ConRep: OmegaCon 1

or, GETTING THERE WAS NO FUN - STAYING WASN'T A PICNIC EITHER

OmegaCon happened for the first time at the Birmingham Sheraton in downtown Birmingham Alabama. Yours Truly reported on this inaugural effort!

My flight got off the ground 2 hrs late thanks NWA. Gate C19,
9:30-Onboard computer said something's wrong with the engine. So they replaced the computer. New computer said 'Um, you shouldn't fly. There's something wrong with this engine..."

1/4 mile forced march to gate c46 and a waiting replacement plane.
12:15.AM, sixty souls and a tortured stewardess. They offered free beers for consolation. I had Mountain Dew. Keeping my edge.

Round trip air fare - Birmingham ALA: $365 or royalties from 121 copies of AS1

Quoth Anne's text: take the shuttle to the Sheraton. Okay... No shuttle. Taxi. 65mph in a 35 zone. brief, exhilarating, illegal. $15 later, walked into the Sheraton Birmingham (low of 60'F btw) just as Last call for Alcohol went out.

Kept low profile, didn't introduce myself. Didn't recognize anyone else,
of course to my great disadvantage... I was standing next to Shaun and Nathan for an hour without a clue.
Hunger sets in. SubWay open. Outside. No, no walk-in. We have a
service window. She was scared because I appear to be wearing a SubWay employee uniform under those lighting conditions and thought she was being replaced!

Foot-long Sub sandwich:$7.50 or 2 copies of AS1

Anne presumably asleep, no one here believes in leaving contact list for front desk, so almost got thrown out of the hotel at 3:30am
Quoth hotel floor manager:"give me a name, any name to verify this with."
Gave the Conchair's name. No dice. Gave Anne's name. Anne Who? ALMOST said RICHARD HATCH (oh, yeah, let's just call his room at 3:30 am and ask him if he knows some bloke named freon). LUCKILY-
OmegaCon's man Nathan and local smof Paige Smith wandered past looking to unlock Dealer room for 5am(!) setup (for local TV spot) and I latched onto them long enough to prevent eviction from the lobby.

Me under the Big Lamp at the hotel cyber ward. I shared the lodgings with Doc Taylor and Doc Bradley most of the weekend.

I found out very quickly that the hotel wireless was willing and able, and furthermore a 100MHz P1 laptop works better than the gaggle of GigaHertz eye-candy hardwired to the hotel network. Lyssa and Kevin found out the hard way.

This became my War Room. My Inner Sanctum. My Public Rest Area. No room please - Hotel Rate:$200/night. Urk. I'd have to write a sequel and a novel to afford that.

Waiting for Anne to wake up and tell me who's room she's in.

Very heavy saving throw reflexes not to volunteer - I am a panelist in
waiting. I am a panelist in waiting. Repeat. Deep breath. Coffee. Deep breath. Have already helped a few and it's not 5am yet. Have to watch that.

Having a plan that allows for adventure: priceless.

Jedi Charlie Stephenson and Paige Smith are costume gurus down here.

They're overseeing the live news report for ABC channel 33 - showing off one or two of their best.

Charlie stepped on a pair of scissors last week while prepping for Omegacon, hence the cast and crutches.

Another fella is showing off awesome use of floor mats - as armor on his Predator costume.

A note on culture clash - Sheraton also hosting Friday classes for the
local AMA. Explains the sudden inrush of fen dressed as nurses - uh oh, they ARE nurses. Guess what? They have ribbons from Larsen's on their badges. So they LOOK like fen! I'd rather bring back buttons.

Unfortunately, the ten or so College Basketball teams here, from all over the South do not look like fen. They're amused. And amazingly easy-going.

At least it isn't a barmitzvah.

Most of the Gohs had to find their own ways to the hotel apparently and somebody's offsite right now making a few thousand copies of the program book. hahahaha things do go awry... Hey! First year. Fuggeddaboudit.

Lyssa says Arrrrr... - first pirate I've spotted today. She's from Western MI actually.

There's a cool Duffman!

'Grandma' Ivey poses for photographers.

Anne just steps through the door. Apparently Gary is up to his eyeballs in tentative(!) lit programming and corrections. It's gonna be weird.

A few years ago I ventured out of Michigan for the first time to take in Marcon 39. One of the stunning things about the experience was that everywhere I looked, I saw people I thought I recognized. Not just by face, but by mannerisms, clothing, and what they did AT the con. It was incredibly spooky, y'know, like that episode of RECESS when the schoolyard kids went intramural for a softball(?) game and met their Doppelgangers on the opposing team.

