My Convention Career: 1988

• Westercon, Phoenix -- A con that started out well with young and noisy neighbors volunteering to switch my room with a room their friends were in on another floor! Great food in the con suite, but programming was so boring that we ended up sitting around throwing balloons from the hotel atrium railing onto cacti in the lobby below. The convention at which Mike Glyer, Rick Foss, Edie Stern and Joe Siclari and I found out that the worldcon coming up in less than two months had absolutely no program planned whatsoever (about which more later).

• NolaCon, New Orleans -- My con report for this disaster is probably the only piece of fan writing for which I've gotten requests outside my apa: Bring Me the Head of Dennis Dolbear, named after the head of Nolacon programming, who hadn't bothered to tell the convention committee, most of them his close friends, that due to personal problems he hadn't come up with a main program for the worldcon at all. With me providing computer support, Rick Foss and Mike Glyer ended up programming most of the worldcon (except for individual tracks previously given to other people) in about six weeks. (The fact that this was the first worldcon at which I was a program participant is completely unrelated, of course!) My main job at the con was working Program Ops and getting Mike Glyer to leave the Program Ops room occasionally for food and sleep.

  The best restaurant guide I've ever seen at a con, a program item featuring the WildCards authors that was the first two-tier seating for program participants I'd ever seen, and a surprise 40th birthday party for George RR Martin were highlights of the con. Lowlights were trying to deal with the programming chaos and the split between me and other SFPAns over the hard line I'd taken about Dolbear's actions.

• SMOFcon, Phoenix -- My first experience at this convention for convention runners. Lots of fun being able to trade inside stories mostly boring to other non-involved people.

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