Now that I have had a chance to attend a party at CoNZealand, I know a lot more about how they will work. If you are planning to attend, here are some pointers.

The easiest way to find the party is through Grenadine. If you select the Schedule tab and then Thursday you will find us right at the top of the list. The title is “Parties: 30 July, party band #2”. It is at the top of the list because it starts at 7:00am on Thursday in New Zealand, even though it is still Wednesday for most of us.

If you click on that programme item you will find a Zoom link button. Go through the usual process of starting a Zoom event.

That will take you to a main room where the friendly CoNZealand party staff will direct you to the party you want to join. There are three other parties happening at the same time, so you need to get to the right one.

Zoom’s features for this sort of thing are not great, but CoNZealand has come up with a clever trick to help get people into party rooms quickly. Each party is assigned a number. You need to edit your name in Zoom to put that number in front of your name. We are party #1 (obviously). So if your name is “Kevin Standlee”, you would edit that to “1 Kevin Standlee”. Once you have done that, the party staff can press a magic button and you will be teleported into the Wizard’s Tower party room. You can edit your name back to normal once you have arrived.

As a reminder, the rough schedule (in UK times) is as follows:

• 20:15 – Tate Hallaway (Lyda Morehouse) reads and does Q&A
• 21:15 – Juliet McKenna reads and does Q&A, plus we reveal the cover of The Green Man’s Silence
• 22:15 – I read from a forthcoming collection by Croatian author, Aleksandar Žiljak, which we wll be launching at the Eurocon in Rijeka in October

See you all soon.

One more thing. If you still can’t find us, Info Desk in Discord may be able to help, but in an emergency write something anywhere in Discord including @Parties and one of the party still should get pinged and come to help.