Personal Interlude: “All the Conventions Fit To Eat”

Modest Proposals On Dragging Literary Conventions Out of the 20th Century, Part 1

(Remember how, in the days of standard episodic television before streaming and binging, many dramas and some comedies would give a thumbnail update starting with “Previously on…”, flashing scenes so fast that people starting midway through a season or story were more confused than before? Well, that’s what this newsletter is like. Look at these as regular updates of how the sausage is made, with what, and whether or not the staff washed their hands after they used the toilet. Or, worse, if they only washed their hands before using the toilet.)

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So. 22 years after quitting pro writing and swearing that he would sooner become a dedicated Dallas Cowboys fan before returning, Your Humble Chronicler relapsed, prolapsed, and regressed. 19 months after starting the current project, the easiest part of the whole thing was getting back into the writing habit: various wannabe wags brought up that because of various blogs and promotional projects involving the Interstitial Project, I never quit, but this mostly came from fear that “if this guy quits and doesn’t come back, then how does that reflect on my own writing career, such as it is?” That’s why the whole St. Remedius project is how it is: it’s writing on my own schedule and my own scale, with no concerns about spending three months working on a massive article that was either spiked by editorial ego or because the whole publication shut down without notice, no worries about a major release being eclipsed by an editorial temper tantrum on a completely unrelated subject, no waiting months or years for publication, and, most importantly, not spending time and energy trying to convince publishers that contracts reading “payment 90 days after publication” are actual binding legal documents and not vague recommendations that don’t apply if they’re inconvenient. I’m too damn old to be playing those games, and i was too damn old to be playing those games when I started writing in high school.

One of the great things about coming back to the science fiction/fantasy/horror genre after two decades, quite honestly, is how much things have changed. I look at the few remaining print magazines and the waves of online magazines and just thrill to the fact that I don’t recognize any of the names in tables of contents. (It’s up to friends fluent in Yiddish to decide if it’s inappropriate for a lapsed Catholic to use the word “kvell” when I see all of the new voices in the supergenre, but that’s the best word to describe the feeling. If I had any idea in 1991 how many new voices and how many new perspectives would be available and given audiences in 2025, I would have been a considerably less angry and confrontational twentysomething.) And that can be a problem, too: instead of being one of a few young curmudgeons in a very small field, now I’m just one voice in a field packed with them. Ever try to pick out an individual cicada buzz on a Texas summer evening? You haven’t? Well, let’s just say that you need to come out here and catch a Dallas insect wall of sound to grasp the metaphor to its fullest extent.

Even that isn’t a problem, because part of the fun of St. Remedius is the hustling to reach new readers and remind old enthusiasts that I’m back. Well, it is a bit, because situations have changed with said getting word out. A LOT. A significant portion of last summer went into creating, printing, mailing, and otherwise disseminating flyers, cards, press releases, and other swag to build up a new readership, to mixed response. (I won’t even get started on how so many US Post Office locations are now so understaffed that mail that doesn’t obviously resemble bills just gets dumped into bins, tagged with “Unable to Forward” notices three to six months later, and sent back.) Social media is completely poisoned these days: half of the venues require paid “boosting” to allow links to be reached by more than ten to twenty readers at a time, the other half work only if a writer has a face for video, and one is run by and for Nazis and/or Cat Piss Men. So what to do?

If you thought “Why not get out of the house and meet people,” boy do I have a story for you, mostly involving the near-impossibility of getting people to put their phones down and leave the house. My girlfriend Sarah, Alice Tompkins to my Jay Sherman, has multiple reasons to get out and touch air and huff grass, erm, reverse that, and we make plans for events with plenty of room for everyone who wants to join in. For the last year, we’ve both had the same attitude about events: we understand that others may have prior commitments or obligations that keep them from going to everything, so our .sig is “If you can make it, great, and if you can’t, see you next time.” That said, the tiresome aspect is spending weeks or sometimes months rattling cages with calendar proclamations, having nobody else show up, and then getting three weeks of “Oh, if I’d known this was happening, I would have been there,” starting after the event is safely over. So be it.

The next option was to look at conventions and bookstores. What exposure I had with conventions over the previous 20 years was purely as a vendor, and I was very happy to keep it that way: it was easier to bow out of a local convention by noting “I can no longer make my booth fee on carnivorous plant sales” than having to share “I couldn’t make back my booth fee because the attendees you encourage also scare the hell out of grownups with disposable income.” Oh, the big Fan Expo shows are still running in Dallas, but it’s purely for non-literary media. Texas Frightmare Weekend is a must-attend, but not quite the right place for promotional efforts until St. Remedius gets a movie or TV deal. Besides, part of the idea of the trip is to see what everyone else in the genre is doing, not just stand up and yell “Buy my book!” That left the few remaining small conventions in the greater Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, and as Mark Finn shared earlier in the year, these are all dying off for multiple reasons. This is part of the regular cycle of convention decay and rebirth that last started at the end of the dotcom crash 20 years ago and rotates every 10 to 20 years, but there might be the opportunity to build something better.

