Conventional Experience

(Advance warning and disclaimer: this post contains a lot of names. I'm doing this not in a vein of riding the coat tails of people mentioned, but rather because they're all wonderful people, some of whom you might not have heard of, and they all deserve your attention.)

World Horror Convention was spectacularly fun. I apologize that it's taken me as long as it has to get around to the blogging of it.

The whole experience was very educational for me. My familiarity with horror as a genre is kind of unfortunately skewed- I own almost every annual issue of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and my understanding of both genres is somewhat defined by the fact that I didn't really differentiate within those volumes which stories belonged in which categories. They were all just dark, weird, and lovely. It does, however, mean I have a sample of horror that misses a lot of the greats, as well as broad subsections of the genre that would have fallen outside of Ms. Datlow's general taste. I also wasn't paying so much attention at the time to the authors as I was to the story.

So a lot of World Horror Convention for me was discovering new writers, as well as attaching names to stories I hadn't realized were written by people I should have known. Joe R. Lansdale in particular falls into this latter category. I don't understand why this gentleman isn't the official spokesman for Texas. He's a world class martial artist who writes stories about beating people (and sometimes zombies) into blood-oatmeal in one of the most spectacularly fun, pulpy ways I've ever read. I also was able to have some wonderful conversations with authors like Wrath James White, Rio Youers, and Joel Sutherland, as well as publishers and editors like Jeff Burk and Rose O'Keefe of Eraserhead Press, Boyd Harris of Cutting Block Press (who it turns out had met and remembered my father), the whole adorable, sweet gang from Absolute X Press, and most especially, more than anybody else, author, editor, and general awesome fellow John Skipp, who has got to be the sweetest man working in mutilation ever. I also found out my TA from college, Scott A Johnson, has published 11 apparently excellent books since the last time I saw him. I got to meet fabulous animator Abby Goldsmith, cuddly writer Laura J. Hickman, writer and amazing illustrator Carlton Mellick III, writer R. B. Payne, Thomas Sipos of the Hollywood Investigator, and Denise Broussard. I got to watch Peter Straub, F. Paul Wilson, Cameron Pierce, and a very animated Sarah Langan give accounts, in a darkened room in front of a web camera, of their travails in the zombie apocalypse. And I removed a pen from someone's nasopharyngeal cavity with my teeth, which I think speaks well of how fun the parties were in general.

The panels I attended were universally fun, but my favorites were the panel on Violence and how to do it right, and the panel on Frightening Children for fun and profit. There was a lot of talk about e-books and Twilight (in terms both of people wondering if it could be a gateway horror product, and also bewailing the romantic degradation of a previously scary monster. "What's next?" they would ask, "Zombie Romance?" at which point someone would invariably raise their hand and mention the anthology Rigor Amortis, available in the dealer's room). I also managed to catch several wonderful readings, though my favorite, I have to confess, was the zombie golf comedy "Blood on the Green" by Joel Sutherland, forthcoming in Blood Lite III. Actually several of the panels touched on the close relationship between humor and horror, in terms of building tension and release, and how one can either diffuse or enhance the other. Jack Ketchum gave a hell of a speech in acceptance of the Grand Master of Horror award, and Nate Southard's opening remarks were heart wrenching. Joe Hill was full of hilarious anecdotes. I got a free signed copy of Black and Orange by Benjamin Kane Etheridge. I took extensive notes and now have a backlist of aproximately a gajillion books and stories I need to track down and read.

I didn't stay at the hotel (actually one of the main reasons I attended this conference specifically was that it was local to me) so I ended up getting about three and a half hours sleep a night (though part of that was that I also made a 150 mile round trip to attend a 9 AM job interview on the second day of the convention). In order to save money and not have to miss any panels or readings, I also stocked up on powerbars and munched them in between events, which saved me having to pay for hotel food or go off-site. Depending on your perspective and finances, this is either sound advice or utterly sad.

In terms of what this convention meant to me as a writer, most of what I got from it had to do with building my understanding of the genre and the craft, and building my confidence in what I could achieve from writing as a career. I didn't have much in the way of things to pitch or sell, but I had a great time, and I don't want to understate how wonderful it felt to be among a whole mess of people who loved a good scary story.