Armadillocon in the rear-view mirror: 2024 edition
An infamous Fannish Feud that will live in INFAMY!
Armadillocon is a long-running (46 years!) science fiction literary convention held annually in Austin. I attended my first one in 1990. Its is essentially an annual reunion of friends in writing circles and fans who love to read. I look forward to it every year as a chance to recharge the creative batteries and get those motivational juices flowing. Before I get into my weekend experiences in general, I must discuss Fannish Feud. This is a long-running game show-style event at the convention that pits a team of professional writers against a team of fans. A question is posed and each team is prompted to guess the most popular answers as compiled by an online survey. Think a geeky version of the TV gameshow Family Feud (it doesn’t matter if it’s the Richard Dawson or Steve Harvey version. Seriously). Mark Finn served as host in the Richard Harvey/Steve Dawson role. My teammates were (brace yourself) Andrea Stewart, Arthur A. Levine and D.L. Young. I know, right? How’d I luck into such a team of rock stars? Once the game started, they blew the doors off the competition. Once the smoke cleared, the Pros emerged victorious, 666-94. I cannot recall such a one-siced shellacking in this game. And here’s the thing—the Fan team’s answers weren’t bad. In fact, they were usually quite good. But the surveyed answers were often abyssmal. Most categories had a dozen or so potential answers but after the top five or six they tended to become wildy obscure or just flat-out wrong, often hilariously so. The Pro team quickly realized that if we hit the buzzer first and took first crack at the category, we’d nail the first five or six answers easy then rapidly get three wrong and allow the Fans a chance to steal. But that “chance” was fool’s gold, because no matter how brilliant their answer was, it was no match for the sheer stupidity of answers 7-12. You wanna know how bad it was? In the “Name a House from Game of Thrones” category one of the surveyed answers was “Lancaster.” That’s right, no “House Lannister,” but rather “Lancaster.” My heart aches for the hilarious wrongness of it. But not enough not to gloat over the victory. I do not take credit for this win, because I contributed my own level of dubiousness. Under the category “Famous Killers of the 80s” I was stumped once Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger came off the board. I am not a horror guy, certainly not a slasher guy. Stymied, I went with the most literal answer I could: AIDS. Yeah, I went there. Wasn’t on the board, either. Still didn’t stop us from winning. Boo-ya!
With that important business out of the way, everything else is reduced to pretty much a blur. I gave a partial reading of “Bad Tamales,” my contribution to the new anthology, Southern Fried Cthulhu, and it was well-received. The Howard Waldrop memorial panel was funny and bittersweet, as one would expect. Armadillocon just isn’t the same without a Howard reading to bring it to a natural conclusion. My panel with the absurdly long title, “Going from 5 cents a word to 50 dollars an hour: Telling stories for corporations and public agencies,” dove into the mixed bag of work-for-hire. As a recovering journalist, I’ve supported myself for 30-plus years solely through my writing, sometimes more lucratively that others. But I do not own the vast majority of what I’ve created and I’ve never come close to supporting myself and my family through my fiction. I like to think the panelists shared some worthy information with the eager audience. My other panel, “Writing to Length(s),” was ostensibly about how to approach writing different lengths of stories, from flash-fiction to multi-novel epic series (with screenplays and comic scripts thrown in) but veered into a more generalized writing advice discussion that concluded one should always trust the writer’s subconcious when it’s telling you that something in the work-in-progress isn’t working. It was during this back-and-forth that an idea of how to turn a short story I’d written a number of years ago into a full-blown novel came to me, unbidden. That was unexpected and wholly unintended. I’d always considered it a self-contained, one-and-done tale, but now I’m not so sure. The “what comes next” impetus is strong and the solution to the main problem faced in the short story organically manifests itself as a much more complicated difficulty that my protagonists have no easy way to extract themselves from. It’s an intriguing scenario worth exploring further—once I get the darn moribund Venus novel dusted off and finished. But maybe this Armadillocon has given me the much-needed kick in the pants necessary to get it done. We’ll know soon enough.
Until there, here are several galleries worth of photos I took over the weekend. There were lots of new and younger faces this year that were unfamiliar. I’d hope to document a bunch of them but old habits and social awkwardness conspired to have me mostly photograph folks I’m already acquainted with. Maybe next year I’ll do better (feel free to share!).
And again, I didn't find time to talk to you... Getting better at this stuff, but still a work in progress.
Fannish Fued remains the highlight of the Con (which is a high bar...it's a GREAT con) and Mark Finn is maybe the perfect host. I realized your team's strategy midway thru...made sense. Still az d at how much you won by.