Browsed by
Category: Convention Report

Goth Chick News: Corpses, Monsters and a Giraffe Onesy – Hitting the Road to TransWorld 2025

Goth Chick News: Corpses, Monsters and a Giraffe Onesy – Hitting the Road to TransWorld 2025

Comments 0 Comment
TransWorld’s Halloween & Attractions Show 2025

Around this time every year, Black Gate photog Chris Z and I pack up the car for the 10-hour-round-trip from Chicago to St. Louis to attend the TransWorld Haunted Attractions Show. This event not only kicks off the spooky season for the new year but never fails to produce at least one memorable adventure. From Fireball shots to epic snowstorms, to celebrity encounters, I can always count on our annual road trip to produce stories that will easily carry me through a year’s worth of cocktail-party small talk.

This year was no exception.

…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: Hitting the Show Circuit Hard in 2025

Goth Chick News: Hitting the Show Circuit Hard in 2025

Comments 0 Comment
This is why BLACK GATE gives out press passes

And so this happened last week…

John O (the big cheese): People probably imagined you lot (Photog Chris Z and I presumably) are just hunkered down there in the subterranean offices of Black Gate sequestered with a blender, several bottles of adult beverages and the Roku horror channels.
Me: So…?
John O: So – that’s not the image we want to portray here at Black Gate.
Me: We have an image?
John O: OF COURSE WE HAVE AN IMAGE! Why can’t you be more like Bob Byrne?
Me: Bob? Oh… you mean Sherlock. Right. Wait, what was that first thing again?
John O: [insert unpublishable adult language] Would you please just go be visible somewhere? Be a reporter – get out in the field and report. That’s what Bob does. He reports… on detectives… for Black Gate.
Me: The ice machine is broken again.
John O: ARG! [insert more adult language and stomping up the stairs]

What John O doesn’t know but what — and I’m just guessing here — he wants to know, is the following.

About the time “the season” has officially concluded for Goth Chick News (and the season runs from March through November), we have a short holiday break before plunging headfirst into a new annual show circuit: hell bent on bringing you the warmest, moistest, gooiest news from the underside of pop culture.

…

Read More Read More

Hal Clement Helped Launch My Writing Career

Hal Clement Helped Launch My Writing Career

Comments 4 comments


Novels by Hal Clement: Cycle of Fire (Del Rey, February 1975), Iceworld
(Del Rey, October 1977), and The Nitrogen Fix (Ace Books, September 1980).
Covers by Gray Morrow, H. R. Van Dongen, and David B. Mattingly

Hal Clement (real name, Harry Stubbs) was born in 1922 and passed away in 2003. He graduated from Harvard and held degrees in astronomy, chemistry and education. A former B-24 pilot, he worked for most of his life as a high-school science teacher at Milton Academy, in Milton, MA. He gained his reputation as a writer of hard science fiction, a pioneer of the genre. I have read his novels The Nitrogen Fix and Cycle of Fire, both of which I enjoyed immensely.

I got to meet Hal at a sci-fi convention about 30 years ago. I was a struggling young writer in my early 20s, working hard on a science fiction novel modeled in the styles of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hal was part of a panel discussion on how to break into the writing business. His fellow panelists were comprised of some Star Trek novelists and editors. I was thrilled to attend the panel; with all the youthful exuberance one could imagine.

…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: And That’s a Wrap on Spooky Season 2024

Goth Chick News: And That’s a Wrap on Spooky Season 2024

Comments 0 Comment

Since 2012 Black Gate Photog Chris Z and I have closed out spooky season with the Days of the Dead convention in November. For the past twelve years an O’Hare airport hotel has played host to the DotD, a horror and pop culture convention with annual stops in Atlanta, Las Vegas, Indianapolis, and Phoenix, wrapping up its tour in Chicago (where it also stops in March).

Between the incredible array of vendors, the dedicated and detailed cosplayers, and the somewhat inexplicably long line for a photo with the cast of the Terrifier films, it was once again a weekend where the spooky and spectacular collided in the best way possible.

…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: My Weekend at “The Overlook” Hotel

Goth Chick News: My Weekend at “The Overlook” Hotel

Comments 0 Comment

I have always loved The Shining.

