Sometimes You Just Gotta Do it Yourself

Quite often I will be asked or see comments along the lines of ‘Will you ever come to [insert town/ city/ country of person] anytime?’ The answer is most likely no. As much as I love meeting fans and talking books, I don’t have the budget to jet/ train/ drive to every gathering across the globe.

Graham McNeill will attend an event on the promise of a pint of beer and a steak pie, I am reliably informed.

On the other hand, ‘Would You Like to Come to [X]?’ as a proper invite, with travel expenses and accommodation covered, is much more likely to succeed. If you are prepared to look after a guest (not necessarily me, just any guest) then you might be surprised how willing many writers are to come and hang out. We don’t all ask for a fee, either, although that would be even nicer!

Slightly more irritating are the people that complain the absence of such visits – almost universally that Black Library has not run an event in [Location X]. Well, the answer to that is kinda the same as the first. If you want an event in your area (or a club, or tournament or whatever it might be you feel is lacking] I suggest that you and some like-minded friends organise it yourselves. Nothing was ever achieved by waiting for someone else to do the work.

That’s Gemma, with the Mayor of Chestermere dressed as a Sister of Battle!

Black Library Expo

This was why, back in 2012, a whole raft of BL authors shipped out to Chestermere, near Calgary in Canada, to appear at the Black Library Expo. The entire event was organised by a resourceful lady called Gemma Noon, as part of the promotional activity of the local library service (for which she works). Rather than just ask BL to come and run an event, she got in touch, rustled up some authors, convinced BL to run a trade stand… She was helped by having public funding for the project, but she also ended up organising something pretty big. There’s no reason why you couldn’t have just one or two guests rather than half a dozen.

(Games Workshop’s events calendar has been somewhat erratic over the last couple of years due to structural and personnel changes, and there are more alterations to come. Hopefully the revised regime will see a return to more GW and BL-related events not just in the UK but across the world.)

Convention Secundus

And the same has just happened here in Nottingham. Pining for companionship and the chance to geek out over the latest Black Library releases, a group of fans were disappointed that there were no ‘BL Weekender’ events organised for 2015.

Rather than simply wait for something to happen, they got together and created Convention Secundus – a fan-run alternative to the Weekender. These folks can usually be found holding out at the Black Library Bolthole, but many of them (and several authors) have come to know each other in person too through successive Black Library events.

Convention Secundus took place at a hotel in the centre of Nottingham, attended by about thirty fans. As well as me, they managed to lure in Laurie Goulding and Christian Dunn (BL editor/ former editor and writers) as well as writer Rob Sanders, cover artist extraordinaire Neil Roberts, and even a Skype appearance of Canada-based author David Annandale.

And if you think thirty people in a couple of hotel convention rooms seems a bit small fry, I would point out the other event I attended at the weekend. Novacon is the annual get-together of the Birmingham Sci-Fi Group, and is now in its 45th year. There were, give or take, 200 people descending on the Park Inn in Nottingham over the weekend, possibly more including those like me on day memberships. That event started out with a few folks getting together to socialise and talk about their thing, and it has grown and is thriving.

Many games clubs, tournaments, wargames events, genre conventions, ComiCons and the like started out with modest ambitions. But they were all started… by people with passion and commitment to make something great, and that’s exactly what we had with Convention Secundus.

Even if there are more official events in the coming years, I hope that Convention Secundus returns. It was great to hang out and relax with fellow Warhammer and 40K fans, talk Horus Heresy and books, show off my copy of Betrayal at Calth, and also find out what they are getting excited about or looking forward to in the coming year.

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