It’s easy to talk about the good things about LCC that I expected: I know people and enough of us have been to enough conventions and even have worked on enough that we could anticipate success in certain areas. And that’s not me braggin; when it comes to program, yes, I have experience and I do think I’ve learned a lot over the years. It takes a lot of listening and just plain old thinking “would this be interesting?” and seeing past some things. Some GREAT ideas aren’t; once you think “ooh, that sounds cool” then you try it out and realize, well actually no, that’s a one-shot wonder, that’s a “yes/no” panel, that’s a rehash of another idea and you realize that if you were in the audience you’d be bored to tears.

What went right-er than I expected? What were the surprises?

Well, that everything ARRIVED, since for reasons I won’t go into there were some huge crashing problems about that and I didn’t believe we’d get several things. There were also the tons (probably literally, yes? I mean 300 boxes of books probably do weigh in over 2,000 pounds) of giveaway books that has slowly appeared after Ann’s amazing efforts with the publishers – and some generosity BY publishers in sending books. It’s an amazing difference between ’94 and now; in ’94 we were told by dealers not to solicit books, as it would cut into their sales. Now, it’s a given that a major convention will have books to give away. It’s a little nuts to some of us; we’re dumfounded to arrive at a con and be handed a bag with 12, 15, 18, 20 books.

It’s pretty standard to be nervous about things like “will enough people help out” – we didn’t have a specific “volunteer coordinator” and I was worried but, well among other things, I got super helpful email from Jodi in Madison reminding me that people ALWAYS step up and help out. Jodi wrote about a week or so before the convention – a huge help from someone who 5 months before had been in the spot I was – she was program co-chair at Bouchercon and KNEW all about the attacks of nerves and second guessing you go through, the hassles of people canceling and how you forget stuff – and reminded me of so many positive things.

One surprise? I admit it. The food. I’ve eaten at this hotel a half dozen times in the last several years; lunch meetings, Stu and I were treated to dinner there last year, and I’m not a big fan of hotel banquets. I’m not a big fan of hotel restaurants (although there are some that dazzle us. I mean Stu and I went out Friday night to Sazerac, at the hotel Monaco and saw (I think Stu said) 26 people he recognized from our convention. We’ve been there several times and it’s just wonderful but come on, it’s a hotel. They do their damndest but it’s not the same. Usually. And serving food to hundreds of people is never as easy as serving a few, ore ven a few dozen. And yet I was completely knocked out by the reception goodies on Friday and found the banquet halibut as good as a number of other dinners I’ve eaten out. Not the best halibut I’ve ever had but in a way that’s good. I mean, I ate most of it and am pretty surprised that I did given how hugely nervous I still was. I thought that by Saturday night I’d be relaxed but I still had to get up and talk and still wanted my guests of honor to have a good meal and a fun time and feel honored and all that. But most of us did pretty well. The service was way better than expected (remember El Paso? 90 minutes from doors opening to everyone leaving phew) but there were many ways things could have gone wrong (well, I messed something up but I’m not going to talk about it here, but I apologize to several people who should have had better seats! Just one of the many things I forgot to get to/managed not to get to/thought I’d done/ran out of time to do. But while I expected things to be perfectly okay, perfectly reasonable, they were, at least from my place and from Stu’s perspective, better than we thought they’d be.

Okay, and while this is supposed to be my “positive” post – and it mostly is, this where I will talk about greed because one of the negatives I did see was people taking advantage of there being food. And YES, I am surprised because in all the years I’ve been to or attended or worked on mystery conventions, no people have not acted that way – grabbing food, using hospitality as their “3 meal a day” hang out, taking more than their share. “Hospitality” is about more than just food and I AM disappointed that people behaved that way. YES, there was food provided, but I do not understand lining UP at hospitality to get something for lunch. IT’s NOT A LUNCHROOM. There WAS a coffee shop. We are in Seattle and within two blocks, there were cheap eats – everything from coffee joints like SBC and Starbucks (and we had a restaurant guide FULL of places to eat). We offered a reception on Friday and a BANQUET on Saturday. Thus, when someone came to ask “where are the sandwiches on Saturday morning, I almost explained that sandwiches were for lunch. All I said was “they won’t be out until 1 or later; it IS still morning you know.

