Via Mike Glyer I have discovered that the latest issue of Apex Magazine contains two articles about con-running. Lynne Thomas contributes an article titled, “The 21st century SF/F professional at Conventions”, while Steven H Silver take a look, “Behind the Convention Curtain: Programming”. Both pieces are well worth a read.

Will be in Washington DC. So I won’t be there. But congratulations to my friends Guy Gavriel Kay and Les Edwards, who will be amongst the Guests of Honor. Full details here.

During the Q&A session at the Sunday Business Meeting in Chicago, LoneStarCon3 admitted that memberships were below target. They talked a bit about reining in the budget, but not about doing more PR. They were challenged on this, and promised to do better. Well, now we have some action. I have a press release from then announcing a partnership with SF Signal (also Texas-based). This sounds like a very smart move — teaming up with a hugely popular (and now Hugo-winning) SF fan site should bring the con to a lot more people’s attention. I hope it works for them.

As most of you will know, World Fantasy Con will be in Brighton next year. Lots of industry professionals from the USA, Canada, Australia and other countries will be descending on the UK. But World Fantasy is predominantly a professional networking event, and has a strict membership cap, so if you are coming all the way from another continent you might be thinking about how you can make use of the trip to meet fans.

Well, I can help. For 2013 we have moved BristolCon a week later in the year so that it takes place the weekend before World Fantasy. Bristol is a good tourist destination. It has lots of museums and the like itself, and is only 10 minutes by train from Bath. I’ll enthuse more about that in detail nearer the time. There’s also a direct train service from Bristol to Brighton, which passes through Salisbury, the nearest large town to Stonehenge. Kevin and I are planning to make that trip, including the short bus ride out to look at a pile of stones.

Since we made that decision I have discovered that the 2013 Swecon will take place on the weekend we would have normally used for BristolCon. It is taking place in Stockholm and has Jo Walton and Lavie Tidhar as Guests of Honour. So if you are planning a long European trip you might consider that one too. Carolina Gómez Lagerlöf is in charge, so I’m confident it will be a great event. And there will be English-language programming for the benefit of the large numbers of Finns who will attend.

Looking even earlier, Octocon in Dublin is normally held early in October. They don’t seem to have announced dates for 2013 yet, but there’s a good chance it will be the weekend before Swecon. A month is a long time to be touring, but it is worth bearing in mind.

Of course none of these cons will be able to pay trans-Atlantic flight costs for anyone other than their GoHs, who are probably decided by now (I know ours and Swecon’s are), but they do provide an opportunity to meet fans and see parts of Europe you don’t normally get to. If anyone is interested in taking in one of these events I’d be happy to put you in touch.

One of the things you may have seen talked about during recent discussions of Worldcon is SMOFcon, a convention where people who run SF conventions get together to talk about how things might be done better. This does tend to be a fairly hardcore event, and therefore dominated by the usual greying fraternity. It badly needs new blood. But conventions are expensive, so a while back SFSFC started offering scholarships to help people attend. We don’t have the money to do that this year, but CANsmof, the parent organization of the Montréal Worldcon, is offering two scholarships of CA$500.00 to people wanting to attend this year’s SMOFcon in Philadelpia (Nov 30 – Dec 2). Details are here.

What you need to do is send an application explaining why your attendance at the event will be good for your local fan group. Preference will be given to Canadians, but as time is short (the deadline is Oct 7th) there’s a good chance that a non-Canadian might get in. Kevin, being a director of CANsmof, is one of the people adjudicating the applications. The other people on the selection committee are Diane Lacey and Terry Fong.

The latest Outer Alliance podcast is all about Worldcon. The guests on it are Nnedi Okorafor and her daughter, Anyaugo, Jim Hines and Sofia Samatar. As usual it is hosted by Julia Rios. I think it makes some very good points.

Nnedi talks about getting people to read outside of their comfort zone. Hopefully that’s a message that regular readers here don’t need to be told.

