Corflatch II: it's official!

Corflatch was the name coined by Seattle fans when they held Corflu and Potlatch on adjacent weekends four years ago. Now it's happening in San Francisco, early next year. This has been in the works since, oh, February or so. But now the hotels have been found, confirmed, and signed on the dotted line, and the websites have the full info:

Corflu Titanium will be held on Feb. 25-27 at the Holiday Inn Civic Center, near the corner of Eighth and Market in San Francisco.

Potlatch 14 will be held the following weekend, March 4-6, around the corner at the Ramada Plaza.

You should all come - all of you with any interest in sf or fandom at all. They're small, unintimidating, and friendly. I'm working on both, but I wouldn't do so if I didn't think well of them.

Corflu is the fanzine fans' convention, and I've no idea where fanzine fans' reputation for being elitist and uninviting came from. Maybe they had that reaction towards people who belittled them, but just show any interest in fanzines at all - you don't even have to know anything about the subject - and you'll be welcomed. I'm thinking particularly of some locals who've done apazines in their time but probably don't think of themselves as fanzine fans, but who would fit in just fine (yes, smofbabe and liveavatar, I do mean you). And as for neos who attend Corflu, they usually walk away with huge piles of old fanzines they acquired at the sales tables and auctions for shockingly little money: ask Raven Pehr from this year's Corflu. Me, I originally got interested in fanzines when I found out how much fun they were to read.

And if you've ever been to the kind of large SF con whose programming made you wonder, "What happened to panels about, you know, books?", Potlatch is your convention. It's filled with people who are passionately interested in good science-fiction literature and who believe that the thing you do with enticing books after reading them is to talk about them with other readers. This year our "Book of Honor" (which means there'll be one panel focusing on it, and other panels might or might not also touch on it) is Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, which should give us a chance to refute that silly article on Dick that supergee pointed to recently. Potlatch is also noted for its dealers' room that, while tiny, has more books than most large cons' enormous dealers' rooms.

I don't read much new sf any more, and I'm pretty much gafiated (the local word for retired) from active fanzine fandom, but I still go to these cons whenever I can - for Potlatch, I think it's been all of them - because I enjoy the company.

Actually, spikeiowa has been leaning on me to conjure up some LJ posts into a new issue of my fanzine in time for Corflu, and I may well do just that.

I'm also thinking up touristoid day trips to entice out-of-towners who are staying on between the cons. More on that later.