Aaah, oh, aah, ooh. Dressed in my gown of too virulent blue-oo-oo-oo. I play the pitiful damsel

[hazelchaz]

Pictures from Noreascon on Monday are up. Click on Joyce Scrivner and the Fan Gallery shipping cases to see them.

Monday. That last day -- a full day if you stay for the dead dogging and/or teardown -- but there's only so many hours until the whole thing brigadoons away for another 11 months. We couldn't keep it going for weeks at a time even if we wanted to, you can't sustain that kind of energy that long, but while it's going on it shines brightly... So Monday is sort of like watching the candle burn when it's down to its last inch. It's just as bright as when it was taller, but the end is coming and you can see it loom.

Well, library_lynn dragged me off to the Dealer's Room after jamesb came to relieve me of my Children's Services desk shift. We browsed, I shot a bunch of the dealers... but didn't get through more than about half of the room before having to leave for some reason. (And I don't remember the reason, but it probably had to do with making sure our laconiv party stuff made it home safely.) So I have an incomplete survey of the dealers... I ran into Zale, and a bunch of the KC folks, and southerners such as Uncle Timmy, and J.A. Stelnicki from the BArea with the airbrushed silk ties. And I took some shots of the Mended Drum including some of the handbills posted on the walls, and snuck into the art show after they'd taken down the art to shoot the standard East Coast art show fixtures they used. (Got yelled at, too; I'd asked the wrong person for permission. Oops!)

Our Fan Gallery picture of Dave Cantor had gone missing, either to or from Con Jose, and so I caught up with Dave and got a fresh shot or two. Bruce had put him in the exhibit, so I wanted to reinstate him as soon as I caught up with him... glad it worked out. We ended up with a red background, because there was a red wall where I shot him, which actually I think will make for a nice spot of color in the exhibit overall.

We want a better picture of Bill Rotsler for the exhibit. Anyone got one? (Remind me to ask Len Wein if I see him Saturday.)


Closing ceremonies at N4 included a fife and drum corps, and inter_action's madcap replay of the entire convention in 15 minutes featuring the frenzied Sparks doing a lot of the reenacting. (Including the Klingon opera, Klingon poetry, and Klingon filk sessions.) One of the best gags of the replay skit was when they got to the very end - where the 2005 co-chairs told the 2004 chair "And now we'll re-enact the entire convention for you" and Sparks looked like he was ready to drop from exhaustion right there and gave them the most incredulous dirty look. And then they had a pipe band come on! I was hoping that we'd get a face-off between the fife and drum guys and the bagpipes, but of course the bagpipers would have won... Anyhow, a nice ruckus front and back for the Closing Ceremonies to end things up with a joyful noise. Even if you weren't in the audience, you knew something was going on.

We had to tear down the Fan Gallery -- the convention was over, so the exhibits were to come down. Most of the exhibits were being shipped onto Glasgow by way of York; some of them to Seattle because they were going straight to NASFiC; but the Fan Gallery would just be going home. (It's here in my garage this minute.) Andy Hooper turned up with nothing to do, so we put him to work; library_lynn, Ann Marie Jackowski and Robert Levin also pitched in taking down peghooks and the photos. And in the middle of all the teardown, Moshe Feder found me because he wasn't really happy with his F.G. picture, so we took another one in the Fan Lounge.

Can I rant about signs for a little while without hurting anyone's feelings? Pam Fremon and Bill Neville did excellent work with the signs department. But there were structural problems, which resulted in Pam having a big stack of work that never got caught up. It goes like this. There are two convention jobs that both can be named "Signs Department." Job #1 is figuring out what signs the convention needs, and what size, and where they should go. This includes, but is not limited to, soliciting requests from the concom; and prioritizing their importance if necessary. And Job #2 is producing the signs. As near as I can tell, Pam had Job #2, and was too overworked to be good at tackling Job #1, which should have been someone else anyway. And then on top of all that, N4 had a big HP "Bertha" (DesignJet color plotter, which is basically a monster inkjet printer with a wide roll of paper), and the result was (in my opinion) the familiar pattern of someone getting a big hammer and everything starts to look like a big nail.

