P-Con II Newsletter #3

Hello, and welcome back to the Phoenix Convention newsletter. This is the 3rd newsletter for P-CON II but is, confusingly, numbered #6 (for those getting it by e-mail). This is just ‘cause I’m keeping count from the last year, and the 3 newsletters I sent out for P-CON I. It probably means nothing to anyone except myself and Ian, the P-CON site manager….

Anyway, in a packed newsletter tonight, we have more guests, more site updates, and more news about accommodation. I’ll start with the guests.

More Guests at P-Con

We are delighted to have two more guests to announce for P-CON II. They are Paul Cornell and Maggie Furey.

Paul has a vast amount of writing experience under his belt, having written two original SF novels of his own, many Dr Who novels, co-written a bunch of TV series guides, and is now on the team writing the new Dr Who TV series.

Maggie is no stranger to Irish SF conventions, but hasn’t been seen in a while, for health reasons. She’s back on track now, though, and we’re delighted to have her making her reappearance at this year’s P-CON. You can find out more about these, as well as all the rest of the guests, at the con’s Guest Information Page.

Site and Committee Update

As mentioned above, the Guests’ section is now online, and Ian has been making a few other changes also, not least the overall look of the site. Genuinely, it never fails to amaze me how well he makes my few words look. I should also mention the two people who are largely responsible for the photographs we’re using on the site: Edward Stafford, well know for his photographic talents, once again gave us free access to his photographic library, and Mike McPhail, who attended P-CON I along with his wife, the truly fabulous Danielle Ackley-McPhail, sent over a CD of his photographs, with his permission for us to use anything we wished. These are the kinds of things that make con-running a pleasure, and we really appreciate the help from both of them. We’ll hopefully be putting some of the photos from last year’s con on the site, too, and will announce it here when we do so.

We’ll continue to update the site as we go along, and the next section to go up, which will be within the next week or so, will be the Committee Page. Actually, this is more a Who’s Who, rather than a committee page per se, as there are a lot more people involved in the running of this than just the committee and guests who are appearing. There is still, however, a core committee, and that committee is very sorry to be losing one of its members, Angie McKeown. Angie is getting married later this year (as are at least two other of the committee members), and is moving to England, so feels she can’t devote the time she would like to to the convention, so is regretfully stepping down. She’ll still be on hand at the con to help out, and we’re sure we haven’t seen the last of her…

Accommodation

As well as the convention hotel, which you can find out more about in the Accommodation section, there are a number of other places to stay on Parkgate Street. There’s Sadler’s Inn, which two doors down from the Ashling Hotel, and you can see it's website at www.sadlersinn.com , the Phoenix Park House at 38/39 Parkgate Street, which you can find out more about on www.dublinguesthouse.com , and the Kingsbridge B&B, directly next-door to the con hotel, which you can find out more about here .

SCA at P-Con

We are very happy to have the Society for Creative Anachronism, or SCA, coming to P-CON. The SCA is more or less a medieval re-enactment society, although as Nina Shiel says in her article about them, which you can view here , “anything that looks "period" from the distance of ten feet, rather than ten inches, is considered proper,” or in other words they take it seriously enough to enjoy it, but not so seriously that all the fun is gone out of it. They’ll be doing various things at the con, much of it involving medieval weaponry, and also some of the arts and crafts form the period. They’ll have a table in the fan/dealers’ room, so if you’re interested in joining, they’ll be glad to tell you all about it.

Dealers Tables

We’ll have a joint dealers’ and fan room, with the aforementioned SCA having a fan table, as well as the folk from Albedo One, and David Stewart in his capacity as Irish agent for Worldcon 2005, as well as because he’s the man behind the Irish bid to run Eurocon in Ireland in 2007. The primary difference between a fan table and a dealer table is that fan organisations are usually not working for profit, and therefore don’t pay for their tables. Dealers have tables for commercial reasons, and therefore do pay for their tables. So far, the only dealer signed up is Slovo Books, which is myself, as I’ve been selling books at cons for something like 15 years now, but there are some others interested in taking tables also. If you’re interested in taking a table at P-CON, either as a dealer or for a fan venture, let me know, and I’ll see how we can help you.

Membership

The con’s membership is now standing at 65, not including dealers, which is very good for this stage, with about 7 months left to go. If you want to join, you can pay by credit card, simply by writing back to me at the con’s email address, or you can print off one of the forms at http://www.slovobooks.com/phoenix/join.php and put it in the post. There are flyers in a number of shops in Dublin, and posters sent to various SF shops around Ireland. If you want a flyer, ands can’t find one, let us know, and we’ll mail one out to you.

Finally, I’d like to congratulate Michael Carroll on his recent appointment as chairman at Octocon. Michael is an old friend, and has a wealth of experience in con-running, having been on the Octocon committee a number of times in its history, and he was also on the committee of the recently run event They Came & Shaved Us. He has also been on the other side of things, being a popular and regular convention guest in his own right (or should that be ‘in his own write’?) I wish him the best of luck, and hope we can work together to give Ireland two of the best-organised SF conventions it has ever seen.

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