LibertyCon AAR
What?
For the unfamiliar, LibertyCon is the best literary science fiction convention. LibertyCon isn’t where you go to be in the same general vicinity as big-name authors and actors who hide out in a green room and are kept 50’ from the crowd at all times by security. Nor is it the sort of convention where you get lost in a sea of Stormtroopers and Slave Leias.
Most literary conventions have panels, presentations, and workshops on “how to write.” LibertyCon has those in Spades Tournaments. But it also has panels on the business of writing, worldbuilding, science, space travel, future speculation, gaming, art, crafting, law, military strategy…
There are time slots each year where I want to do everything. If you’ll excuse some hastily edited images, this was just one hour of programming:
Luckily, I didn’t have to decide which of these to attend as my wife and I were supposed to run Kingsburg.
Another quirk of LibertyCon is the high guest : attendee ratio. Officially there are ~250 guests and ~750 attendees. The actual ratio is higher as several writers, artists, and scientists don’t sign up as guests, and many attendees are future guests.
TLDR
(It really is too long.)
LibertyCon is still the best convention, even with numerous facility issues.
Thursday: The Ambling
What unnatural force of inhuman motive, what squamous feathered THING, what horror from the blackness between the stars opened its thirteen mouths to gurgle unspeakable dooms upon Chattanooga?
Was our front yard not covered in beady-eyed buzzards in the days before we left? Were the Beta Taurids not in the midst of an occult rain from the sky? Did the very bowels of the Convention Center not usher forth putrid waters from the deep?
Did I not dream of the sun turning red, of a velvety, lavender mist dripping down from it onto the high winds, of the irresistible urge to dig, dig, dig a tunnel to hide—only to find a cuneiform tablet which shattered into a mouth with cracked teeth and spoke to me dire warnings in forgotten Luwian? Of being a painfully lonely sea stack in a storm, the waves cutting into my feet, the moss gnawing into my stony flesh, the wicked gulls relieving themselves upon my head? Of being on stage in a packed theater, dressed in a bunny costume, my hand resting on a broken keytar, and a terrible expectation on every face?
Yes.
Indeed.
But those are the dreams I have every night.
Also, I’m not superstitious.
And it wasn’t that bad.
The trip started well. Last year we were stuck in traffic multiple times, turning our 7-8 hour trek into a 12-hour gantlet/ordeal/misadventure. This year the drive to Chattanooga was super easy, barely an inconvenience.
The first Raconteur Road Trip experience occurred around noon when our antiquated vehicle’s climate controls were no longer able to control the climate. The compressor struggled mightily against its low refrigerant charge, but it was a war of attrition between the blazing death-rays of the sun and the dwindling Freon.
In a feverish daze, I began to suspect Maxwell’s demon was in the dashboard.
We arrived, checked in, and carried everything to the room without losing any vertebrae or tendons. On the way to Ops to get our badges, it was obvious something was…off. There was a faint, unpleasant smell and many air movers scattered about like stepping stones in a noxious stream. We soon learned there had been a water or drainage pipe break. As the rooms LibertyCon planned to use were now inaccessible (or at least inadvisable) everything was moved from our usual hallway of the Convention Center to the next one over.
After the Gaming Room was set up, I slung my trusty daughter over one shoulder and set off. I sought friends from prior conventions. I sought fellow Alpha Mercs, publishers past and hopefully future, and a few specific people to ask about covers, editing, their latest book, their art, or some obscure science question.
Alas, I didn’t see anyone I knew well, and I didn’t know what the other people I was looking for looked like. However, I did speak with a fellow who led one of those stranger-than-fiction lives. As best as I could make out between the ambient noise and hearing loss, he ran away from home at 12, became a logger, married a girl who died only weeks later, entered seminary, was drafted before finishing, and then became a millionaire.
Friday: The Beginninging
The convention is at the Downtown Marriott and the Chattanooga Convention Center. These are probably fine business-class establishments. The problem is that I am decidedly not a business-class person.
Give me a cot in a tiny room with cracks in the walls, a pillowcase full of rocks for my head, next to an ice machine stuck on a spin cycle…and there’s a good chance I’ll get some sleep. Put me in a quiet, fancy hotel with an overly soft (yet somehow lumpy?) bed, and I’m at a loss. A loss of sleep, specifically.
On the other hand, there are times where I’d appreciate some creature comforts. If you’re in the event space business, allow off-site food and drink, don’t skimp on maintenance, and buy comfy chairs. People will duel to the death to host their convention with you instead of those other places.
We used to stay at a hotel across the street, which was rather run down, and far more comfortable for us therefore. Someone bought it and kicked the City Cafe Diner out, so we didn’t want to stay there again.
I suspect my daughter is a business-class person, possibly a first-class person. She slept fine every night and woke bright-eyed and all that. After a brief struggle session over her clothing and bourgeoisie sympathies, I took her downstairs to give my wife a chance to continue not sleeping.