The segment with Jim and Sophia starts off by exploding what one might call the Among Others stereotype of fandom. It is very clear from the enthusiasm shown for that book by Hugo voters that very many people did indeed “find their tribe” at SF conventions in exactly the same way that Jo Walton’s heroine, Morwenna, does. However, it is by no means a universal experience. Jim, Sophia and Julia all say that they had to work at becoming part of the con-going community. Most of you probably think that I have been a part of fandom forever, and I did attend my first con in 1984. There were some great things about it, including getting to talk to John Brunner & Julian May, and making friends with a young lad called Neil Gaiman. However, the convention itself felt very insular to me, and I didn’t go to another one for 11 years. Had I not met Kevin at Worldcon in 1995, I might never have gone to another con. And without Kevin’s support I’m sure I would have not been accepted into fandom at all, given how unpopular I made myself with fanzine fans.

Thankfully, I did find an entry way to the community, and I have made very many wonderful friends as a result. The OA discussion has similar stories to tell. And the point to take away from that is that we don’t want people to have to work hard to become accepted, we want them to feel at home from the start.

I was very impressed that Julia pressed her guests to think of ways that conventions could become more welcoming, especially to minority groups. As Jim says on the podcast, it is hard. Bringing in a diverse range of guests is all very well if you are a big con and have the money. Putting on interesting panels is much cheaper, but if you have limited panel space and your challenging discussions are poorly attended because most of your attendees are straight, white dudes then they become hard to justify.

I don’t want to be making excuses here. Everything in life is hard. But if things are hard then making them happen will take time and effort by someone. Simply being outraged on the Internet won’t make much difference. Saying that “they” should fix things is all very well, but if “they” are mostly straight white dudes then they probably don’t want to. Things change when “we” do things to make them change.

Finally I’d like to thank Julia and her guests for presenting a very different view of the recent Worldcon to the one I have got from social media. Worldcon isn’t perfect, far from it, but it is good to know that people of color and QUILTBAG people can go to it and have a great time. Hopefully more of them will do so in the future.

Back when the Readercon harassment incident was in full flow, many people were saying variations on, “that’s it for ReaderCon, I’m never going again.” Rose Fox, whom one might normally expect to be in the forefront of any feminist campaign, stood by the convention. They liked the event, and wanted it to be fixed rather than destroyed. The results were spectacular. I was very pleased by that.

Now Rose has waded into the discussion again on the back of ongoing discussions, sparked in part by René Walling’s appearance at Worldcon. The point that Rose makes, and I think it is a very important one, is that most people are still talking about how creepers should be punished, and whether the punishment René has received has been too lenient, too strict, or just what mother bear likes. Far fewer people are talking about how we can make conventions safer to attend, and that’s really the important issue.

Well, back up there a minute. Some of the people busily yelling at Worldcon appear to despise fandom and would be very happy if conventions simply stopped happening. They have every right to have that opinion, but from my point of view they are irrelevant because I happen to think that conventions are good things that I would like to see continue. Within my worldview, what Rose has to say is very welcome.

I occasionally get abuse at conventions. Not sexual harassment, of course. But people do sometimes come up to me and tell me what a bad person I am because I am “trying to destroy all that they hold dear”, or some variation on that. What they mean is that I want conventions (or fanzines) to change. People are naturally protective of things they love. Ultimately, however, you don’t preserve an institution by encasing it in amber so that it can never change, you preserve an institution by encouraging it to move with the times so that it is always relevant to new people.

Where I am sure that SMOFdom will recoil from the post is where Rose talks about conventions needing to be customer-focused. There is a long tradition of SF conventions not being something where you buy a ticket and get a service in return. Conventions are fannish activity. The people who run them are all volunteers. And when convention attendees complain, the reaction of con-runners is often to say, “well if you don’t like it, you run the next one and see how well you do.”

However, unless a convention is being run for the con-runners themselves, and their close friends, the need to provide a good con-attending experience is very real. Just because an event is community-focused and volunteer-run, that doesn’t mean that it can provide crap service. You wouldn’t expect, say, The Samaritans to provide poor support to callers and, if challenged on that, complain that they were only volunteers. The same goes for conventions.

Now of course there are people who think that Worldcon is staged for the sole benefit of that relatively small group of people who attend every year (most of whom help to stage the event). I have been arguing with those people for well over a decade. As far as I’m concerned, if you want to put on an event the size of Worldcon, and attract large numbers of members from outside traditional con-running fandom, then you have to make the event enjoyable to attend.

So thank you, Rose, for standing up for conventions. I want to see them continue as well. But that means that I want to see conversations about how to make them better, not conversations about how much punishment needs to be handed out.

Update: post edited to reflect Rose’s pronoun preferences.