Yes there are Doppelgangers here at OmegaCon. At least two Anne clones so far and one each of myself and Paul Haas. There's a Tim Murphy doppelganger. Anne had two, but since she was shackled to Operations, she never saw them; lucky us, or badaboom.

Andrea Dean Van Scoyoc's (above) husband is William Jones' doppelganger. Was that Joy Rosenberry darting through the hallway on a quest for protein? Nope. This place is spooky.

Ooo, Peter Chewbacca Mayhew is on Fox pushing
Omegacon. He'll be back later after touring the tv stations.

Back under the Lamp, I realize that somebody is playing Star Wars Ep 3 on the hotel channel. Okay, bonus. Never saw it before.

THE HYJINKS ENSUE:

Programming for OmegaCon's literature track was dynamite. I have to get this out of the way first off, because no matter how you cut it, it had and lived up to its potential from the word go. Every panelist I met this weekend seemed perfectly 'in' his/her element in each panel I attended, and generally held their panel in front of a flatteringly sized and receptive crowd.

That said, I should remark on how they cut it.

Friday afternoon Omegacon was still awaiting program BOOKS. As Registration rolled its doors open for the light crowd at noon, the convention was relying on looseleaf program schedules, which we knew right away were going to be superseded by something bound, and much less error prone. As the evening marched on, program books did indeed arrive, but with a glaring omission: THE ENTIRE SCIENCE TRACK. Oopsie.

I'm under the impression that amends were swift and effective. Shaun, the convention god, quickly had a room found and cobbled up a time schedule for the science panels, which were headed up by such as Doc Taylor and David Finkelstein. The track rocked, and it's prime real estate was most enjoyed because the signage (eventually) pointed members directly up the elevators to the Science Room, and all was well for the remainder of the weekend.

My plan was to get audio from panels all weekend to feed Radio Free and possibly SFOHA if they'll take it. So out comes the PDA, armed with a memory card that boast a capacity of some three or four hours of recording time. Oh, how soon the plan crumbles.

Oh - and it was six before they stopped Episode 3, which had been REPEATING on the hotel channel. I think if I'd seen it once more I believe I could recite it. At which point I shall entreat upon someone to take my life.

7:30 pm I caught 90% of the Crackpot Science panel, and the ol' PDA beeped 'out of space' forty-eight minutes in. Cause unknown until later. That panel aired 8pm EST Tuesday March 18 and featured M Keaton and Chris Jackson.

Finding the fault of my audio equipment was easy but befuddling. Did you know that you could actually fragment a CompactFlash card? Me neither.

9pm - A tornado goes through Atlanta a hundred miles or so east of here. It's on all the televisions and half of the patrons know someone living 'round thereaways. Not great news.

1:30am - Anne and I discover the 'evil' Waffle House outside town with MK, Cheryl and Derek. Derek, by the by, drives like he's got a trunk full of moonshine and stolen DVD players. Loved it. Great company, and believe it or not, the food was super despite coming from a franchised oubliette off the side of the road.

3am A second storm front tried to blow the roof off the Chez-Raton after an hour of torrential horizontal rain, and then came a burst of pea sized hail. Roof leaked in a dozen places. During this the hotel was swarmed with dust bunnies and had to be vacuumed.

SATURDAY!

10am: Lunch with Anne at Casey's, the grille on the first floor. Tomato Basil soup deserving of awards. Coffee. Everything sings praise to Starbuck's, around here.

Noon - My main event panel featured "Reading like a Editor" (sic) with Julie Cochrane, Jackie Gamber, Baen Editor Jim Minz, local Michigan editor William Jones, and guerilla panelist MKeaton filling in (sound here got a little twitchy because they were at a long table). I told Jackie later at her author table that she was captivating - she had her hair down and several times her 'Clairol commercial-ready' pose had me cursing the camera's batteries for having given up the ghost.

A lunch break saw me frantically uploading RadioFree soundbytes and checking my email. Spotting Jim Minz and Doc Taylor, I wandered over, sat with them for a couple of drinks and chewed fat about Baen. Returning to the Big Lamp, I found that some kind souls (Juan and Hulda, who I met at random some hours afterward and talked with for a spell) had turned my laptop, PDA, vest and cell phone in to lost and found.

I got a tour of the Chez-Raton Batcave, and claimed my paraphernalia as the kind security man showed me his bank of monitors, the likes of which lies somewhere deep in the bowels of every hospitality megaplex. Not a sight for the average traveler. I daresay, an exclusive.

I took the initiative and spoofed the panel 'Why use Pseudonyms' for twenty minutes, becoming a willing opening act for authors Mike Resnick, Louise Marley and Anne Aguirre (pronounced 'a-GEER-ey' and watch this name!).