There was another event at the Convention Center, and my daughter needed some exercise, so we walked/hopped to the far end of the Convention Center out of curiosity…and were ambushed by muscular dudes in banana hammocks all oiled up and posing for photographs.
My curiosity having been more than satisfied, we returned to the hotel lobby where I happened to meet fellow authors Sam Robb, Mike Burke, Matt Skaggs, and one of the Raconteur Press editors Jonna Hayden. This turned out to be quite fortunate as there was a 1632 breakfast starting in a few minutes.
Successfully conning them into an invitation, we went to elevenses. We’d already eaten a bit in the hotel room, but I picked up some yogurt and fruit to all-too-briefly sate the toddler’s endless hunger.
I sat with Sam Robb, Bjorn Hasseler, Bethanne Kim, and Wally Walthers. I overheard a bit of what 1632 is looking for, and I wrote a few things in my ideas-to-feel-bad-about-ignoring file.
After breakfast I returned to the room to not wake up my wife and then headed to the first panel of the convention. Little did I know it would be the only panel of the day…
Panel: What’s New with Raconteur Press
This was a great panel with lots of answered questions and tossed ducks. Raconteur Press has even more anthologies planned next year, and they are branching out into novels and children’s books. You can click on the title above to watch the whole thing.
Kid’s Crafting
My daughter made play-dough, precociously painted a cat mask, and less precociously blew bubbles of paint everywhere.
Engineer’s Bag
We picked up an Engineer’s Bag from Mystic Waboose. My wife got one of these at an earlier LibertyCon and she loves the bag—can’t recommend it enough, carries it everywhere—but it’s seven years old and starting to fall apart, so she needed a new one. I decided to get another for myself.
While in the Dealer’s Room, our daughter got to play with one of Mike Williamson’s kids, who she met at ConFinement. This was good timing as we didn’t end up seeing any of them again.
The Kingsburg Fiasco
We were supposed to run a game of Kingsburg at 6:30. All gaming staff are supposed to run a game, and Kingsburg is an easy-to-learn, fun, quick, high-choice, sort-of-worker-placement game that my wife and both know well, so either of us could run it (or swap seats and glance at the board and immediately know the other’s current strategy), depending on who/what our daughter needed at the time.
This was a good plan, in theory. As our daughter’s insatiable hunger waxed, we decided to go to the ConSuite before running the game. But when we arrived, the ConSuite did not have much food. This was bizarre. Unprecedented. LibertyCon has the best ConSuite in all of fandom.
I suspect there were more people eating in the ConSuite that usual. The closing of the City Cafe (and a couple other nearby places) meant fewer attendees were eating out. Lots of people are struggling financially, so they might not want to eat out as much.
Whatever the case, one of us had to go back to the Gaming Room to run the game while my wife and daughter snacked in the room. At 6:40 or so, there were no players, so I packed the game back up, retrieved the family (who, due to the vicissitudes of toddlers, had not started eating), and returned to the ConSuite. There was an announcement that food would be arriving soon, so we waited.
Then my phone rang. I couldn’t understand anything because of the noise level, but I thought it was Kat, the head of Gaming. I texted her back and discovered that someone had come to play Kingsburg, and that the other schedule said it started at 7:00. Since I was already holding our daughter, my wife went back down to the ConSuite to play Kingsburg. The food arrived just as she was leaving…
My daughter picked this exact moment to fall asleep, and the sleep rapidly spread to my arm. Kat, who is wonderful, came up to the ConSuite, explained what was going on, and made sure we reserved some food for my wife.
Eventually my daughter woke up and ate. A couple hours later, my wife arrived. Everything worked out in the end.
My hours in the ConSuite were not dull. I met another one of those guys with a stranger-than-fiction life who was at the first LibertyCon in 1987. The food, once it arrived, was wonderful (bbq sandwiches and dill potato salad). Someone also made bourbon balls, which were fantastic.
The Curse
Lots of the staff looked a bit ragged Friday, more like how they usually look Sunday.
The LibertyCon staff deserves huge thanks. Not me. I did less than usual this year. The water leak and moving all the panels caused a huge amount of extra work. There was an Air Conditioning failure that cause another room to have all its events moved to new locations. It seemed like there were more problems than usual with the hotel and convention center, but the staff did tons of extra work to fix them or work around them. Somehow the staff managed to keep everything running smoothly.
Saturday: The Longest Day
Panel: You’re Writing a Book, Now What?
This panel seemed relevant to my current situation, and Bill Webb has given me some good advice before. There was some great new info here, even if I heard most of it before. There’s one tip in particular I think applies to me, and I’m going to try implementing it this week. This would have been a fantastic panel for someone a little newer to writing.