Reports of people stacking plates with food and grabbing cans of soda and leaving hospitality dismay me. I do NOT believe it’s okay and no, it’s not accepted behavior, no matter what someone says. “Hospitality” is about socializing, as well as about eating. Lightly. I DO understand – oh do I – about the costs of attending a convention. Back when, I DID share hotel rooms with 6 other people, and I do know people who bought one meal a day for cheap and used the hospitality room as their cafeteria. Just because it’s “free”, just because “I paid for it” does not make it a polite practice to overindulge, and to take more than is appropriate. We did spend more than we budgeted for food and food was a huge part of our budget. We did add to the Friday night menu – a reception menu that had something upward of 30 different items to choose from. But even when you’re a hard-working writer, or a fan without a lot of extra money, it’s not okay to use the convention’s hospitality resources as your dining room. I’m NOT saying you are not entitled to the food that is put out. But as one of 550 people, you do have, I believe, an obligation to remember that perhaps one of those other 549 people might want a muffin. Just because “you paid for it” does not mean you paid for endless refills. I can show you just how much it costs to get a gallon of coffee from the hotel catering department, or a trayful of cookies. And I was bewildered to hear that people felt entitled in that way. This isn’t what I’ve come to expect from fans attending LCC. It’s what I expect from kids trying to save money at Worldcon. Conventions are not “about” free food. They are about a social experience that includes food and drink and hospitable surroundings and talk and laughter and meeting and hugs and conversation. It’s not okay to act in this manner. If you need the food, of course, by all means, eat. I saw a blog post that expressed surprise that I would find it dismaying at the fact that “authors were eating all their meals in hospitality”. I don’t know if it was authors or not- I don’t have names, wasn’t there, just signed the orders for more food and heard the reports from staff/committee members and others who saw this. I never yelled, never stopped anyone (though consulting with committee, we did stop ordering SOME items after mid-afternoon. Especially when it two hours or four hours there was MORE FREE FOOD in the evening – since we did manage to get everyone in to the banquet who wished to go, thanks ot others who did not wish to go.) Damn right I expressed dismay. It’s tacky and I expect better of these people – my peers, my community.

What went right? Program. I know that I’m experienced at this. Having gone to somewhere between 75 and 100 at this point in my life, I know a lot about program. About what works, what doesn’t, what people want to hear, what they’ll put up with, what bores them, But that still doesn’t guarantee SQUAT. There were some programs I knew would work because they just had the right mix of people, they were hot topics or because at least 1 program participant was, I knew, just GREAT at this stuff and would carry things if necessary. But that doesn’t mean SQUAT to you when you’re hoping that this time, your luck, experience, ideas would hold. What if people have moved On from that topic. What if someone’s having a bad day – it’s happened. Many of us have seen that panel where a formerly articulate witty charming person because Johnny-One-Syllable I Don’t Care What I Look Like To You. Has a headache and doesn’t want to say. You KNOW that in spite of begging pleading asking groveling insisting that people TELL YOU if they decide that “no, I don’t WANNA do this after all” they don’t tell you because they’re scared you’ll put them on The List or that they won’t get a panel or that they’ll be tagged as troublemakers or whatever it is that goes through someone’s mind at that point. So they freeze up on the dais and don’t utter a word and it’s a dead loss for audience, moderator, planner and participants all. Feh. Pooey.

I didn’t get to most programs and what I heard about was, of course, hugely gratifying. I mean, face it, people are nice and they’re not going to report back to me on a sucky program, for the most part. I wouldn’t care – in fact it helps to know what didn’t work (gently though, I still am pretty shaky. Still having anxiety dreams – two weeks after the thing is over and done with.). I know from one friend that a program she was on was pretty standard/average/ordinary. That’s a disappointment to me as that’s the thing I worked so hard to avoid – standard, average “talking head” panels. It’s why I avoided some topics – because I couldn’t come up with a way to present the idea that wasn’t boilerplate. You can argue that it should be done anyway, but hey, this time around it was my turn and I chose to skip rather than seem mundane. Someone next time WILL come up with a new idea, a new slant on things, a new way to present a topic that I skipped. OR the mix will be different or better OR the moderator will be just that much more knowledgeable. That from Thursday on, I heard “standing room only” “the room was full” was huge for me.

