I have been attending different conventions on and off for a little over a decade now – comic cons, Star Trek conventions, literary conventions like EasterCon, WorldCon, BristolCon, smaller lit cons like TeratoCon, and honestly, I think this is the best con experience I’ve had in all that time.
Made a lot of new friends and connected with con regulars, had great fun watching panels and being on them, and I’m very excited indeed to go back through and listen to panels I wasn’t able to attend through the course of the con.
It wasn’t our first time at the Birmingham Hilton Metropole, as I’ve gone to EasterCons there before, although God knows it’s such an odd and labyrinthine building that having been there previously didn’t help much with navigating the place. It was an oddly warm weekend for one day and then a little chilly on the others, and the hotel had a bizarre breadth of temperatures – you’d be shivering and chilly in one room and then go into another and feel like you were being steamed, although our hotel room wasn’t too bad temperature-wise!
I gave a presentation on Parasocial Relationships and navigating setting boundaries and protecting one’s mental health as a creator – I definitely want to make that talk more concise and present it at other cons, as well as to write up an online version of some of the philosophy and tips in there, especially for things like creating emotional distance between commentary on your work and commentary on yourself, etc.
And then the three panels I was on – one discussing romantasy, one looking back on Labyrinth and to a lesser extent broader 80s dark fantasy, and then a final one discussing folklore and adapting it. It’s hard to pick a favourite, because I honestly loved being on every panel so much and found them each to be very enriching and stimulating in their own ways.
I was talking on the Labyrinth panel about how in many ways Labyrinth resonates to me as a narrative about transmasculinity, how Sarah’s family push her toward gender-appropriate activities whilst insisting it’s a matter of growing up, how she both desires and desires to BE Jareth on some level, and I might write about that in more detail soon.
I especially loved Helen Gould’s presentation on Black hair and the the panel on appropriation of Greek culture and the lack of access afforded Greek and other Balkan authors to publishing spaces, spearheaded by Sophia-Maria Nicolopoulos and Kat Kourbeti, and I’m very excited to go back through the panels and listen to the ones I wasn’t able to make it to!
It was also the most I’ve ever made at a convention money-wise.
Expense wise, the actual tickets were £50 for Lorenzo and I each as low-income attending tickets; £30 for our table in the dealer’s room; about £120 for our trains there and back; about £450 for our hotel room including breakfast. We did a grocery shop of easily transported dry goods that we could keep in the room – pasta pots and cheese and ham and so on, but once we’d made a bit more money through the con we ate at the food trucks and in the hotel.
We made a little under £300 in sales all told – An Uncommon Betrothal was my most popular book, then The Gravedigger’s Tale, Dirk and the Weaver, and Heart of Stone. I am unfortunately not always good at actually plugging my own work in panels or even remembering to say we’re in the dealer’s room, especially given that most of my panels were after the dealer’s room shut on the Sunday and then was the last of the day on the Monday, but I do my best.
Obviously not a profit – I’d have to do crazy sales to make a profit at a con like this – but making back our trainfare and attendance and a bit more is stellar!
I’m just after buying a laminator, so I’m going to do some printed custom cards to label books for sale with prices and tags; as well as getting a big trans flag or something to make us more visible as a QUEER TABLE from farther away – I’m thinking about getting us a big cardboard cutout or something – I also want to maybe do a browsable portfolio folder that people will be able to page through to get a sense of a lot of free short fiction without having to go directly to the website.
I also want to write out a laminated card which says like, we accept groats, we’re happy to trade merch with other vendors, etc, and then I’m thinking if I put on the back a space for us to write with a whiteboard pen that we’re out for lunch or when we’re coming back etc.
Next up, we’re doing the Leeds Kink and Fetish market this weekend, and then the next convention I have is Once Upon A Tyne in September in Newcastle, then FantasyCon in October in Glasgow! FantasyCon is gonna be great because I’m gonna pay to have a bunch of books on the FantasyCon table rather than run one ourselves, and I’ll have more time to run around and attend more panels and chat to people.
I made a Bluesky starter pack here, and some assorted websites and linktrees to check out are:
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