Last weekend was NecronomiCon 2019 in Providence, RI. This was my first time attending, though I have been reading about it for years. Up until this past year, I always considered myself more of a filmmaker and film scholar of the weird, so this more literary-focused event couldn’t compete for time and funds alongside the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, The Outer Dark Symposium, and other academic conferences that were a bit more central to my pursuit of tenure and promotion as a professor of film. This is a new path, though, and conferences like NecronomiCon, NECon, and ReaderCon are likely to be much more central to my writing life going forward.
I know I am hardly alone among my fellow authors in saying that I am not particularly good at cons. I want very much to be part of the group, or what looks like a group from the outside, but I am not a natural extrovert. I want to sit in a corner or a bar or a cafe and talk shop with people. I want to go to room parties, but I worry that I don’t belong, that I’m intruding. This anxiety was much easier to believe whole-heartedly when my primary accomplishments were as a screenwriter of some minor merit. Being a finalist several times over and even winning an award or two doesn’t confer a lot of credibility, because screenplays that don’t become films are largely invisible as accomplishments. Like scholarly essays, only a tiny number of people have actually read them.
Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows has changed that for me, both in my mind and in the minds of others to some extent. As a fiction writer, I came to this conference with a novel freshly out of the gate from a well-known and widely respected press. I not only got to meet authors I’ve admired from afar for years, but several of them had read my book, and they like it! It’s just crazy. It’s gratifying and motivating and…just wonderful. I want people to enjoy that book, but in a lot of ways, these are the people for whom I wrote it. They are the readers who I already know have a taste for this sort of thing. Most if not all fiction is part of a conversation, and these folks are absolutely my interlocutors. To be seen and recognized as one of them, literally and figuratively, is a genuine homecoming.
I set out to challenge myself at this con by doing my best to speak with people, to make new friends, and to praise the authors of stories I have enjoyed to their faces. I was able to do that, and it felt good. It’s far easier to thank people honestly for their art than it is to make small talk. That’s a good step forward, but I will try to do more next time. And the next opportunity comes soon.
In early October, I will be at this year’s H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival and CthulhuCon in Portland, OR at the Hollywood Theater, where this year’s Guests of Honor include Victoria Price (Vincent’s daughter), Roger Corman, and Richard Stanley with his new adaptation of The Colour Out of Space, starring Nicholas Cage! WTF? The HPLFF is a fine opportunity to pass through the veil and finally see what the room parties are all about.*
In the meantime, I am fully engaged in the beginning of the new work in progress (WIP). This novel has been popping up now and again in my daily writing practice (30 minutes, every morning, long-hand), but it has been amorphous for months. I had enough of a concept for there to be a pitch (which I am mostly keeping to myself for the moment), but a more solid grasp of character and plot and the nature of the weird at the heart of it all remained elusive until this past week. Though there was no one crystalizing moment, I expect that the atmosphere of NecronomiCon helped to push me in the right direction. So now I have consolidated all of those daily notes and I can see the vague outline now. I start to know the people in this story. I can smell the fresh water of Lake Michigan and the murkier darkness that clings to the shore near the mouth of the river.
* Full Disclosure: I did actually go to a room party at the very first HPLFF I ever attended in 2003, but there was absinthe and pleather and I only remember flashes of it. Now that I think of it, it’s entirely possible that I never made it out of that room…