Reading: Wayne Kramer
There were several readings for kids, but only one looked like it was for kids my daughter’s age. Wayne read from his Penny Pangolin books, the first of which is The Missing Ant Cake. My daughter definitely enjoyed these books.
Panel: State of the Self-Publishing Market
This one was fantastic. Lots of things I didn’t know. I took five pages of notes. Great panel. I’m glad I managed to make it.
The Masquerade
LibertyCon isn’t a big cosplay convention, but they’ve had a masquerade the last few years, and my daughter loves to go on stage, which means we had to be here.
After the contestants went on stage and the judges left, there were the usual Big Hat, Kilt, and Hawaiian Shirt contests, followed by filk from Gray Rhineheart. My daughter was enjoying the music and clapping enthusiastically, but she was getting increasingly restless and hungry, so we had to leave before the judges returned. We learned later that our daughter won the youth category prize.
Parties, etc.
I had a bad headache all day, but after some coffee, my headache finally started to improve, so we wandered briefly into some of the room parties. In particular, the launch party for Ashes of Entecea. I somehow got confused and thought this was Rob Howell’s new book, so I congratulated him on it, but it turns out that it is Kacey Ezell’s book. I just got the book, so I haven’t read it yet, but based on Kacey’s other work, I expect it is good.
Sunday: We Live to See Another Dawn
Event: Kaffeeklatsch
I sat next to Doug Loss and Michael LaVoice. I knew who Doug Loss was, having been to some TVIW (now the Interstellar Research Group) panels. We had an interesting conversation with each other as our table was understandably not the most visited at the start. I knew Michael LaVoice from somewhere, but couldn’t remember where. I was subscribed to his substack, but didn’t own any of his books. I got Galaxy’s Most Wanted so I’ll have something to talk about if I meet him next year.
We wandered around a bit ourselves and talked to a few people briefly, most notably, Sarah Hoyt, who gave my wife a well-deserved carp.
Panel: Stories in Video Games
This was an entertaining panel with a variety of opinions. In retrospect I wish I’d asked to be on it. It’s probably good I didn’t have anything else on my schedule this year, though.
Gaming Again
We spent most of the rest of the day, either in the ConSuite, where we met an old techie with war stories from the bad old days, or in the Gaming Room where we should have been all along.
Deader-Than-Usual Dog
We didn’t go to the Dead Dog in the ConSuite, but just hung out in the Gaming Room. We were all quite tired, having slept maybe a few hours total, and took an early night to lie awake for another eight hours.
Most Missed Panels
I wanted to attend more panels related to current and potential future publishers, such as What’s New in Car Wars, Chris Kennedy Publishing—The Year Ahead, What’s New from Three Ravens, and What’s New from Cannon Publishing. Alas, it didn’t work out.
Monday: The Long Road Home
We broke the trip home into two parts, stopping in Mount Airy. When I pulled off the interstate, I thought the engine was louder than usual.
Tuesday: Revenge of the Raconteur Road Trip
As we set out for the final and shortest leg of our journey, it was immediately obvious there was something wrong. There was a whining noise that grew in pitch and volume with the car’s speed, not the engine’s RPMs. The tires were relatively new, and it didn’t seem to change if I turned the steering wheel, which ruled out a few possibilities.
I’d never heard a broken wheel bearing, but if I had to imagine what it might sound like, I’d imagine it would sound something like this. We stopped at Mt Airy Tire & Auto, who were too busy to look at our car, but they did us a solid and recommended another shop nearby.
A huge thanks to Parrish Tire and Auto for getting us back on the road.
The End
So we finally arrived home, quite a bit later than intended. And we were finally able to sleep.
And sleep.
And I still haven’t caught up on sleep, which is why I only go around to writing this tonight and it’s probably more rambling and incoherent than I realize.
We met a few other people throughout the convention. For instance, Devon Eriksen, who isn’t a cat, but is a convincing salesman for his book. I spoke with Rita Beeman of Raconteur Press and fellow author Matt Skaggs for awhile in the Crafting Room. We met David and Lydia Sherrer a couple times in the Gaming Room. I won a copy of Cat Magic last year, which is a really fun and funny game. David was demoing a new one called Outflanked, which will have a kickstarter soon. I hung around Rich Weyland’s outdoor table a bit, as he’s always great to listen to, and I strongly recommend his Empire series.
There’s a long list of people I saw but didn’t get a chance to talk to, and an even longest list of people I never even saw this year.
That’s why we have to go back.
I felt bad about not doing much volunteering. My wife spent a fair amount of time in the Gaming Room, but I never worked the table or played a single game. We had a rough time last year for different reasons. I suspect next year will be easier.
Since you made it all the way to the end, here’s a photo of some of the Alpha Mercs Sunday afternoon after the convention: (left to right) Me, Sam Robb, J. Kenton Pierce, Anna and Todd Casasent, Mike Burke, and Richard Cartwright.
