CONvergence!

This past weekend was CONvergence, which is currently the largest science fiction convention in the state. In addition it was the 10th CONvergence, so they pulled out all the stops and invited every guest of honor from the past, as well as some new ones. There were probably 20 of them. I got to meet Peter Mayhew (who played Chewbacca in the Star Wars movies). Odd fellow. I didn't talk long because I was actually in line to get an autograph from Mercedes Lackey, who has been my guilty pleasure for almost 20 years now. She writes fantasy novels. I'm finding it difficult to describe them... on a superficial level they are set in a world where psychic white horses with blue eyes bond with their riders for life. Anyway. I also went to a talk by David Weber, the premier name in military science fiction, and he was charming and very talkative and obviously well-read and insatiably curious about the world. I also went to a reading by Broad Universe, an organization dedicated to supporting female writers of SF&F.

The beauty of going to this convention after being away from the convention world for ten years was that I ran into several people who I haven't seen for that span of time. It was also fun, yes fun, to be so utterly immersed in the geek world. It's a mutating, shifting world, and I'm not entirely sure how much I want to be in it, but I love that it exists. It all takes time and I'm just more aware that I can't do everything at once, or else I didn't have as many things to do back in the days... Still. To walk down the halls of the Sheraton, past several Klingons, the guys from Ghost Busters, multiple pirates and maybe a couple of ninjas. Captain Kirk passes in the opposite direction, followed by a lady with a dragon tail sticking out from under her dress. This is the world of the geek. Escapist? Maybe. But we all live inside our heads on some level. We all need more than what we get from the input; we need to make things, to create, to express.

I remember the first time I went to Minicon; two days of convention activity, and I went home with a dejected air and the thought that I would have to wait a WHOLE YEAR for the next Minicon. It seemed unbearable. This time I thought about the whole thing more; the world was smaller. The Romulan ale sucked. I watched this world I had been away from and felt that, yes, I could go back again. But I could wait a year. Or two.