The book publicist Kathleen Schmidt brings up excellent arguments on how book publicists need to change their focus in the next year, including not wasting time on legacy media, an assessment I can’t agree with highly enough, considering that often there’s nobody available to write reviews or interviews and even fewer to read them. If anything, the focus now with legacy media is to pick subjects that maximize the amount of Web traffic coming to their sites from the subjects’ fans and enthusiasts, which means they’re very averse to giving time and space to anything new. Old-school literary conventions are in the same boat, so the attendee lineup is usually one or two big stars with enough name clout to get other writers and other attendees to sign up, four or five local writers willing to come out for a full weekend on their own dimes, at least one self-important editor who assumes that everyone reads their magazine or book line for them (and often stays just ahead of convention anti-harassment policies created mostly to deal with their latest depredations), and con staffers who also think attendees are there solely for them. Fine and good when things are flush, but when attendee money gets tight, the only attendees who show up are usually the ones who make a point of going every year, and their business isn’t enough to keep things going.

Now, I know that any suggestion of running a revised literary convention is a case of building dream castles and planning to move in at the end of the month. I’m not talking about going after the big Expo Extravaganza Kidney Stone events where you get to wait in line for three hours to get a photo with a Marvel Cinematic Universe star and maybe have enough money to buy food afterwards. I’m also not talking about changing the few remaining literary conventions still doing business: we know that their patrons are still complaining about when Analog magazine went from digest format to standard magazine size in the early 1960s, and the best option is to leave them alone and not agitate them. But for writers beginning and established who want to get something out of a three-day convention weekend other than a perforated duodenum and a twitch visible from orbit, and for potential convention organizers wanting to try something different that will get everybody talking, let’s throw out nice-to-haves and get a discussion of what would work and what is delusional.

To that end, we’ll need some room to navigate and some room to sprawl, which means this essay needs to be broken up. Hence, get ready for Part 2, coming very soon.

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St. Remedius News

Two weeks to the new year, and things continue to get stranger and stranger. In response, the Annals of St. Remedius Medical College reciprocate the sentiment. Those who haven’t visited the main site in a while are welcome to get caught up at your convenience, because it’s getting kinda full over there with new stories. That keeps expanding due to new inspirations, and at the rate things keep going, you may get a couple of standalone St. Remedius novels to go with the installments before the end of 2026. The original plan was to have 200 installments ready and readable by the impending New Year’s Eve, and the dream is to hit 400 by 2027. This next year, I won’t have moves, kitchen repairs, or jury selection impeding this, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

(As a sidenote, many of you may remember original plans to shut down the old SubStack page at the end of 2025. Cohort and fellow appreciator of countryside interdimensional portals Tom Cox brought up a major issue when he shifted away from SubStack: same material, same writer, and nobody wanted to subscribe or even read his non-SubStack installments. With full solidarity to Tom, who is a wonderful fellow I either want to meet in the UK or convince to travel to Texas just so we can talk about cats for the next week, the Personal Interlude installments will continue to appear both on the main site and on SubStack, but everything else stays on the site. If you’re on the SubStack list and want to stay there, knock yourself out. If you want to move to the site and get newsletter injections of every new installment, feel free to subscribe over here.

In other additions, it’s time to go retro into the 21st Century. Last summer’s line of St. Remedius flyers were extremely popular, to everything but the wallet, and recent increases to US Post Office First Class rates and increases in photocopying costs make massive runs on flyers cost-prohibitive. (Honestly, the jump in photocopy price in just the last three years is beyond ridiculous, even as paper prices remain relatively stable.) Designing the flyers, though, remains a lot of fun, so the Academics page now contains copies of each new flyer for download and use. Print them out. Use them as screen backgrounds. Spam your friends (within reason). Attach them to job applications and lease agreements. Go wild. They’re not going anywhere.

Other Reading

Here’s another development: partly as an opportunity to collect influences, friends, and interesting bystanders in one place and one as a blatant attempt to monetize the Annals (I get a percentage of any sales made here), I set up a Bookshop.org storefront for St. Remedius. Expect it to be updated incessantly, especially as I keep getting reminders of writers and subjects needing sharing, and it’s already grown pretty impressively in the past week. In addition, the site’s Research page contains links to this and publishers and booksellers in need of inclusion: I don’t get a thing by recommending the publishers and booksellers, other than relief that they’re doing what they’re doing. Either way, feel free to browse, peruse, and purchase, and know that every purchase makes Andy Jassy at Amazon cry.

Events

The Kylo Boomhauer’s Ultimate Exonormal Gift Overload event was an overwhelming success, and the last of the Silent Read events of the month are done, so things should be reasonably quiet for the rest of the year. Next year, though, things continue to get weird, in both contemporary and archaic meanings of the word. The hope and plan is to take the St. Remedius show on the road, possibly outside of Texas, if finances allow, so keep the Campus and Off-Campus Activities page near and dear both in your heart and in your browser bookmarks. Considering both horrible weather in January and possible snowstorms and freezing rain in February (as a rule, Dallas is reasonably assured of not seeing further freezing weather after St. Patrick’s Day), things may be quiet for the first couple of months, but once spring sets in, the plan is to get outside with a fury.

Final Words

I know some old-school convention people are going to be less than happy with the impending suggestions. I’d worry about taking grief, but suspect that they’d have to get off Facebook to express them somewhere where they might be read.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

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