World Fantasy Con 2005

posted by Todd T @ 8:13 AM

I don't know how I shall summarize in just a few paragraphs, but I thought you might want to hear about it a bit.

Usually I miss WFC, with regret, but this year it was in Madison, WI, so I was able to combine it with visiting relatives and friends thereabouts, and rationalize away the expense a bit more reasonably. It was a wonderful time.

GOH was Graham Joyce, who turns out to be very funny, very warm and very sage about what makes books and readers tick. He's a great interview. His tales of his discussions about books and his future with his miner father were right out of Playwriting 101 but he made them very funny. The story of the TOOTH FAIRY movie was again so typical as to be cliche but was riotous when told by Joyce. (After insisting on being able to write the screenplay himself, he found himself conceding right and left - cut the pike and the toe, cut the whole pond, and the scouts, and half the characters - then finally he got a call in middle of the night from a Hollywood idiot who announced in a palsy way "hey, we've figured out what to do, we're going to cut out the tooth fairy.") On the other hand, his comments on the events and symbols in FAIRY were quite interesting. Other tales: because he thought it was how writers write, he quit his job and moved to a remote end of Crete to write his first book. His only neighbors, shepherds, called him Karlos, because Prince Charles was the only Englishman they'd ever heard of before. The story of the phone call from his agent in London to the one phone in the village near his shack is quite amusing if told by the man himself - without the accents and language issues it wouldn't convey. I'm told he has a web site where some of this background appears, and I'll have to check into it.

I had a 21st century experience in that I met a bunch of old friends for the first time. About 8 or 10 of the on-line ghost fiction community were there. I'd met none of them before. It was like meeting a bunch of pen pals. They all turned out to be just as great company as I had expected. Two of them, Barbara and Christopher Roden, who created and run Ash-Tree Press, won the WF Award for Best Anthology (also the International Horror Guild award), and it was fun to help them celebrate.

I don't have the juicy details that one usually must have to blog about a con, but I thought a quick note might be OK. I was certainly reminded of how far apart this particular one is from the run of the mill convention. It's all about books, and perhaps bit of art, and every single person there loves them as much as you do. Perhaps half of them are active in providing us with the elixir we crave. Very hard to return to the daily routine after a week of that.