NASFIC 2024 AAR
Where the Buffalo roam... supposedly
For a very brief moment on my drive to Buffalo for the North American Science Fiction Convention I thought these were real buffalo in the median of the interstate. Not only are they not real, a quick Google search (incontrovertible proof) reveals there are no buffalo living in New York State, which seems to me to be false advertising of the highest order. They should change the name of the town immediately.
ANYWAY… this was a new con for me, and is actually the first con I’ve been to outside LibertyCon. I went with my friend
and got to spend a lot of time with him talking about writing and life over a few beers.NASFIC is held whenever WorldCon is outside of North America and since Buffalo isn’t too far of a drive I decided to tag along with Sam. He had a pretty busy weekend, which you can read about in his after action report here. I didn’t register for the con until pretty late, so I wasn’t able to get on any panels. Even not being on panels, I got to listen to some very interesting discussions.
Sam was on a panel on “The Care and Feeding of Critique Groups” that was interesting. I actually got to talk briefly as I described how our AlphaMercs group works in Discord. I liked hearing about how other groups handle critiquing and why they do it different ways.
I sat in on a panel about Alternate History which started out great. There was a good discussion about what AltHistory was and why people like it, along with four authors discussing different aspects of the genre for the first half hour. After that the audience got to chime in and things got pretty odd as everyone asked why no one has written AltHistory about their extremely specific slice of interesting history.
After that was a panel on AI, and then Sam and I went to a Kaffeeklatche hosted by Alex Shvartsman, a well-known author and editor. There were only two other people there besides Sam and I, so we got to ask a lot of detailed questions, mostly about his history and experience running Kickstarter campaigns. That was a really interesting discussion as I’ve only ever been on the buying end of a Kickstarter. I really appreciate Alex spending the time to share his experiences.
After that I had a cool panel on ghost stories, a hilarious improv storytelling panel with JF Holmes of Cannon Publishing, and wrapped up Sunday with a panel on marketing for self-published authors.
Overall I’d say the con was a mixed bag for me. A couple of the panels were interesting, and I got to meet JF Holmes, Ben Yalow, and a number of other cool folks. But on the other hand most of the panels weren’t that appealing. There were a large number of panelists that were participating remotely, and in a couple of occasions there were technical difficulties that made this very cumbersome. I probably wouldn’t go back unless the con was in Pittsburgh or very close by.
That’s it for me. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time!