If we were going to replay N4 all over again, I would have acquired one or two extra computers and two more printers in the office room that functioned as the sign shop. One of them would be a color wide-carriage printer like the HP 2500C printer that can handle 11x17 paper, and the other would have been a garden-variety laser printer with a couple of reams of letter and legal size paper handy. (You'd have to use the sheet feeder to get the 14" paper in, but you could make signs that size if you wanted to.) And the computer(s) would have the convention's fonts and logos loaded on them, with a little sign taped to the monitor telling you which directory the clip art was. This way, it would have been possible for someone to volunteer to help with the workload and get some of the smaller signs done and out the door sooner. And when that person was off-duty, it could function as a self-service machine. (I'd also try to recruit more people to help with Job #1 and Job #2. But that's another story.)

(I remember at L.A.con III, the Internet Lounge had two laserprinters for light printing. Nobody abused the privilege, which is good because I think we only had one ream of paper for each. I noticed that someone had needed a simple sign during the convention (for their party, I think) and so they'd logged onto their account, created a simple web page, printed it out on the printer, and taken it off to get copies run. But that wasn't an official convention sign -- if you had an official need, you could go into the office and get a sign done or do one yourself.)

(Another thing about L.A.con III, which wasn't known throughout the whole concom ahead of time if you didn't come to the right meeting, was that we had a bunch of vinyl banners made up for various purposes. The one that simply said "Green Room" is still in use today. Something to consider for Next Time -- think about leaving off the name of your one-time convention, so that your leftovers can be used again. To this end, the banner for the Internet Lounge in 1998 has been making the rounds from one year's Worldcon to the next -- I saw it in use at Con Jose in 2002, and I hope we get to use it for laconiv.)

Anyhow. The sign shop got behinder and behinder, and the stress took its toll on Pam, and there were two spiffy "Pro Photo Gallery" signs produced for the Pro Gallery exhibit, but we never got an official "Fan Photo Gallery" sign for the Fan Gallery. So at the end of the convention, we snagged one of the Pro Gallery's signs, crossed off "Pro" and wrote in "Fan" and we finally had our official Noreascon 4 sign complete with the Lensman family. (I'd also made some small generic "Fan Gallery" signs using scraps of foamcore from the discard pile in the office, and we stashed those in the shipping cases to use next time.)

And then it was all over but for the shouting. (I think I might have the timestamps wrong on my pictures for the last few days of the convention, by the way; I have a suspicion they might be off by 2 or 3 hours...) I'd asked Christian if he could please get me into the "Old Farts Party" (aka Worldcon Chairs party), not because I wanted to hobnob with the smofs but because I wanted to make sure we got a good group photo for the exhibit. I got up there in time for the group photo, and was dismayed to find out that the only place wide enough wasn't deep enough.

You see, there are about 20 Worldcon chairs that come to these things -- which often don't include Mike Glyer, btw, because while Mike usually goes to Worldcon he doesn't often dead-dog it and make it to the party for the group shot -- so you need to take a picture of three or so rows of people standing 6 or 7 abreast. You need the room for them to stand next to each other, plus you need room for the photographers to stand back and get the picture. Wide-angle lenses help; for the next one, they ought to enlist a regular SLR photographer with a short focal-length lens in his kit to get a shot, because they'll probably be in a tight space again.

I tried to stand on the bed to get a good shot, but could only get 3/4 of them at a time -- I finally had to head towards the door and get a shot of them obliquely, because I wasn't confident that I could splice together two of my "left" and "right" photos together for a composite photo. Maybe someone else got a better shot... It also would be nice to plan for the photo session and bring some extra lights, as long as I'm dreaming about next time. (This is usually the point where someone pipes up "And I want a pony!" to round out my wish list...)

library_lynn went to bed, Maria went to bed, but I stayed up dead-dogging it. The con suite was open, of course; the unicorn head had migrated from the Mended Drum to the con suite. The Brits and the Fan Fund delegates were down there, a lot of the usual suspects were there, F L Ahsh (another photographer) was down there. People were playing games or just sitting at the same table as the chess sets and other games. I ran into Rob Sneddon, for the second time that I know of -- I'd met him 6 years previously when we'd both helped with setup at Bucconeer.

