Con Time Again

For the past few years I’ve been attending FanX Salt Lake City. First, I went simply as a fan. But for the past two-ish years, I’ve been blessed to be part of various author panels. FanX Salt Lake is this upcoming weekend, April 19th and 20th, at the Salt Lake Convention Center. I will be on one panel, Eighty Years of Batman, from 7PM to 8PM on Saturday night. So, if you’re in the area, stop on by. I’ll have a few free copies of “Mat the Cat” and “The Far Shores of Saucerland” to hand out.

The founders of FanX Salt Lake, Bryan Brandenburg and Dan Farr, have done an amazing job of creating and maintaining a wonderful event. FanX started in September 2013 and has quickly grown to be one of the largest comic conventions in the nation. Both my wife and I have found the atmosphere to be genuinely friendly and kind. Everyone is there to have fun and get along while geeking out about their varied fandoms.

I’ve traveled around the world and been in large crowds in many, many places (i.e The Taj Mahal, The Forbidden City, Tower of London, etc.) and I’ve never felt more relaxed than I have in the midst of the FanX crowds. That may seem like a strange point to emphasize about the convention but it inevitably comes up when I talk about FanX. Having 120,000 people in a small area could very well be chaos. There are masses of people moving around to the different venues, lining up for the presentations in the main ball room, heading to the vendor floor to check out Artist Alley and Author Row along with photo and signature ops and all the other merchandise. You will see families of all sizes, couples, individuals, groups from various organizations, local news reporters, etc. Bryan and Dan and their crew handle it all with grace and aplomb.

In any event that size, there are bound to be hiccups. When those have cropped up (hello, photo op computer glitches!) the FanX team has handled them well and efficiently. Had I been in charge I probably would have lost my cool more than once. Definitely more than once. Both the late summer and early spring FanX shows have become part of my yearly schedule. They are a great place to relax, have fun and see some cool presentations.

I will be running “Mat the Cat” free this upcoming weekend on Kindle. I’ll post the exact dates near the end of the week. I hope to have “Far Shores” available, also, but have run into some difficulties with the digital formatting. Kindle doesn’t like two columns per page, you see. I’ll see what I can do to figure that out.