Blackmoor Vituperative

Friday night’s programming is complete, and I think it went pretty well. For those who came in late, I scheduled programming for RavenCon 2011. This included coming up with panel ideas, contacting guests to ask them to volunteer for panels or suggest new ones, and scheduling the panels so that the whole schedule would be full for people who pay to come to the con.

It’s only Friday, but so far it’s gone really well. Nearly all of our guests responding to my emails in a timely manner, and all but one eventually responded with the names of panels they would like to participate in. As far as guest response goes, it’s gone better than I expected.

As a lark, I participated in a riff of Star Crash, Mystery Science Theater style, with Rob Floyd of Team Fantasmo. I had fun doing it, we had a pretty good crowd, and they seemed to have fun, too. That pleased me.

There has really only been one blemish on the weekend so far, and that’s the aforementioned guest who never replied to any of the nine or so emails I sent them. I still have not heard from this person, but two other people have come to me all aflutter asking why that person is not on more panels. Well, the fact is that person is on four panels (suggested by other guests who said they would be sharing the panel with this noncommunicative guest: the artist who did his book covers, for example). They are also featured in an interview (which was my idea), making five.

So: five panels, which is 20% more than the minimum I aimed for. If this guest wanted to be on more panels, they would have said so. Frankly, I have little sympathy for anyone who complains to me about it. If they want to complain, they should go complain to the person who never responded to their email.

Other than this extremely minor hiccup, Friday went really well. One or two panels had an excessive number of panelists, and one panel had no one in the audience, but this sort of thing is bound to happen. I learned a lot from this year, and next year will have fewer occurrences like this.

I consider Friday a success.