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hrjSomeone on Twitter asked me a few weeks ago just how it was I ended up making Chessiecon (formerly Darkovercon) a regular habit, given that it's a rather small, rather specialized convention on the opposite coast from my home. When I noted that it would take longer than a tweet to explain, it was suggested I might blog about it. And here I am, with a literary-community blog slot open to fill.
At this point, I have to do a little historic triangulation and guesswork to recall just when it was this whole thing started. I first met Judy Gerjuoy (the founder and permanent Con Chair of Darkovercon) at a Fantasy Worlds Festival in Berkeley. I know it was when I was living on 40th St Way [sic] in Oakland, which puts it in the very rough neighborhood of 1985 (+/-). Judy had come out to California for the convention and we ended up hanging out for a while at the con, and then since she was staying in town for a few more days, I invited her to my place for dinner. And the upshot of the whole thing was that she ended up encouraging me to make a return visit to Darkovercon with a promise to put me on programming.
That was rather a seductive offer because I wasn't really "anybody" in fandom -- just a fairly new musician/songwriter who had somehow found myself hanging out with the Greyhavens crowd in Berkeley. So I did. And you know? It was fun to go to a smallish convention where I knew the people who were running it, and I got sucked into working the convention, and I got a chance to do a little concert, and I knew a bunch of the author guests because at that time a whole bunch of the Greyhavens/Greenwalls crowd made Darkovercon a regular part of their convention circuit. Darkovercon had an established musical focus, which meant that the one bit of fan-ac I was doing at that point gave me a solid, objective way to contribute to programming. (Though I also did panels and learned to be a moderator by the sink-or-swim method.)
I'd have to do some research to figure out exactly which year that was, but it was when Darkovercon was still being held in Delaware. I think the last year that it was there. I had a good enough time that I went again, and again, and… well, it became a bit of a habit. In addition to knowing various of the Berkeley crowd, I started picking up more friends among the regular attendees, and in particular among the SCA crowd, of which there was significant overlap. (In time, this also included a special attraction for the SCA heraldic crowd, and there were heraldic friends from across the country that I saw most regularly at Darkovercon.) The con has always had a sort of "family reunion", although for the first several years it felt a bit like attending someone else's family reunion. There was always a group Thanksgiving dinner (at the hotel buffet) for the staff and guests who showed up early, and then I could be sure of being put to work assembling registration materials and whatever else Judy needed done.
There were variable additional attractions for attendance. After the con had moved to the Baltimore area, at a time when my older brother was teaching at Annapolis, I suggested that he come to the con so I could get a chance to see him as well…and the upshot of that was that he got latched onto by the local SCA heraldic establishment (including Judy) and got sucked into the SCA. So for the period when he was living in the area, it was also a chance for some family time.
When I was in grad school in the later '90s and early '00s, I cut back significantly on my attendance, not only because budgeting was tighter, but because I always seemed to come back from traveling to it with a horrible cold, and that meant coming directly back to Berkeley finals week sick. On the other hand, it was also during that period that I had my first professional fiction sales and had the fun of participating as an actual published author. After I got my degree and had a decent job again, I've defaulted to going every year. The one year I missed in the last decade was when my mother died just before the convention and I was with her instead. And then, in the last several years, I've expanded the trip to start with a visit with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
abd07 in NYC and then driving down to go to the con together. And then in 2012, Darkovercon was where I got to announce the sale of my first novel, Daughter of Mystery, which had been confirmed just days before the convention.
The convention has gone through a number of shifts in flavor and focus over the years, most recently when Judy's death was followed by changing the name from Darkovercon to Chessiecon and a more formal recognition of some of those gradual shifts. It's possible that there might come a time when it's shifted enough that I'd reconsider my automatic inclusion of it on my schedule. But for those who might wonder how it is that I've settled into a habit of flying across the country on a major holiday weekend to attend a small local convention…well, perhaps the above helps explain it.
At this point, I have to do a little historic triangulation and guesswork to recall just when it was this whole thing started. I first met Judy Gerjuoy (the founder and permanent Con Chair of Darkovercon) at a Fantasy Worlds Festival in Berkeley. I know it was when I was living on 40th St Way [sic] in Oakland, which puts it in the very rough neighborhood of 1985 (+/-). Judy had come out to California for the convention and we ended up hanging out for a while at the con, and then since she was staying in town for a few more days, I invited her to my place for dinner. And the upshot of the whole thing was that she ended up encouraging me to make a return visit to Darkovercon with a promise to put me on programming.
That was rather a seductive offer because I wasn't really "anybody" in fandom -- just a fairly new musician/songwriter who had somehow found myself hanging out with the Greyhavens crowd in Berkeley. So I did. And you know? It was fun to go to a smallish convention where I knew the people who were running it, and I got sucked into working the convention, and I got a chance to do a little concert, and I knew a bunch of the author guests because at that time a whole bunch of the Greyhavens/Greenwalls crowd made Darkovercon a regular part of their convention circuit. Darkovercon had an established musical focus, which meant that the one bit of fan-ac I was doing at that point gave me a solid, objective way to contribute to programming. (Though I also did panels and learned to be a moderator by the sink-or-swim method.)
I'd have to do some research to figure out exactly which year that was, but it was when Darkovercon was still being held in Delaware. I think the last year that it was there. I had a good enough time that I went again, and again, and… well, it became a bit of a habit. In addition to knowing various of the Berkeley crowd, I started picking up more friends among the regular attendees, and in particular among the SCA crowd, of which there was significant overlap. (In time, this also included a special attraction for the SCA heraldic crowd, and there were heraldic friends from across the country that I saw most regularly at Darkovercon.) The con has always had a sort of "family reunion", although for the first several years it felt a bit like attending someone else's family reunion. There was always a group Thanksgiving dinner (at the hotel buffet) for the staff and guests who showed up early, and then I could be sure of being put to work assembling registration materials and whatever else Judy needed done.
There were variable additional attractions for attendance. After the con had moved to the Baltimore area, at a time when my older brother was teaching at Annapolis, I suggested that he come to the con so I could get a chance to see him as well…and the upshot of that was that he got latched onto by the local SCA heraldic establishment (including Judy) and got sucked into the SCA. So for the period when he was living in the area, it was also a chance for some family time.
When I was in grad school in the later '90s and early '00s, I cut back significantly on my attendance, not only because budgeting was tighter, but because I always seemed to come back from traveling to it with a horrible cold, and that meant coming directly back to Berkeley finals week sick. On the other hand, it was also during that period that I had my first professional fiction sales and had the fun of participating as an actual published author. After I got my degree and had a decent job again, I've defaulted to going every year. The one year I missed in the last decade was when my mother died just before the convention and I was with her instead. And then, in the last several years, I've expanded the trip to start with a visit with
abd07 in NYC and then driving down to go to the con together. And then in 2012, Darkovercon was where I got to announce the sale of my first novel, Daughter of Mystery, which had been confirmed just days before the convention.The convention has gone through a number of shifts in flavor and focus over the years, most recently when Judy's death was followed by changing the name from Darkovercon to Chessiecon and a more formal recognition of some of those gradual shifts. It's possible that there might come a time when it's shifted enough that I'd reconsider my automatic inclusion of it on my schedule. But for those who might wonder how it is that I've settled into a habit of flying across the country on a major holiday weekend to attend a small local convention…well, perhaps the above helps explain it.
