Convention Reporter

Well, that was a busy day.

It started out with a committee meeting for the San Jose SMOFcon bid over breakfast at 9:00am. After that I had a couple of hours to explore Austin and buy a pile of AA batteries for Kevin (if you really want the gory details as to why, check his LiveJournal). I also spent a lot of money in the hot sauce shop.

Over lunch SFSFC was sponsoring food in the con suite, this being the SMOFcon equivalent of holding a bid party. The one sure fire way to convince SMOFs that you can run a good convention is to feed them well.

John Picacio turned up at lunch time, and I spent an hour or so chatting with him, Traci, Vincent Villafranca and a few others about art show issues, in particular at World Fantasy, before the “what artists want” panel at 3:30. The panel was a bit disjointed but touched on many relevant issues. I’ll try to do a more complete summary of it in a separate post, but the main issue that came out of it for me is that Worldcon needs to attract more Art Directors to the convention. Currently the only specialist Art Director we see regularly is Irene Gallo. Lou Anders comes as well, but he does almost all the jobs at Pyr and is not an art specialist. Art Directors are to artists what editors are to writers, so if the art directors are not there then the artists have little chance of advancing their careers by networking. Hopefully Reno will take this on board.

That panel was followed immediately by the Montreal debrief panel, which unsurprisingly spent a lot of time talking about the difficulties of getting money around the world. The general upshot of it is that opening bank accounts, or even using the bank account of a friendly local fan group, is easy, but sending checks to a foreign country is not, even if those checks are supposedly cut in the currency of the receiving country. If a check isn’t from a local bank in the receiving country you will have trouble.

Kevin and I went out to dinner with Deb Geisler, to a very nice Tex-Mex restaurant called Iron Cactus. That’s two fine meals we have had in Austin. We like this town.

At 8:00pm we had the Fannish Inquisition, and you can replay my live coverage of the event here. We had a total of 21 people online at one point or another. The highlights are as follows:

• Plans for Melbourne and Reno continue apace, and there is general good news about wifi
• Chicago are still unopposed for 2012 and will be holding the entire event inside their Hyatt hotel
• San Antonio is bidding for 2013, using the same facilities as they used in 1997, but which have been significantly upgraded since then
• There will be a UK bid for 2014, but the site is not yet confirmed. It will either be the SECC in Glasgow, or the Excel Center in London
• There are no extant bids for 2015 and 2016 (the rumored San Diego bid appears to have vanished)
• Japan is intending to bid for 2017, and Mr. Shirt announced his intention to look at facilities in New York for that year

And finally, the 2010 SMOFcon will be in San Jose, and I have spent the rest of the evening working on the web site and various social media tasks related to the convention. As it is nearly midnight, I’m now going to bed.