Click here for my Gen Con 2024 coverage table of contents.
This post collects a bunch of Sword & Sorcery bonding at Gen Con 2024. The event was legendary and haunting, and this post collects some of my thoughts & experiences so I do not forget them.
TOP: Howard Andrew Jones, Matt John, Jason Ray Carney, Gilles Plantin, Sean CW Korrsgaard, SE Lindberg BOTTOM: Seeking peace away from the chaos, we found a Mexican bar and was assaulted by a mariachi band!
Hey Jude - Take a sad song and make it better
Howard Andrew Jones was struggling with serious symptoms (thought to be depression and/or acute leg nerve damage) and roomed with me (co-organizing the Writers Symposium granted me a downtown room in the Marriott). Within two weeks he later he was hospitalized and diagnosed with terminal brain cancer which he fights still. Tributes and testimonials to his character are rightly being shared as the writing community digests his status. It is awe-inspiring to see how broadly he has inspired others. I've been reluctant to share my own perspective for a month now.
I have been grateful to HAJ for many years, from being a fan of his S&S blogs and appearances at World Con 2010, to meeting him at Gen Con and having him coach me into volunteering at the Writers Symposium ~2017 (which grew into me chairing it in 2023), for bridging the connection to John ONeill to edit for Black Gate online magazine (~2019), and for being able to intern for his magazine Tales From the Magician's Skull as acquisition editor and for being a social media intern for the Skull (~2022).
HAJ has been likewise grateful to me for helping him with the internships, organizing Gen Con S&S events, and providing book reviews. On a whim, he sang "Hey Jude" on the piano near the green room (image), but he replaced the name "Jude" with "Seth". Co-event organizer Emily E.D.E. Bell swayed with me. He also played some Bad Finger ("Day After Day"). The memory of him playing at the piano is bittersweet and haunting now, knowing that his body was fighting itself as he sought to inspire me.
C L Moore Tour & Panels
"An exciting day at the GenCon Writers Symposium. Good fiction, great company, an evening among a literal "who's who" of modern sword-and-sorcery at the annual Heroic Signatures soirée... capped off with a walk to a little honored Indianapolis historical landmark.A short hike away from the Indianapolis Convention Center, and just across from the stunning Indiana State Soldiers and Sailors Monument, is the Fletcher Trust Building.And, in the 1930s, there was a stenographer and secretary employed at the Fletcher Trust bank by the name of Catherine Lucille Moore - better known as C.L. Moore. It was in this building that every word of fiction she wrote between 1933 to 1940, was produced, from "Shambleau" to "Black God's Kiss".Naturally, Howard Andrew Jones, Seth Lindberg, Jason Ray Carney, his wife, and I had to swing by to salute the First Lady of Fantasy, and see where some of her finest stories were penned.Fun Fact: Moore wrote under the pen name "C.L. Moore" not to hide that she was a woman, but to hide from her bosses at the bank that she was using company typewriters and the mail room to produce and send off her stories to Weird Tales Magazine or Analog Science Fiction & Fact, known as Astounding at the time." - Sean CW Korsgaard 2024
Howard Andrew Jones and Castlevania!
Over dinner one night (see the above picture of the non-peaceful mariachi band) we learned that HAJ once created video game guides, including for Castlevania! He related how Legacy of Darkness got to him via a few parties and without cheat codes. He had to diligently capture his own screenshots and remembered a difficult section [likely the Pit and Gondola] in which the protagonist navigated a thin bridge and died easily. Funny story, but the process of making a guide was not as enjoyable as one may predict.
Precious Magazine Cover - Lost and Found
Sillier Odds and Ends
