SCIENCE FICTION FANDOM

 This has been my major hobby since the middle of the 1970's. I got interested in reading SF in high school, and a common interest in the genre was one of the factors in bringing Morris and me together. (There was a period when we had to flip a coin to see who got to read ANALOG first.)

 We discovered Fandom (with the capital F: convention-going, filksong-writing, corresponding through amateur publications) in 1975. We noticed in the convention listings in ANALOG that George R.R. Martin was to be Guest of Honor at something called Khubla Khan Khubed over in Nashville. From Little Rock, that is a longish but not un-manageable drive for Friday-after-work. I had just read an impressive piece by Martin in ANALOG ("The Storms of Windhaven", co-authored with Lisa Tuttle)

 So we went. I told Martin that the story was the best piece of writing about the pure joy of aviating that I had ever read, including "Jonathan Livingston Seagull". While at Khubla (which became a fixture of our Mays for several years thereafter), we saw an ad for I-Con the following October, in Iowa, featuring Roger Zelazny. Roger had long been one of Morris’s favorite writers, and while Iowa was farther away than Nashville, it was not un-manageable if we took the Friday off work.

 So we went. And I discovered Filk. As is common with new converts to Filk, I wrote one on the way home, another in the next week, and two more by the time I went to my first Chambanacon the next month.

 After that I was a gone gosling. Morris never caught the bug quite as badly as I did; he was transitioning from Chess to Ham Radio as his major hobby around about then. Eventually I became a merchant of filk publications to help pay my travel expenses, establishing M-Cubed Ventures as my fannish business. This went dormant after Sharon got into school, and my convention-going radius was cut down quite a lot. Now that I’m retired from the Highway Department, though, M-Cubed is reviving.

 Meanwhile, I had found the local SF group, and talked them into becoming the rest of the committee for ROC*KON, so we could have a convention to go to right here in Little Rock. We got Roger Zelazny for our first GoH. ROC*KON ran for 27 years and we only closed-out the bank account when I retired and moved to Mississippi in August 2012.

After our daughter Sharon was born, she accompanied us to conventions as far afield as Wisconsin and Ohio until she started school. That reduced our con-going range as a family to places we could get to Friday-after-school and back again on Sunday, at least during the school year. Once she reached driving age, we were able to re-extend the range, coordinating with school holidays.

Sharon is married now, and living in northern Indiana, which provides a convenient stopover point when I attend conventions in the Great Lakes region.

I've even been able to combine my quilting hobby with fandom: we make and raffle a quilt at GaFilk in Atlanta every January. GaFilk is one of several filking conventions held around the year, and is the closest to our retirement location in east-central Mississippi.

I've made webpage-reports of a few convention trips: Dorsai Thing 2006, Ohio Valley Filk Fest 2007, Robert A. Heinlein centennial, also in 2007. It's a lot easier to do that since I got a digital camera in late 2005. Now that I'm retired, I hope to go through my older fannish photos and extend that list.

Updated 10 Nov 2012