One of the (many) great things about KillerCon in Round Rock, TX (near Austin) is that I can drive to it in under three hours. Traveling long distances isn’t nearly as much fun as it used to be…and was it ever? We didn’t have to worry about delayed flights, missed connections, lost luggage or any of the other myriad potential problems associated with flying to a conference.
My wife has family in Round Rock, so she came with me to KillerCon. When I was off attending readings, panels and other Con events, she visited. So that was nice–we had breakfasts together each morning, then went our separate ways for the rest of the day.
I only decided to attend a week ago, just as I did in 2018, so I wasn’t on any of the scheduled programming events. That doesn’t mean I didn’t get to participate, though! While I had entertained thoughts of participating in the short fiction contest (judges supply five words and contestants have 20 minutes to write a 200-word short story using them all), my role changed when I was asked to be a judge. About a dozen people wrote some very good stories using our five words, then read them to the audience.
My judging duties were expanded when Brian Keene suggested that John Urbancik and I join three others to judge the gross-out contest, figuring, I guess, that there would be some entertainment value in having two of the unlikeliest people judging some of the grossest stories you’ve ever heard. It turned out to be a lot of fun. I don’t think I could ever write something as gross as what we heard, but they are entertaining even as you groan and moan.
I brought books to sell and sign at the mass autograph session and unloaded most of what I brought, to my surprise. Having one of those Square attachments for my iPhone so I could take credit cards helped a lot.
People attending from out of town were taken aback by the heat. It was as high as 102° during the daytime, with “feels like” temps near 110°, which is hot even by Houston standards. Even so, every now and then I felt the need to escape the air conditioning and bask in the warmth, like a lizard on a rock.
There were other things going on in the convention center. On Friday, there was a very misleading sign advertising McAllister’s Deli on the second floor, which had a few of us venturing upstairs to discover…no deli–the company was having a corporate meeting. And here we thought our food options had expanded! We didn’t have a mariachi band traipsing through this year, though, like we did in 2018. Also no memorial service attendees, who last year had to walk past the five-foot black cardboard coffin that contained donuts.
KillerCon is small and intimate. There’s never more than one thing going on at a time. Panels alternate with readings. The biggest drag about the con this year was that the hotel bar was closed the entire weekend. Apparently they didn’t have a bartender, which was poor planning on their part. With a hotel full of writers, they could have earned megabucks from the bar proceeds. It also meant that there wasn’t a centralized place to go to hang out with people between program events. Hopefully they’ll have that rectified by next year.
Hearty thanks to Wrath James White and his team of volunteers for putting together such an awesome con deep in the heat heart of Texas.
After I got home, I finished watching the final season of Orange is the New Black (they stuck the landing, although I was hoping for a different outcome with Zelda), and signed ⅔ of the limitation pages for LetterPress Publications’ edition of Revival. The box weighs in excess of 60 lbs, and there are nominally 1500 regular pages plus 52 lettered pages. Of course there are extras for damage and spoilage, so I signed at least 1000 pages yesterday and probably another 250 this morning. I timed myself for three minutes, during which I signed 38 times, so my optimal rate is about 13 pages per minute. I hope to be done this evening so I can ship the box to the next (and final) contributor in the morning.