Granted, I saw the movie first and fell in love. It was the idea of a hotel that comes to life in the desolate isolation of winter, preying on a fragile family unit – a father who was white-knuckling sobriety and dealing with the humiliation of a big comedown in his career, a codependent mother with a tattered self-esteem after years on the receiving end of spousal abuse, and a little boy coping with his dysfunctional parents as well as a supernatural talent. Cutting these three people off from the rest of the world would be a recipe for disaster of the kind that could unfortunately show up in any headline anywhere. But add in the terrors that lurk in the Overlook hotel?

For me, what’s not to love?

…

Read More Read More

Fame – an Introvert’s Dilemma

Fame – an Introvert’s Dilemma

Comments 10 comments
This is my literal nightmare.
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

Good afterevenmorn!

It is a long-held convention, it seems, that writers are, by nature, introverts. From my experience, both quite personally, and with nearly everyone in my immediate professional circle, this seems to be the case. In fact, of the many writers that I know in person, only one of them is not an introvert. She is the only one who is invigorated by crowds. Others you might be excused believing are extroverts, given their bright, effusive natures, but they, too, collapse into a heap following interactions with people.

…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: The Chicago Fan Expo Kind of Blew Our Minds

Goth Chick News: The Chicago Fan Expo Kind of Blew Our Minds

Comments 2 comments

It’s not often that Black Gate Photog Chris Z and I experience sensory overload at a convention, so this is likely a first. Last weekend, August 16-18, Chicago played host to the Fan Expo in its third year taking over the event from Wizard World.

The 2023 event boasted an impressive list of celebrities, vendors and artists. However, this year was closer to mind-blowing for a lot of reasons that I’m about to tell you. Before I wade in, this is a convention that happens in many cities in the US and Canada throughout the year. We highly recommend you go at least once, if you’re near one of the host cities. You can check out the full line up at my pre-show post.

…

Read More Read More

Necronomicon: Sunday, Sundayyyyy

Necronomicon: Sunday, Sundayyyyy

Comments 0 Comment

The sleepers wake: attendees start the fourth day of Necronomicon

In the usual life cycle of a con, Sundays range from DOA — they expired sometime in the dark of night and when the sun rises all one finds is an empty, sun-baked dusty street with flies buzzing desultorily on piles of yesterday’s horse dung — to a lively old age that becomes more fragile as the day goes on. Checkouts at the hotel desk are consistent, though a good number leave luggage for later retrieval. But as the 8AM session on Thursday was well-attended, so too the 9:30 session Sunday morning about the correspondence between our man Lovecraft and Robert E. “Conan the Barbarian” Howard filled most of the seats. From this one must conclude Necronomicon’s Sunday will be on the lively side, and no dusty, abandoned street.

Letters constituted a major venue for communication between notables during this time period, and some — alas, not all — made it a practice to retain these letters. As a side-note: a loss to present-day scholarship on Lovecraft occurred when Lovecraft’s spouse burned the letters she’d received from him over the years of their acquaintance, courting, and marriage. And when we’re talking about H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, the letters aren’t short little hello-how ya doin’-what’s up affairs, but lengthy epistolary conversations on weighty matters relating to writing style, what constitutes a good and required text for reading, and life, liberty, and the pursuit of publication in the fraught world of the pulps of that era.

…

Read More Read More

Necronomicon Saturday: All the Funs

Necronomicon Saturday: All the Funs

Comments 1 comment


The glorious Vendor Hall at Necronomicon

As Necronomicon enters the full adult stage of its four day life, wee Thursday toddlerdom and energetic Friday late-teens giving way to brawny, wide-shouldered, keen-eyed prime of life. Today sees peak attendance, as day-trippers flock in to swell the ranks of shoppers on the Vendor Hall and help pack the seating in panels and presentations.

The Armitage Symposium organizes traditionally academic panels at Necronomicon, a nice way to draw a distinction between them and more traditional fan-oriented panels, and also a much nicer thing to put on one’s academic vita (like a resume) than the name of a fictional book that contains… stuff.

In The Surpassing Despair Which Flows from a Loss of Identity: Postcolonial Historiography and Race in Lovecraftiana, four academics presented papers on topics that fit under the awkward umbrella of the panel name. I could do a whole post about the art of crafting panel names for collections of academic papers, but whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy would I do that to you?

…

Read More Read More