Ahem. Start again.
I spent most of the convention in and around the fan room and its associated programme, which were being run by the Plokta cabal with the help of the
I don't know to what extent the fan room suited the con. It worked exactly as we'd planned; the bar area was a bit more mixed, with more people I didn't know, still quite comfy though, and the lounge area was more comfortable and more prone to having my friends in it, but I think still welcoming to people who didn't know us all. I found it straightforward to find interesting conversations at any time, but I liked that it was also a place in which people could chill with a fanzine or a book, or whack each other with foam lightsabres. We gave away thousands of fanzines, and I must have had dozens of conversations where people looked at the massive stacks (no mouldering piles here; this was Greg's selection of duplicates of the better fanzines, alphabetised and sorted by continent. You aren't ever going to see a fanzine giveaway table like this again) and said 'where do I start' -- I'd pull out six likely fanzines more or less at random, suggest they read those and then write to editors for newer copies where the address is the same. We also raised money for fan funds through the auction, donations, a sales table, and the Great Tat Tombola -- we discovered that only the British understand what a tombola (a form of instant win raffle where you pull tickets from a drum and (normally) tickets ending in 0 or 5 are winners) is. Or what tat is for that matter.
We got a Hugo for Plokta, not bad after only 34 and-a-bit issues and 7 nominations. People tell me I squealed but I thought it was
Here's a pic of my Hugo; other ignominies it suffered included Hugo Ring Toss (thanks to
More later; I really am too shattered to write a con report. It was fun.