Some of the inter_action folks seemed to be talking about what to do next year and going over what they'd seen this year. It looked like some people were falling into clumps by where they were from; of course, they'd tend to gravitate towards people they know, when they just want to sit and soak up a little more of the convention-ness of it all before they go to bed, so I suppose that makes sense. It was interesting to note some of the people (mostly who didn't work on the convention, I think) still talking animatedly, vs. the others (looking a little shell-shocked) who'd been working and were talking in low voices, or possibly just sitting stupefied by it all, staring into space in a companionable silence.

Keith Lynch and Doug Friauf lobbied to be considered for the Fan Gallery, which always leads in to a discussion of defining what we're trying to do with the exhibit. One of the rules we try to go by is that you can't necessarily get in just by warming a seat for ten years, for example if you've attended every Worldcon since your first one, that's not enough; have you been participating too, or are you just someone in the audience that we see every year? And we like breadth -- we like there to be more than one string to your lute. But on the other hand, sometimes doing the same thing for 30 years counts for something. It's a fuzzy thing. Should we honor Doug Friauf for being the mascot (so to speak) for Minneapolis in '73? And if we're considering that, are there other Minneapolitans who we should honor first? (An especially difficult question considering the early Mpls. skew still evident in the collection.) Should we honor Keith Lynch for longevity (and contrariness) in online fandom -- and if that's what we're considering, are there others on the waiting list we should look at first?

We've got fans blogging up a storm here on LJ -- but what else have they done for fandom that we should make them known outside of their area? (Average attention span for a weblog author isn't that great; should we start by finding the fans who've been blogging longest?) It's even more problematical with pros, and almost as fuzzy for dealers. Since the pros have their own gallery, we raise the bar higher for them. Greg Benford's in, because of VOID, and he still keeps his hand in with the fanwriting; Larry Niven's not in the exhibit, because he only did a little bit of fanwriting, and he mostly just does the panel thing at conventions. Larry has been invited to be a fan goh or equivalent, such as "Listener Guest of Honor" at a filk convention or two, but he doesn't self-identify as a Fan. (Fuzzy's another story, of course, and we've already got her in.) Being on panels because you're an author, or an expert in a particular field who happens to be a fan, does not automatically make you a Fan Gallery candidate.

One thing that works in your favor, btw, although it's not automatic, is your "Fan guest honor a thousand miles from home" score. That demonstrates that somebody else from out of your area thought enough of your fanac to invite you to their convention. It's not a hard-and-fast rule, but it is one more thing we take into consideration.

So it's inevitable that the Fan Gallery question come up sooner or later when I'm at the Worldcon, especially with people who want to be in the exhibit. (That's leaving out the people that get the Fan Gallery and Hazel's Picture Gallery mixed up with each other, at that. If they mix up the Fan and Pro Galleries it's a lot easier to steer them straight.) Should we honor Laura Jean for rescuing Minicon when nobody else wanted to chair it for a couple of years? (And now we're back to considering more fans from Mpls.)

The approach Christian and I have been taking lately, now that we've "unfrozen" the list (we froze "list #1" when we lost Bruce), is to look at a geographic area, and ponder who to add from there. That's how we decided to add Pierre & Sandy Pettinger -- they're master class costumers from a part of the Midwest that was under-represented. The Fan Gallery got its start with a bunch of pictures of BNFs and WKFs from L.A., Mpls., and Boston, with a second early wave of more L.A. fans (Loscon luminaries - the second year of the Fan Gallery was the 25th Loscon and some former Loscon chairs and fgohs were added for that occasion), and that's an imbalance we're trying to address. (We're also trying to honor fans for fanac apart from the traditional fanzine and conrunning biases the exhibit has.)

Speaking of Fan Gallery business, I hadn't figured out exactly what do to with the mounted photo enlargements we had; they represented a certain amount of time, energy, and money, but how to ship them home? Or to the next exhibition? I stood them up against the wall throughout the con suite while I pondered the question. I eventually decided to hand-carry one of them home myself, and I put most of the rest in the hands of Tom Becker to possibly take to Corflu; and if I made it up to Corflu we'd talk about sending them home with me. A 500-mile detour and a 6-month delay isn't too long, is it? And if I didn't get 'em back from him, we'd consider it a gift freely given -- i.e. it'd be up to him to figure out what to do with them next.

