And five years later, it all comes around to where this whole game started, with a booth at FenCon in Addison, Texas. It’s a little scary to realize how much has changed in the world since those early days, but the sixth Triffid Ranch display at FenCon went off with only a few hitches, a bowline, and an heaving line bend. The days where the dealer’s room was half-full of self-published authors are as dead as the mihirungs, but the move toward more unique handcrafted items keeps expanding, to everyone’s mutual glee. At this point, the surprise isn’t that someone’s offering carnivorous plants in the back corner. The surprise would have been if the booth hadn’t been there.
On a personal level, this show was a milestone, the least of which being five years of Triffid Ranch operation. So many longtime cohorts from my early writing days came out that we all joked that this was a Dallas Fantasy Fair reunion, and it wasn’t far from reality. While the actual attendance numbers seemed off (having everything to do with a local media convention that oh-so-coincidentally scheduled its big event for the same weekend, forcing a lot of local fans to choose between the shows), those that came out did so during particularly pleasant and refreshing weather. If you can convince a herd of Texans to come to anything indoors on one of the first reasonably cool weekends of the year, you can do just about anything.
To be continued…