MidSouthCon Report

MidSouthCon is one of the best SF cons at which it's ever been my privilege to guest. They know what they're doing, they run things smoothly and they treat their guests - even the non GOHs - like royalty. Attendance, hubby and I estimate, was 1500-2000. We had 3-4 hotels completely booked up.

I told 'em to use me, and they did. I had 3-5 panels every day, including a couple of different opportunities for book readings, and an hour on "Professional's Row" to hawk my books.

I also ran into an old friend from school, which was wonderful. He came looking especially for me, as he'd heard from my mom to a friend to his mom to him that I was an SF author now.

In addition I met Stanton Friedman, the UFO researcher. He and I turned out to be like-minded. He's not the "true believer" crackpot some would have you think. He's a nuclear physicist by training and experience, and a skeptic as well. Altogether a delightful, intelligent gentleman. We clicked, and he wound up getting a copy of Burnout while I got a copy of one of his books - autographed to each other, of course. :-) By Sunday morning breakfast, he'd already gotten well into it and was singing its praises to the other people at the table. We're going to stay in touch and I might even be able to get a promo blurb out of him.

I networked with a few other cons' peeps, and other writers and small publishers, got some advice and such like. My friend that put Burnout on his display invited me to submit a themed short story for an anthology though, and I think I might do that. Just for fun. It's a comedy SF thing, looks to be.

My panels ranged from science stuff to literary stuff to SF applications in science. Very interesting stuff, all of it. And the con ended with an author's game which was incredibly well attended for a 2-4pm Sunday event, called "It Was A Dark And Stormy Night." The gist of this is that throughout the con, people write down odd quotations they overhear and stick 'em in a box, then each author gets a handful of these pieces of paper with quotes and, beginning with the game title, a character and location called out by the audience, we have to take the quotes one at a time and string together a story, round robin. Allen Gilbreath told me, after that, I was officially a writer that nobody could fluster! (And after wordcrafting a quote like, "She rolled out of bed, jumped on her menstrual cycle, and ran my ass over" into the story, I agree with him...)