10:30pm - Having met them on the dealer floor earlier in the day and photographed them eating lunch en masse, I hosted the interview panel with WANDERING MEN, a crew of writers for a D20 game systems designer who have started a book series together. They happily sat down with me and talked about their unique collaboration. That interview aired 8pm EST Wednesday March 19.

A supple conversation with David Finkelstein and wife made great intermission between panels. Amid this were sporadic requests from Operations to spread the swag books from Pyr around a little, which I did with 'done-that-before' flair.

Into the evening, the Workshop Track, which featured MB Weston and local author Jeremy Lewis, greeted me. Jeremy's family surprised us all with a BUFFET TABLE at the literature room on Saturday night. At a convention with NO CONSUITE, this was a very pleasant little secret which filled my tummy with spinach pies, chicken casserole dip, crackers, and a fruit plate or two. As such, we simply HAD to put the food somewhere because another panel was coming up - oh, dear what can a starving author do...

THAT'S NOT ALL, WHAT ELSE DID I WIN?

At Midnight, rumor that the fourth floor had open alcohol threatened to shut down the convention's own party. A hurried trip upstairs to 'investigate' yielded fen hurriedly emptying liquor into the gullets of those who were interested (and legal) before any more than Hotel security came along. Well, I was just at the right place at the right time, and imbibed a shot of absolutely terrifying (mission accomplished) tequila. With a glass of red wine (oh, take it! It'll go bad!) and a further peck of Crown Royal under my arm, I wandered sated to the Auditorium. What to my wandering eyes...

A Midnight Performance of WAR OF THE WORLDS (both nights) by Lee Shackleford Radio- I caught a stunning Saturday show and met the players later. I heartily recommend a radio-style performance at any con where I get a choice.

SUNDAY

Having to put down that starstruckedness was hard. Radio stars, all of them. I have an ear for that.

Anyway I plunked down for an early morning talk with Baen Editor Jim Minz and Doc Taylor, which was somewhat torn asunder by an argument about the War, but not before I found out Jim also sorely missed the golden age of GOOD CGI television - yeah we gabbed about REBOOT.

Just before tabletop hostilities peaked, I dragged Red Ranger, a fellow whom I like to think I rescued from political maelstrom, off for a three hour unscheduled introduction to "how Microsoft is laughing at us all", a 2am panel which I hosted to an audience of two. Y'all know I'm good at these. Red didn't fall asleep - forthwith he claims an AS1 freebie, signed and with my profuse thanks for entertaining an old fellow pirate. Long live the fighters, Red!

9:00am - Fresh and perky, sat in on "The Business of SF", a standard panel at cons everywhere, and a mingling point for writers, authors and publishing names from all over. Always informative and this time entertaining, we heard from Lou Anders, Lit Guest of Honor David Drake, Claire Eddy, Jim Minz, and Eric Flint.

Now, while I didn't catch the blockbuster panels and events at the Con, it's hard to say that I shortchanged myself in any measure when all weekend I was running into people like Ben Bova, David Weber, Richard Hatch, Billy Tackett and Patrick Burns. Suffice it to say they're doing FINE.

Finally bumped into David Kopaska-Merkel at the dealer's room - David's reputation precedes him: dailycabal.com Also, a version of PIG PONG (@2001) was the funniest short-short story to air on Radio Free Fandom when we launched it in 2001 http://michiganfandom.org:8000/. So sayeth the greenhorn who narrated it. 'Nother copy of AS1 to him with regards!

7pm - Nothing left to see? Hell no. Adventuring bands of fen caught me up and swept the hotel for stragglers.

Anne reveals who went through the muscatel cider...

The Dead Dog Party committee at OmegaCon - Break into the convention suite, get a free Tee shirt! (just kidding)

- my compadres Kelly, Doc Bradley and Anne stood at the helm. I worked competently with what I had and served hors d'oeuvres. They went to 3am, folks! Oldster that I was, I fizzled at about 1:30. (I couch this slightly with the small fact that I hadn't slept since Thursday morning.) Trust me, I didn't awake with a jerk, ;-)

Monday morning saw Anne Off to the fabled Shuttle bus, and bided my time for my flight.

Packing it in Monday afternoon (damn, what a long weekend) found me entering mellow denouement-mode with Gary Babb, the guy this whole thing spiraled from, in my opinion. No finer man. Profuse thanks to Gary for his hand at keeping the best first-con attempt I've witnessed in decades firmly grounded and ready for anything, and for watching it unfold with me all week.

Y'all have fun, and thank you so much.

freon

[final edits pending]

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