In the dead dog party I saw Alice Lawson again, who had been unsuccessful in her plan to track down Marty Gear for a "Sunnydale Visitors Bureau" and I promised to mail her one after I got home. I wrote down her Sheffield address in my little notebook, and came across it just recently -- so by now I hope she received my little envelope... (A lot of fab femmefans seem to hail from Sheffield or Yorkshire. Is it something in the water?)

And then it was time for bed for me, too. I got up early the next morning and visited the Hynes one last time, where a lot of the convention was packed up in boxes and bins waiting to be loaded onto all sorts of trucks. There was a designated area for things going back to the NESFA clubhouse, or Baltimore & Philadelphia, or to Seattle for NASFiC, or Arisia, or the MCFI storage area. And one really lonesome corner for things going via conventional UPS or Fedex shipment -- I dropped off my boxes of laconiv materials and more than doubled the population of that corner. The WSFS banner was still hung up -- I know somebody takes charge of storing that and bringing it back next year, but I haven't the foggiest notion who. One of those secrets of Worldcon I haven't uncovered yet. Maybe someday...

I talked to lots of friendly Brits and Eurofans and LJ fans on Sunday and Monday, but not anyone I haven't mentioned before. I think.

And will I be at Worldcon next year? I'd like to be. I'd originally hoped to sneak out to Noreascon on the cheap, as it were; but by the end of it all, it had mushroomed into a weeklong apartment rental, three airfares for me and my family, and a bit more cash than I'd hoped to spend. So I don't have the cash in the bank to go to inter_action, although I'd be delighted to attend; that, too, entered into my decision to stand for TAFF. If fandom sends me to Worldcon, I'd be able to set up the Fan Gallery (the exhibit's going, regardless of whether I do), I'd add a whole 'nother chunk of fandom to my ongoing collection of photos (which, without my realizing it, has turned into another fanhistory resource), I'd meet an awful lot of fun people, and I could do my bit for fandom by pubbing a trip report.

That last part has become a particular interest for me: every trip report that gets published by a recognized international fan fund earns that fan fund a $500 bonus from SCIFI, Inc., and I want to be one of the people that gets SCIFI to cough up the dough. You'd think that with three or four international fan funds (TAFF, DUFF, GUFF, FFANZ - I'm not including NoFF here yet) that SCIFI would be paying out a thousand or two thousand dollars a year as the trip reports pile up, but it hasn't worked out that way. I think the published trip report tradition has been so weakened over the years that some people aren't really sure what constitutes a Trip Report -- does my write-up here on LJ the past few entries count? (No.) Does three or four articles published as a series in CHUNGA count, as Randy Byers is doing? (Well... not if they haven't sent them into SCIFI, but if they do, would it count? I'm not on the SCIFI board, so I don't have a say in the matter.)

I believe a "Trip Report", as opposed to a simple conrep in a fanzine, is a one-shot fanzine; it might be compiled from installments published serially, but the Trip Report is a stand-alone fanzine with a cover, a table of contents, and some substance to it. It should have some outside contributions besides the delegate(s) such as art or photos. (I'm referring to Len and June Moffatt's trip report, THE MOFFATT HOUSE ABROAD, from their 1973 TAFF trip while I'm thinking of all this.) It should probably track the complete trip from departure to return; it should definitely follow the delegate(s) before/after the convention, as they visit other fans and fan hotspots in the hosting country. jamesb promised a trip report that would include articles contributed by others; I think this is a cool idea, but I'm curious as to how it's working out in practice. I missed the deadline for it, because I learned about it late; if I'd decided to contribute something, what would I write about? How nifty the TAFF guy is? (Seems a bit much.) How the convention went that he happened to be at, from my point of view (which only intersected his two or three times)? (Seems like it's not enough.) So I'm really curious to hear about that.