I deliberately didn’t schedule too many programs on Thursday because I’ve learned something – I learned this way back. If you schedule too many things early/late, people will complain because too many people can’t get to the con when it starts. When you don’t schedule enough things, people complain, because they got there early/late and want stuff to do. Back in ’93, I think the same day that we got a complaint about how early things began, we got a complaint that things didn’t begin early enough. Conclusion? YOU CAN’T WIN. Some people will have problems or find fault no matter what you plan. But the idea of running full program on Thursday just didn’t work for me. We had lots of people coming in, yes, but I hoped that, as many do, they were coming in early to get a head start on Friday (bless those folks who plan to attend program first thing) or to do a little bit of tourist stuff. But even those Thursday programs were full. Hmm, second guessing myself, I could have tried for another track but you can second guess yourself into total blither. But things WORKED. And that’s the flop sweat part of program planning. YOU DON’T KNOW. I’ve gotten pretty good at this yes. I listen to people, I pay attention to post-con reports on “what I went to”, I watch for reactions, read them on-line, ASK. I follow the genre well enough to know some of the trends and the new names, but you NEVER know what will work. DID you pick the right room for the big event? Was t truly the big draw, or did you put the wrong event in the big room because YOU might find it interesting but so what? You’re only one person.

While I knew that the forensic stuff that Jan Burke organized, both with “our” people and with “outsiders” would appeal, I still didn’t know how much a draw some would be. Even though I thought some programs would draw huge numbers, I always had to stop and remind myself that NO, NOT everyone IS interested in that stuff. Speaking as someone who cannot watch “CSI” and has in past years at mystery conventions avoided all morgue tours, coroner slide shows, true crime “reality” programming and the like because if a BIG streak of weenie-ism, I know that despite huge popularity, some people would rather not hear about that stuff. No matter how hit a trend a certain topic is, not everyone reads the trendy stuff. And despite some lukewarm responses to some topics, they drew rooms full of people and could have gone longer. Who knew?

And that’s the thing. I DON’T know and didn’t and the fact that things worked as well as they did was a major big deal.

Finally. I have to talk about this because it is part of Left Coast that I won’t ever forget. Do you have a hero? I mean someone you really admire, look up to, think “I could never do what she does” or “I want to be just like him” even if you’re long past thinking that way? Do we adults still get to have real heroes, not what you hear called heroes like some sports dude, but someone you hold in special reverence, awe, respect? I do. I got lots. Many of them are heroes to me because they show a certain courage, they risk when they don’t have to.

In early 1997, I bought a copy of a special issue of Life magazine. It was titled “Celebrating Our Heroes”. In among the photos and commentary on what heroism means, historical looks back at people who were courageous in the face of hatred and evil and wrong, there was a photograph of a man in a hat. He was seemingly buried up to his waste in much and he was cradling a skull – human remains. The commentary, by Gilles Peress describing this photo of Bill Haglund in Srebrenica read “I was with Bill last fall as he handled forensic efforts on behalf of the war tribunal in the Hague. He had to disentangle the bodies and oversee their removal from the graves. Bill gave all that he had in his heart and his soul to provide the evidence for justice. With his sharp wit, crummy hat, clothes stinking of death – he is, in my mind, the closest thing to a hero in our time.”

I carried that photo in my heart and mind for years. Still do. I learned he was from the Seattle area, and I tried to come up with a way to bring him to LCC in 1997, to give him some reward, acknowledgement, but it seemed too far from the purpose of the convention and perhaps, just maybe, too political. I read somewhere that Haglund, no matter the weather or heat, always dressed as he dressed in that photo in Life – long sleeve shirt, sleeves rolled up, a tie. A hat. No matter what – out of respect for the victims he was digging up. And I cried.

And two weeks ago, I met Bill Haglund. Jan Burke’s work with the forensic community puts her in touch with a lot of people, and when she wrote to say she might be able to get Haglund – that he was a mystery reader – I just about screamed the house down. And worried about making a fool of myself. Because you see, I never really MET one of my heroes before. God, I mean who has that opportunity? And if one photo makes me weepy, what sort of dumb thing would I do meeting the guy for real?

So okay, I did cry but I DID manage not to do so until he’d walked away. I didn’t make an ass of myself and we got to talk several times and I did get to the presentation he did – the only one I swore I’d go to. (And again, not knowing if five people or 100 would show up – the room was filled to the rafters. If there had been rafters yeah). But I was there to say thank you, and I got to say “you’re a hero to me” and I got to talk to him, about the photo and the book it’s in and just to get a sense of what kind of man Bill Haglund is that he can do what he does.

And I still cry. Because in the face of that kind of strength and humanity, of that kind of caring and articulate witness, meeting someone who can DO what he does, and talk about it, and make the world a better damn place – which is WHAT HE DOES – well, what the hell else can I do?