talented.
The con itself had excellent health and safety protocols. Proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID test was necessary for admission, and masking in social situations was required. The downside to this was that very few mass gatherings of authors and fans for round-robin conversations in the bar and lobby area just didn't seem to happen. Conversations were smaller affairs, limited to small handfuls of folks, many of which migrated to hotel rooms and therefore not readily accessible if one didn't get in on the ground floor, so to speak. The result was an unusually subdued convention that appeared to close up shop rather earlier than usual.
I don't frame this as a complaint, but rather an impartial observation. For my part, I was up exceptionally late Thursday before the convention and therefore arrived in a state of sleep deprivation. Insomnia decided to pay me a visit Friday and Saturday nights, so I was punchy by sundown and in no condition for late night con shenanigans. Curse this aging body! Despite that, Armadillocon did exactly what I'd hoped it would do: Infuse me with energy and enthusiasm for my fiction and get those creative juices flowing. Because here's the thing: I've barely written any fiction in the past two years. Apart from a nifty collaboration with
Don Webb and my finally getting around to completing a short story I started writing nine years ago, the cupboard had been bare. Which explains why my Venus novel remains in a perpetual state of incompletion. It's not that I had writer's block, writer's indifference is more like it. Or maybe writer's aversion. I just had no interest or desire to write. Armadillocon remedied that, for the time being at least. I came home brimming with ideas and concepts and Jonesing to dive back into fiction, so yay! There's an unfortunate downside that stemmed from that, but I'll save that for another blog post.
Friday's Writers Workshop proved a great experience. I'd not participated as an instructor for maybe six years, and I missed it. I was partnered with
Britta Jensen who was a soothing, encouraging yin to my demonstrative, prescriptive yang. The submissions in our group were intriguing and broadly competent, which isn't something that can always be said about writers workshop manuscripts. One was damn near publishable already, another was maybe a draft or two away from the same status, and the other two manuscripts had some problems to overcome but excellent worldbuilding and lots of potential. Curiously, all the submissions I critiqued were first novel chapters, no short fiction at all. I moderated the "Building Your Brand" panel for the workshop, which could've been more accurately called the guerilla marketing panel, but I think we muddled through okay and, as usual, smarter people on the panel pulled us over the finish line.
There's a saying I've heard in the past: If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. The idea is that the way to improve oneself is to learn from those who are more intelligent, more skilled, more talented. In that context, I was never in the wrong room the entire weekend. I'll wager I got something of an unexpected tan, so much basking I did in reflected creative genius.
I attended two readings, one by
Mark Finn and the other by the afore-mentioned Don Webb. Both were entertaining, and if you know either of them, exactly the kind of story one would expect to hear from such fonts of creative fiction-making.
My panels went swimmingly: Conventions from a Con-Runner's and Participant's POV with
David Chang,
Rhonda Eudaly,
Brad Foster and
Sarah Felix; Cli-Fi with
Chris Brown,
Sim Kern and
Alexis Glynn Latner; and Writing YA Fiction with
Kathleen Baldwin,
David Anthony Dunham (who I bought a copy of
Pride of Carthage from, but inexplicably forgot to have him sign it) and
S.G. Wilson.
Aside from the panels, I had varying great conversations with
Scott Cupp,
Rick Klaw (who I kinda sorta agreed with on the King Kong vs. Godzilla panel),
Jessica Reisman,
Mikal Trimm,
Jess Nevins, Jeremy Brett,
Lawrence Person and my sworn arch-enemy,
Stina Leicht. Apologies to everyone I left out--the slight is unintentional. I also came home with a carnivorous sundew plant from Texas Triffid Ranch, so that's something. Until next year!
Now Playing: The Surfaris Gone With the Wave
Chicken Ranch Central
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