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lprovenI am chronically indecisive. If I'm faced with a choice of things to do, I vacillate until the very last minute.
What do you do when the plans for a weekend fall through? In my case, you panic and fluctuate wildly between alternatives until it's as close to too late as is possible. But in the end, I decided to go to Discworld Con IV – the biannual Terry Pratchett convention.
Now, the thing is, I've been going to conventions for a long time. A scarily long time. About 17y: since 1987, Conspiracy, the Brighton Worldcon, where I spent almost every spare penny I had to sail back from the Isle of Man to England again to go down to stay in a youth hostel for a long weekend. And damned good it was, too.
So this time, I surrendered to temptation to join![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
the_magician, who had generously offered to not only give me a lift but share his room for the weekend with me. (Thereby saving him a tenner a night, but that's neither here nor there.) So off we went.
We came. He registered. I didn't, 'cos they weren't set up to take registrations on the door. We went to the bar, like you do. (Chris may not drink, but he knows how to fake it.)
And we stood around like lemons. Here we were, veteran con-goers, if not SMOFs then distressingly close – I'm averaging out, here – and we're at a con of about 800 people, and between us, we knew about ten, maybe twelve of them. It was quite scary. We hung around the bar together, awkardly, wondering how to start talking to anyone. I'd not felt like this for a decade – Chris, longer.
Eventually, we broke the ice, somehow, but it was weird and awkward. And as is usually the case in such situations, I drank too much. Somehow I spent 'til about 3am in the bar and got a smidgen intoxicated.
Saturday dawned painfully. I rose at 10:30am for breakfast, then though better of it and returned to bed for a few more hours. About 5 of them. Thus missing most of the day's programming. Eventually I staggered down at some point past 2pm, volunteered as a gopher and started talking to people. And somehow, I did – I met loads of them. I got accosted to man the THUD! table – a stand where folk could register for a con-wide tournament of a Discworld-themed boardgame. I had all sorts of paperwork for administering the tourney, except any kind of instructions for the game itself, so I passed the time writing a letter todaemongirl on the back of some unused scoresheets. (I must finish and send it.)
But by Saturday evening, I found myself in the bar happily chatting to loads of new people. Anecdotally, it's easy when you know how – but if it's so long since you've last done it, it can be really quite difficult. But we got over it, and natter happily we did, until about 5am or so.
Discworld fandom is strange. Probably, to be fair, not that strange by the standards of such things, but odd if you're used to what for want of a better word I'll call “mainstream” fandom. I know lots of people from (broadly) literary fandom. My entrance into this odd little sub-world was through ZZ9 and that's how I know most of my friends therein, but Pratchett fandom is something else entirely. I've never seen so many people in costume at a con before – scores of wizards and witches, mostly the expected ones, but also Cohen the Barbarian – a particularly memorable example, and bloody good at it he was, too, if a little more heavily tattooed than I imagine, and damn me if he wasn't complete with Horde too; plus warrior maidens and vampires and several Deaths and Susan Sto-Helits and many more besides.
Once you get past that, though, they're just folk, as ever. Yeah, dressed weirdly, in some cases; yeah, somewhat obsessive, perhaps, but I'm guilty of that, too. Before DWC4, I'd have said that I bowed to no-one in my fondness for TP and his works – I was a fan in 1978, from the first paperback, and have been ever since. But looking at the degree of devotion of so many people here, I am but an egg. I have not memorized my favourite scenes, nor got particular characters with whom I strongly identify; I do not know every book backwards, as I do to some extent with the (considerably smaller) Douglas Adams canon. I know notheenk, in fact.
And yet, even so, I still felt welcome, once I stopped thinking that I was a jaded veteran who knew my way around and accepted my status as a born-again newbie. That done, I was welcome.
And yet, it's odd. Almost everyone I spoke to did every significant Pratchett event – and nothing else. By and large, they're not interested – they have their thing and the rest can go hang. It's not that it's that different – it isn't. It was just another con, really. But it was a Pratchett con, not a Fandom con. These people have their fandom, they neither want nor need to join anyone else's. It's their thing and they love it. Why should they waste their time on non-Discworld stuff when it's Discworld that they love?
It was a little odd, a little disturbing, to see the degree of veneration accorded to Pterry, the father of it all. I only know Mr P very very slightly – I've talked to him a few times, years ago I gophered at a Worldcon in close association with Rhianna, another neo at that time. My impression is that, like Bop Ad*, he's a bit weirded out by all the worship, but unlike Adams, as long as it's not too often, he's happy to play along. He knows what's good for him and I can't fault him for that. But it seems to freak him out a little and he seems... reserved, perhaps standing a little back from it all. A total contrast to Robert Rankin, who could not be more involved in his own fanclub, while Mr P seems to stand at a slight remove.
So. Odd, really. I have no incisive insights, but it was a damned fine weekend, I met loads of interesting people – some LJers, such ashobnobs, koalaesq, bellinghman and bellinghwoman, natural20 and watervole, amongst others – and I really enjoyed myself – to an extent that I haven't done at mainstream cons in some years. Somehow it was all newer and fresher, I suspect because of its lack of familiarity.
The only downside, really, was drinking and buying people £90 worth of beer in three evenings. I'm not sure if my liver or my wallet hurt more.
