Unconventionality

Spent the weekend at MarsCon - my first time going, though I've done CONvergence for the past couple of years. Mixed experience, though well-weighted to the positive. MarsCon is much smaller, and that's in many respects a good thing -- while my primary love is reserved for the sprawling and diverse (hence my predilection for cities), it's gratifying to do a convention where, say, the elevators are functional.

Performance went well, in any case (con performances usually do, in my experience, it's a crowd that's there to have a good time and they really *want* you to succeed, to the point that the laughs almost roll in a little *too* easily for my tastes as a comedy writer, so those performances are a great place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there, if you take my admittedly ambivalent meaning) and I attended my usual bevy of panels (I am attempting to crash-course myself to a better understanding of how the publishing industry works, and have rapidly progressed from proud ignorance to profoundly ashamed ignorance).

Among my favorites was an update on the International Space Station, and the research that's taking place there. (Plus, I'm one of those guys who's a total sap for images of the Earth from space.) It made me truly mournful that future progress on that frontier seems to be (for now) stalled -- Newt Gingrich recently proposed a Mars expedition and was practically laughed off the stage, so it's an endeavor that we apparently lack the collective will for.

Okay, so, here's the thing -- cons are typically an experience of rapidly oscillating between bliss and fury for me, and that's totally down to that community. At its worst -- I'm a great believer in the importance of civility, and while the attitudes of con-going geeks are certainly grossly exaggerated in the media, I do find a portion -- greater proportionately there than in the general population -- of the rude, of the obnoxious, of the self-absorbed.

The unscarred, Harvey-Dent side of that coin, however, is a portion -- significantly greater proportionately there than in the general population -- of those who have teared up at the thought of the colonization of space; who have spent their share of hours poring over medieval texts; who believe in the careful and thoughtful dissection of entertainment; who believe, truly and without irony, in the wisdom of the past and the promise of the future.

A few years back, there was a panel about the Fringe at CONvergence, and one of the panelists offered a description of one of my shows: an Arthurian romance set in Appalachia to bluegrass music; at which the audience burst into applause, which is a pretty far cry from the eye-rolling that most of my colleagues greet such projects with. And it was a revelation for me; I certainly don't regret the amount of time I've spent trying to angle my material to a hipster audience -- it's made me an exponentially better writer -- but at a certain point, it's worth considering that one of the things I've been banging my head against may be demographic mismatch. My appropriations of myth and legend probably have a lot more crossover with the audience that's animatedly arguing about Tolkien's Elves than they do with the audience that's shelling out to see their fourth sex comedy this month.

I'm convinced that the convention crowd is a powerful resource -- certainly the Scrimshaw Brothers and Vilification Tennis have found a way to capitalize on it. One of the many things I'm hoping to learn here is *how*.