I had a fascinating weekend attending Northern FanCon in Prince George, B.C. That’s about a 90 minute flight north of Vancouver, in the interior. A smallish mill town, where Dreamcatcher was filmed. I had to fly to Calgary and then to Vancouver before catching the final flight to PG, as they call it, so Friday was an early morning and a long day of travel. It felt so good to be back in Canada again, though, my first trip back to my native land in five years.
The first thing I did was visit a Tim Hortons in the Calgary airport. There’s something about the cadence and sound of the Canadian accent that blisses me out. I feel like I’m home. And I know people like to make fun of the Canadian predilection for apologizing, but I swear that if I had a nickle for ever time I heard someone say “sorry” this weekend, I’d be a wealthy man.
The third flight was on a small Bombardier Q400 turboprop. All the other aircraft on the runway dwarfed it. I saw a familiar person get on after just about everyone else was seated: Edward James Olmos from Battlestar Galactica and Miami Vice. Owing to a mixup with his route through customs in Vancouver, he ended up barely making this connection and his luggage didn’t, although it came in on the next flight.
One of the cool things about being an invited guest of a con like this is that I got the full star treatment. I had a driver (not a specific driver, and not exclusively mine, but any time I wanted to go somewhere, there was always someone to take me) and a liaison who made sure I was happy, and I got to hang out in the Green Room with the A-listers. In addition to Olmos, there was Lou Ferrigno (The Hulk), Alan Tudyk (Firefly) and Amy Acker (Angel), to name a few. The promoter, Norm Coyne, is a bundle of energy, always on the phone or the radio putting out fires, but always present, too.
I had a presentation on Saturday morning. At first I thought I was going to be talking to myself or one other person, but an audience gradually formed and I ended up talking to maybe twenty people in total. Seemed like it was well received. I skipped a few of the after-hours events (karaoke, for example). I watched some hockey games instead, and rediscovered the yummy goodness that is brown gravy on French fries.
My favorite workshop of the weekend was Marc Bernardin’s — he was one of the writers for Season 1 of Castle Rock. To show us how things go in a writers’ room, he had us “break” an episode of the “classic” TV series Knight Rider. He gave us the basic rules (four-act structure, certain beats that had to be met, the rules of the Knight Rider universe) and then we brainstormed a plot, which he mapped out on the white board, as below. It typically takes a week to break an episode, so obviously our process was accelerated and condensed.
It was a lot of fun but also instructive. A writers’ room is democratic, except the showrunner is the person who has the final say, so it’s like a benign dictatorship, too. Everyone throws out ideas and the good ones survive. I’ve always said I’d love to be a fly on the wall in a writers’ room some day, and this may be as close as I ever get. Here is how our episode turned out. When everything is in place, he said, Act 4 essentially writes itself as you solve all of the things set up in the first three acts, which is why it’s blank here.
I attended the VIP reception on Saturday evening, where we got to chat with the A-listers. Amy Acker, when she found out why I was there, said, “Oh, you probably know my neighbor,” who turned out to be Mick Garris (director of The Stand, etc.).
I spent a fair amount of time at my booth, talking to the occasional person who stopped by. There was a lot of cosplay, and I especially enjoyed seeing the tiny tots dressed up like some sci-fi or Marvel character, absolutely agog at everything going on around them.
I had lunch with James Douglas on Sunday. He directed the Dollar Baby “The Doctor’s Case,” which is a really good adaptation. They got Denise Crosby and William B. Davis to star in the wraparound section, and it was filmed in a wonderful castle-like mansion in Victoria, so the setting is spectacular. We’re discussing the possibility of adapting “Zombies on a Plane,” my story from Flight or Fright. James hosted a Dollar Baby Film Festival at Northern FanCon but unfortunately I was only able to squeeze in “The Doctor’s Case” due to scheduling conflicts.
Chris Dias wandered the show floor interviewing people and he cornered me for nearly ten minutes. It was completely unplanned, but I think it turned out pretty well.
https://www.facebook.com/northernfanconpg/videos/651134275308388/
Although it’s a fairly small convention, I had a great time at Northern FanCon. Got to talk to some cool people and make some connections that someday may pan out into something. You never know about these things. I like to joke that if I’d been in the bathroom when Steve came up with the idea for Flight or Fright instead of sitting next to Rich Chizmar, someone else might have ended up as his co-editor! It’s all about being in the right place at the right time.
Yesterday was another travel day. I left PG at 9 am and got home last night at 10 pm. En route I wrote notes for a review of Ted Chiang’s fascinating story collection Exhalation and watched several episodes of the new Netflix dark comedy Dead to Me starring Cristina Applegate and Linda Cardellini. I spent the rest of the time avoiding spoilers for Game of Thrones because the hotel where I was staying didn’t have HBO!
This Saturday, I’ll be at Comicpalooza at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. My only scheduled event is a panel called “World-Building for Short Stories, Novelettes and Novellas” at 10:30 am with moderator Tex Thompson and co-panelists Michelle Muenzler and Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam.