* Douglas Adams, the late great and lamented – or at least, that's what his signature appeared to say.
What do you do when the plans for a weekend fall through? In my case, you panic and fluctuate wildly between alternatives until it's as close to too late as is possible. But in the end, I decided to go to Discworld Con IV – the biannual Terry Pratchett convention.
Now, the thing is, I've been going to conventions for a long time. A scarily long time. About 17y: since 1987, Conspiracy, the Brighton Worldcon, where I spent almost every spare penny I had to sail back from the Isle of Man to England again to go down to stay in a youth hostel for a long weekend. And damned good it was, too.
So this time, I surrendered to temptation to join
the_magician, who had generously offered to not only give me a lift but share his room for the weekend with me. (Thereby saving him a tenner a night, but that's neither here nor there.) So off we went.We came. He registered. I didn't, 'cos they weren't set up to take registrations on the door. We went to the bar, like you do. (Chris may not drink, but he knows how to fake it.)
And we stood around like lemons. Here we were, veteran con-goers, if not SMOFs then distressingly close – I'm averaging out, here – and we're at a con of about 800 people, and between us, we knew about ten, maybe twelve of them. It was quite scary. We hung around the bar together, awkardly, wondering how to start talking to anyone. I'd not felt like this for a decade – Chris, longer.
Eventually, we broke the ice, somehow, but it was weird and awkward. And as is usually the case in such situations, I drank too much. Somehow I spent 'til about 3am in the bar and got a smidgen intoxicated.
Saturday dawned painfully. I rose at 10:30am for breakfast, then though better of it and returned to bed for a few more hours. About 5 of them. Thus missing most of the day's programming. Eventually I staggered down at some point past 2pm, volunteered as a gopher and started talking to people. And somehow, I did – I met loads of them. I got accosted to man the THUD! table – a stand where folk could register for a con-wide tournament of a Discworld-themed boardgame. I had all sorts of paperwork for administering the tourney, except any kind of instructions for the game itself, so I passed the time writing a letter to
daemongirl on the back of some unused scoresheets. (I must finish and send it.)But by Saturday evening, I found myself in the bar happily chatting to loads of new people. Anecdotally, it's easy when you know how – but if it's so long since you've last done it, it can be really quite difficult. But we got over it, and natter happily we did, until about 5am or so.
Discworld fandom is strange. Probably, to be fair, not that strange by the standards of such things, but odd if you're used to what for want of a better word I'll call “mainstream” fandom. I know lots of people from (broadly) literary fandom. My entrance into this odd little sub-world was through ZZ9 and that's how I know most of my friends therein, but Pratchett fandom is something else entirely. I've never seen so many people in costume at a con before – scores of wizards and witches, mostly the expected ones, but also Cohen the Barbarian – a particularly memorable example, and bloody good at it he was, too, if a little more heavily tattooed than I imagine, and damn me if he wasn't complete with Horde too; plus warrior maidens and vampires and several Deaths and Susan Sto-Helits and many more besides.
Once you get past that, though, they're just folk, as ever. Yeah, dressed weirdly, in some cases; yeah, somewhat obsessive, perhaps, but I'm guilty of that, too. Before DWC4, I'd have said that I bowed to no-one in my fondness for TP and his works – I was a fan in 1978, from the first paperback, and have been ever since. But looking at the degree of devotion of so many people here, I am but an egg. I have not memorized my favourite scenes, nor got particular characters with whom I strongly identify; I do not know every book backwards, as I do to some extent with the (considerably smaller) Douglas Adams canon. I know notheenk, in fact.
And yet, even so, I still felt welcome, once I stopped thinking that I was a jaded veteran who knew my way around and accepted my status as a born-again newbie. That done, I was welcome.
And yet, it's odd. Almost everyone I spoke to did every significant Pratchett event – and nothing else. By and large, they're not interested – they have their thing and the rest can go hang. It's not that it's that different – it isn't. It was just another con, really. But it was a Pratchett con, not a Fandom con. These people have their fandom, they neither want nor need to join anyone else's. It's their thing and they love it. Why should they waste their time on non-Discworld stuff when it's Discworld that they love?
It was a little odd, a little disturbing, to see the degree of veneration accorded to Pterry, the father of it all. I only know Mr P very very slightly – I've talked to him a few times, years ago I gophered at a Worldcon in close association with Rhianna, another neo at that time. My impression is that, like Bop Ad*, he's a bit weirded out by all the worship, but unlike Adams, as long as it's not too often, he's happy to play along. He knows what's good for him and I can't fault him for that. But it seems to freak him out a little and he seems... reserved, perhaps standing a little back from it all. A total contrast to Robert Rankin, who could not be more involved in his own fanclub, while Mr P seems to stand at a slight remove.
So. Odd, really. I have no incisive insights, but it was a damned fine weekend, I met loads of interesting people – some LJers, such as
hobnobs, koalaesq, bellinghman and bellinghwoman, natural20 and watervole, amongst others – and I really enjoyed myself – to an extent that I haven't done at mainstream cons in some years. Somehow it was all newer and fresher, I suspect because of its lack of familiarity.The only downside, really, was drinking and buying people £90 worth of beer in three evenings. I'm not sure if my liver or my wallet hurt more.
* Douglas Adams, the late great and lamented – or at least, that's what his signature appeared to say.
