Octocon is the Irish National Science Fiction convention, in some ways the Irish equivalent of Eastercon, albeit run by the same committee each year in the same city, Dublin. I’d never been before, but I had been (many, many years ago) to Irish gaming conventions like Dublin’s Gaelcon and Cork’s Warpcon, which I enjoyed hugely, writing them up here and here.
After appearing on a panel at Discworld convention in August (which I wrote up here) I said I was eager to do more, which led to this exchange.
…and then the Octocon Twitter account joined in, and well, I decided to go for it:
When the program creation mix fell out, it turned out that not only was I on two panels, I’d also been given a reading, which I was very grateful for.
And then, after spending a little time wondering what do do for my reading:
…I was off to the con. Eventually,
I met up with Gareth Hanrahan, my roommate for the weekend on Friday night, and then Saturday we hit the Con. I’ll do a separate video showing the location itself, but it was at Croke Park, the national stadium for Gaelic sports, and it was a quite awesome location. Here’s a random tweet from them, showing it off:
The first panel was at 11:30 and went pretty well, although I was a bit nervous.
I’d like to think I made a few points, including a good one about the change in viewpoints that helped make the James Heriot books so successful. (It was a good enough point that when I got home, I dug up the biography that I’d read it in, and tweeted about it):
I then had some time to mooch around the convention. I did a couple of other panels, plus looked at the trade hall where I found that Dublin City Libraries had a stand (basically a mobile library), with some of Gar’s books. Of course, I had to take a picture:
And then I had the reading in the evening. I didn’t get a huge crowd, but neither did any of the other authors whose readings I attended. I think those who were there enjoyed it, which is what counts.
Sunday, Gar and I were on a panel together, about storytelling in RPGs:
Again, it went really well. I was particularly chuffed that an anecdote I told (about someone on a writing group I used to be who was writing a novel of tortured love set in Ceylon in the late 19th century, but who mentioned a distant relative of his who’d gone to Ceylon and hacked a golf course out of the jungle – and I told him that I thought that inside his novel of upper class English angst was a golf novel, struggling to get out) led to the panel using the trope of “the golf course” to describe a red herring that the players love more than the actual plot.
And at the end, I managed to grab a selfie:
That was mainly it, although I did manage to grab an interview with Gar about his forthcoming novel (the first in a new series):
And that was mainly it. But I really enjoyed it, and it hopefully won’t be my last Octocon.
Jonny Nexus 