Balticon 55 (A Free Virtual Con) - Memorial Day Weekend and Where You Can Join Me
I’m at Balticon, May 28-31 (Memorial Day Weekend). The convention is virtual and free to attend online. To register to be at any activity, go to their Program Schedule, go to the day of the week’s schedule and click on any panel or reading that interests you. When you click on the description, you’ll see a Zoom registration link. You can find the Discord and other links easily on the website as well.
Balticon was one of the first SFF conventions to go virtual last year and they learned some lessons from the experience, which should make this year’s experience even better. What I like most is that they’ve set up a virtual Dealer’s Room and Art Show we can meet at on Gather, where you create your own avatar and actually speak to me (via mine), when I’m on Gather.
I’ve even a booth we can meet at. I’ve been on a walk through and on my first try my video didn’t seem to work, but my audio did just fine. (Though, connectivity can be a bit spotty momentarily… which may be an issue with my own wifi.) You can also check the online attendance list and right click to “follow me” or any of the authors or other participants and talk with them once your avatar “catches up” to us. I do mean catch up… It’s both a bit old school and “fun” at the same time.
I’ll post times I’m manning my booth on my Discord channel at Balticon. The interesting thing about this to me is that unlike the “actual” Dealer’s Room which has hours of operations, the hours I post as being “open” can be anytime throughout Balticon… I also like Gather more than Discord, which seems to take a lot of resources when I do video or audio, so I tend to text only there.
Here’s my schedule for panels and my reading of an excerpt of my newly released book, Bigfoot Is Not Your Friend:
Friday, May 28
2:30 p.m. EST BAD MOVIE ADAPTATION (I’m moderating.)
7:00 p.m. EST WRITING FANTASTIC DISEASES IN A POST-COVID WORLD (I’m moderating.)
Saturday, May 29
10:00 a.m. EST ENDING YOUR SAGA
2:30 p.m. EST JEWISH SFF
8:30 p.m. EST WARNING SIGNS FOR NEW & INDY AUTHORS
This session is a primer on what to look out for if you are seeking to publish a story, how to know a legitimate market for your work from a scam, or even how to understand when a contract you’ve been sent for your story has terms that will steal your rights to your characters or story forever (and how to prevent that). And, yes, all these things happen to new authors.
Sunday, May 30
No panels (look for me throughout the day at my virtual booth via Gather.
Monday, May 31
10:30 a.m. EST D.H. AIRE READING (30 Minutes)
1:00 p.m. EST REVISING YOUR WORK
I hope you’ll stop by Balticon over Memorial Day Weekend. It’s a wonderful con.
HERE ARE THE DETAILS TO MEET ME ON GATHER DURING BALTICON:
Gather is a video-calling space that lets multiple people hold separate conversations in parallel, walking in and out of those conversations just as easily as they would in real life. In other words, you have a character on screen that you can move close enough to another character to open up a video chat between you and another person.
Click the link to enter the Balticon GatherTown space (password: BookClub).
Gather only supports the Chrome and Firefox web browsers and works best on laptop or desktop computer. No account sign-up is required. See Gather Getting Started for system requirement and an introduction.
The Gather space is designed to mimic our usual convention hotel with rooms for Dealers, Art Show, Con Suite, Fan Tables, Artist Alley, and more.