Breaking my Convention Cherry - Fantasycon 2012

[Ross Warren]

Well I've had a couple of days to get over the buzz of the weekend if not the lurgy bought on by the excessive heat of the Royal Albion hotel and their demon radiators.

I traveled down at a leisurely pace on the Friday and after checking into the smallest hotel room in Brighton I headed to the convention to get my attendee bag of goodies. The first person I saw was Jason which helped get rid of any newbie jitters I had. We grabbed a quick beer to wet the whistle before heading to the dealer room to say our hellos to Chris Teague of Pendragon Press. From there we made our way to our first panel, 'Your First Convention' which was a great ice-breaker in which Guy Adams and Tim Lebbon were particularly entertaining.

Over the next two days I met a great many people I knew from facebook. Particularly nice to finally meet in person Gary McMahon, Mark West and Simon Marshall-Jones.

Rather than go into exhaustive detail I'll just mention my top three events from the weekend.

Mark Gatiss' Guest of Honour Interview was superb with great questions and some wonderful self-deprecating answers from Mr Gatiss in which his passion for the subject shone through.

Spectral Press' launch event for The Nine Deaths of Dr. Valentine in which a manic John L probert held court with a wonderful introduction and proceeded to sign more books than the rest of the attendees combined!

All the readings I attended were superb and I'm going to cheat and say Jonathan Oliver, Simon Bestwick, Alison Littlewood and Joe Abercrombie all made my top three!

All in all I had a great time and it was really lovely put faces to names, in particular Ray Cluley, Stuart Young and Victoria Leslie.

As I made by journey home, with a considerable haul of books in the boot, I was able to reflect on a great first convention and lament the fact that the next Fantasycon won't be till 2014. Mind you it may well take till then to read all those books!

[benedictjjones]

why no fantasycon in 2013??
wish i could've made it, theres a smaller con in felixstowe in november im going to try and get to

[Ross Warren]

World Fantasy is on in Brighton in October and they didn't want to compete.

[benedictjjones]

ah that's okay then i can just go to that instead!

[benedictjjones]

www.horrorintheeast.com/ and still thinking bout trying to get to this

[benedictjjones]

realised im unlikely to manage to reach horror in the east =O(

[Ray]

Did anyone sign up for World Con at Fantasy Con? I filled in the forms to benefit from a reduced rate but paid no money yet - I want to pay now, get it done and secured, but to pay via the site means paying 125 instead of the 100 as stated at FCon.

I put a load of details on the form - am I meant to wait to be contacted?

I can't seem to query at the BFS forum as the appropriate topic threads don't have a reply option for me for some reason.

Apologies if no one knows and I'm just taking up thread space!

[Ross Warren]

Jason signed up, so he probably knows.

[Jason Whittle]

Not much help from me I'm afraid; I signed up so long ago that I can't remember how I did it, how much I paid, or how I found out about the event.

My usual M.O. is to pay just before the deadline for the cheapest possible rate, so that's what I must have done here. I keep getting emails about it from Amanda Foubister, so she might be the person to contact.

[Ray]

Thanks anyway, folks. I'll try to contact them directly and ask.

[benedictjjones]

"I can't seem to query at the BFS forum as the appropriate topic threads don't have a reply option for me for some reason"
ray, think you have to be a signed up forum member to post on the BFS forums

[Ray]

I thought I was - I can write there, and reply to some posts, just not all of them. Oh well.

[benedictjjones]

weird!