I've heard that a lot of fan fund winners get tied up with the details of adminstration shortly after their trip, and lose all their momentum because they've got paperwork to do. (Even with the previous year's winner doing most of the work, the recent delegate still has to process the votes and donations that come into his or her side of the sea, and start ramping up the donation/auction circuit...) I suspect that another way that a busy fanzine publisher-delegate can have the trip report slip through the tracks is because they're busy getting their regular fanzine out on schedule, and again there's no time for the trip report (and a loss of momentum). That's why I applaud what Randy Byers is doing; he's part of the CHUNGA team, and is serializing his report there, with the result (I hope) that after he's written it all, it'll just be a matter of reconstituting the individual parts into a fanzine similar to, but different from, another ish of CHUNGA.

I've decided that my approach, should I win, is to continue doing what I've started doing: I'm pubbing A BEAR WENT OVER THE MOUNTAIN with my own con reports, and other personal items, and if they send me away for TAFF then when I get back I'll continue working on putting together a fanzine with the tales of my travels, only this one would be a one-shot with a different name. Then after that gets out and mailed, I'd revert to putting out A BEAR WENT OVER THE MOUNTAIN. I think this plan will work; you can tell it's working so far next February, when I report here how A BEAR WENT OVER THE MOUNTAIN #2 is coming along. Watch this space!

Comments

[flick.livejournal.com]

What's a NoFF?

jamesb has been slower than he'd planned with his report, mainly becuase his DTP person inconveniently went and got married, then had a honeymoon.

But, that said, I might go and poke him about it...

NoFF: Nordic Fan Fund

[hazelchaz]

The Nordic Fan Fund sends people from Sweden to Norway, Norway to Finland, and Finland to Sweden. Or the other way around.

So far the only con reports I've seen out of NoFF have been modest web pages. But if they go so far as to print up a trip report and mail one to SCIFI, Inc., PO Box 8442, Van Nuys CA 91409, then the next SCIFI board meeting will have an interesting discussion raised as to whether that short of an international trip qualifies as an International Fan Fund.

(One of the reasons that SCIFI doesn't pay out for CUFF & NAFF is that the trip reports that come out of cross-country trips within Canada or Australia just don't have a whole lot of substance to them. The SCIFI bounty is not just a subsidy for the fan funds, it's also a way to encourage fanzine publishing. The Rotsler Award is another fanzine-related prize that SCIFI pays out.)

Re: NoFF: Nordic Fan Fund

[flick.livejournal.com]

Ah! thank you for the explanation!

Trip reports

[hazelchaz]

You might also suggest that jamesb post a status report on his LJ; and if he's still soliciting arkles, to give us who met him here more of a clue as to what sort of thing we otter write about...

Re: Trip reports

[flick.livejournal.com]

Shall do so. He never uses his LJ much, but I have been prodding....

[tammylc.livejournal.com]

Lobby, lobby, lobby...

Lobby, loading dock, ballroom

[hazelchaz]

Vote early and often!

Fan Funds

[nwl.livejournal.com]

I've heard that a lot of fan fund winners get tied up with the details of adminstration shortly after their trip, and lose all their momentum because they've got paperwork to do.

Well, that's part of the deal. When you win the fan fund, you become administrator for the next round of picking a delegate as well as raising money to keep the fund going. Some fans keep up with the fund raising as the years go on, but the actual administrator is the last fan who was the delegate.

Re: Fan Funds

[hazelchaz]

Yeah, I know administering the funds is part of the package -- I accept that, and I hope I can arrange things so that if I win, the administration duties don't get in the way of getting my trip report pubbed.

I know it'll sap some of the momentum, because it's a time sink. That's why issue #2 of my fanzine will be an acid test. I'm chairing a convention (animelosangeles) at the end of January, and if I can get another A BEAR WENT OVER THE MOUNTAIN written and in the mail even though I've got convention administration duties taking a big chunk of my time, it'll show that I can handle a bit of extra workload there.

That's the theory anyhow...

[serendipoz.livejournal.com]

Chaz - I thought the photo of me (with fan gallery) that you took was excellent. Thanks for putting it up!

Meanwhile I think re. signs - that an even better way to create them would be to have a 'section' for the various year's logo and then rest of the sign stay the same - put it on foam core or canvas - and then just pass from year to year the details of the size that needs to be made to create the logo for the signs.

later, ...

Joyce