If you haven’t been following my blog for the past two days, I just got back from OsFest 2011, the sci-fi fantasy convention in my home town of Omaha, NE.

OsFest is a smaller con, but there is something really wonderful about small cons that you miss when attending the really big ones. Like, for instance, you don’t stand in massive lines for hours to go to a panel or meet a celebrity. At smaller cons you end up meeting most of the staff and you are more likely to end up drinking with the authors at the room parties later that night. It is more personal, the panels smaller, the people less like strangers.

I love conventions like this because the outpouring of passion and celebration for fandoms is EVERYWHERE and it may be one of the only places in the universe where you don’t have to explain why you love Harry Potter so much that you own a reproduction of all the wands or know all the spells from the books by heart. You don’t have to explain why you know how to speak Klingon. No one minds that you can list all the Doctor’s companions and where they are now and you consider this something to be proud of.

There was only one panel that I left feeling very disappointed and that was the Writer’s Tech panel on Sunday. I went in expecting to hear about different writing software and I was hoping to hear about things online I hadn’t previously been introduced to. That’s not really what happened. Most on the panel were older authors and several were still using Wordperfect as their software of choice. They talked about “how it used to be” with old computers and machines barely above electric typewriters. They talked about the dangers of using floppies as backup sources. One guy said he just upgraded to Word 10 months ago and hadn’t figured out everything he could do yet. I was frustrated. FRUSTRATED. We live in an exciting technological time period and this is the best tech they could come up with? One of them did talk about using DropBox, which I intend to talk about soon myself, and Scrivener was brought up, which none of them used, but I had so I talked about it a little from the audience. I respect what they’ve done with their own work, but on a panel about writer’s tech, you’d think they’d have people who could actually talk to the subject. I mean, I’d have a projector and powerpoint to share, discussing backup services, Google Alerts, Wordle, all the different types of software I’ve reviewed before, and I’d find a way to also discuss social media and marketing tech. I’m actually inspired to maybe run the same panel myself next year. I spend a lot of my online social networking time helping people get set up with their own tech. I could teach a panel on it.

My favorite part of the con were The Steampunk Society of Nebraska – they were wonderful! The costumes were gorgeous and instead of running into so much steampunk elitism, we met lots of people who believed everyone is invited. It was the refreshing optimism I was looking for. And they were funny! Nothing like anachronism jokes to spice up an evening!! I paraded around the con on my husband’s arm and we had our picture taken by a lot of people. I don’t think I’ve been complimented so much in my life! Talk about ego boost. I promised pictures, so with no further ado….