Convention Reporter

Here are some Eastercon reports from around the blogosphere:

• Danie Ware thinks that fandom has gone digital
• Christian Sauvé reports en Français
• Jim Mowatt has a recording of the Virtual Conventions panel…
• … and a bunch more audio coverage
• Paul McAuley had a great time
• As did Spinks, for whom it was a first convention
• Aliette de Bodard also enjoyed herself
• Al Reynolds was delighted at how busy it was
• Mark Charan Newton met lots of people
• MD Lachlan did martial arts
• Nukapai has a lot of panel reports
• Billy has an extensive write-up of the whisky tasting
• There are some excellent steampunk costume photos here
• WordPunk Radio has more audio coverage

And that only scratches the surface of a very well-blogged and tweeted convention.

Here are a few WonderCon reports that we spotted around the web:

• ericsearleman of Haikasoru
• Some videos at Con-News.com
• Some costume photos at Cinematical

Norwescon Registration did indeed sell out stopped selling new at-the-door memberships on Saturday night.

Saturday was Masquerade Night, and there were plenty of costumes in evidence, both on stage and in the audience. We got some pictures of those we could — the photographer area was full by the time we got there, and we had to be content with snapping pictures of costumers queued up to get into the photo area — but many other people were taking photos as well. There are thousands of photos in the Norwescon Flickr Group including those we added of Saturday Night in the Hallways and of Friday night’s presentation of Match Game SF (the SF/F-themed re-creation of the game show Match Game/Blankety Blank).

Today’s batch of World Fantasy reports includes the following:

John Klima seems to have enjoyed himself despite travel disasters.

Catska Ench is unhappy about the art show (it was, by far, the weakest World Fantasy art show I have ever seen).

Jed Hartman found the convention good but odd.

Pixiu Press has photos here and a report on the American Fantastic Tales launch panel here.

Gail Garriger has reports here, here and here, and has photos of the Best Con Party Food Ever here.

Lucienne Diver has more photos of the Halloween costumes.

Devi Pillai shares what she learned at the convention.

Scott Edelman has a bunch of posts of which we particularly like this one about how Twitter enhanced his enjoyment of the convention.

Brenda Cooper has decided that WFC is her favorite convention.

Matt Kressel has video of himself accepting a Howie on behalf of Ekaterina Sedia.

We have received from the Anticipation masquerade team a list of all entries in the competition, complete with details of who made what, and what awards were won. Click here for the PDF.

We are still collecting coverage to post to our archive pages, but in the meantime here are two fabulous sets of photos:

• Kyle Cassidy’s fan photo shoot from the Saturday
• Charles Mohapel’s official Masquerade photos, Part I and Part II

Well, the live Masquerade coverage wasn’t nearly as good as it should have been. What happened was as follows.

The usual practice for masquerades is for the contestants to go through fan photography after they have come off stage. I was intending to be there and tweet good quality pictures of each entry as soon as they passed through, which would have got you a close-to-live report of the show itself. However, tonight someone involved with the photography took a decision to send all of the contestants through fan photography before they want on stage. By the time I found out about this many of the contestants had already been photographed and in any case I had duties to my den before the show. I did my best to catch pictures of the contestants after that had left the stage anyway, but several of them were in hot, cumbersome costumes that they shed as soon as they were able to do so. Also I had to take the pictures wherever I could catch people, not in front of a nice backdrop.

I would like to emphasize that this problem was nothing to do with the masquerade’s senior management. We had discussed my plans at the team breakfast on Thursday. The show’s Director, Byron Connell, and the Green Room Manager, Sandy Manning, were as surprised as I was at what happened.

I hope that not too many people have been inconvenienced by this.

I was also hoping to shoot some video interviews with costumers explaining how they made their costumes. However, the time I had set aside for that was during the half time show. As it turned out, the half time entertainment as so loud that it would have been impossible to shoot video backstage. That was nobody’s fault, and in many ways it is better for the show to have a nice, compact backstage area rather than one that is well suited for video recording.

I’m briefly back in my hotel room grabbing a bite to eat and getting changed ready for the Masquerade. Some of my colleagues on the team have been working all day on set-up and tech rehearsal. I’m a slacker, I’m only on the evening shift, which means 5-6 hours backstage. But as well as helping out in the green room I will be reporting for you guys via live tweeting.

Last I heard we had 26 entries, so it should be a good show.

Meanwhile reporting of the convention goes on. If you didn’t catch my tweets as the Business Meeting was in progress you can go back and look for them here, and Kevin will doubtless be doing a post about it at some point this evening.

Also of note, the folks from io9 are here reporting on the convention. Here, for example, is Charlie Jane Anders talking about one of the Neil Gaiman events.

Here’s the plan. I will be working backstage at the Masquerade. I will have my iPhone with me. I’ll tweet a little bit before the show, but mainly what will happen is that I’ll be at the fan photography area and as the contestants come off stage I’ll get pictures and tweet them. You’ll be able to see my tweets as they are posted here. Kevin Roche will also be backstage, and his tweets may also appear, but he may be too busy.

If Twitter is down again tonight this won’t work, so keep your fingers crossed.

The show begins at 8:00pm tonight.

Lots of people are currently working very hard on preparations for Worldcon. Few people work harder at this stage than costumers. One of our reporters, Kevin Roche, has been posting work-in-progress reports about his latest costume on his blog. Check out how he is getting on.