The Tampa (Florida) area group I travelled with included myself, Scott Gosik, Kim Liu and Toivo Voll. Bill "Bart Fox" Biersdorf also went, although he ended up making his own travel arrangements, since he waited until nearly the last minute to decide he'd be able to attend the con.

So for me, ConFurence 9 began at around five in the morning that Thursday. Our flight left Tampa International at eight. To move from the early to the slightly bizarre, Northwest Airlines has its major "hub" in Minneapolis--so that's where we ended up to connect flights. As we landed, the pilot announced that the weather had warmed up there to one degree Fahrenheit. This is the first time I can recall being spritzed by snow as I made my way from the plane onto the jetway.

Just before we took off from Tampa, it was noticed that our plane's final destination was the Orange County Airport, not LAX (Los Angeles International). Kim, the guy who made the arrangements for us, had been under the impression things were flying into LAX--which is where Scott's rental car would be waiting for us. With a bit of effort and a cell phone call from Minneapolis, Scott was able to move the reservation to Orange County--which nearly doubled the car's daily rate.

But at any rate, we arrived safely, got the car and made our way through the LA area traffic to the Knott's Berry Farm area and the Buena Park Hotel. The hotel had replaced the largely non-functional metal card key system of last year with an electronic one, but the rooms were still unpleasant--stained walls, missing tiles in the bathroom and in ours a faint smell of mold from the air conditioner. Next year's hotel on the outskirts of San Diego will be more expensive, but the price should be worth it.

I confirmed that I had indeed pre-registered for the con, and that was my extent of "official" con activity for all of that day. Despite the fact that CF had officially announced itself as a four-day con (up from the three days in previous years), very little was really going on, except for the appearance that evening of Fen In The Lobby. In Florida cons, there usually isn't a huge group of fen hanging about the open spaces; at every furry con I've been to, though, the lobby becomes the equivalent of FurryMUCK's west corner of the park.

One of the first I ran into was Mick Collins, along with a significant portion of the con-going segment of Furthest North Crew. I don't think Mick's particularly well-known in furrydom, which is too bad--he's an excellent writer. The one area he is known in, albeit not much in this part of the world, is music: he was the lead singer for a punk group called "The Gories," and is now with a new group called "The Dirt Bombs." He showed off the rough sketch to cover art to the Dirt Bombs' new album, and yes, it's furry art--risqu‚ furry art to boot (a female cat morph stripper doing a pole dance on a stage in front of a rowdy crowd of male dog morphs). The record company's reaction to this art was, "You know, you'll have a lot to answer for with this." Time will tell if that's true, but one European music magazine already started an interview with him along the lines of, "So, we hear the new album cover is unusual," which led into a discussion (presumably now in print) of furry fandom. If a bunch of Scandinavian punk rockers show up at the next ConFurence, now you know whose fault it will be.

After hooking up with two more members of our party, Jason Holmgren and Rick Hobson, we all went out to eat at a restaurant called Claim Jumper's. The place is billed as a steak house, but the most apt description of what they serve is Big Food. The beef stew I had could probably have served three.

Friday began the first full day at the con. Breakfast happened at Knott's Berry Farm, which turned out to set the pattern for all the remaining days. No complaints there, though; the food there is darn good and pretty inexpensive, and will definitely be missed next year.

My "con mode" tends to be quieter than some--mostly wandering around the dealers' room and art show looking for people I haven't run into yet. I didn't get to the art show on Friday, which also follows my typical track record. I did get to talk to Zjonni Perchalski, though, one of the first furry artists (or furries, period) that I met--in this case, way back in the late '80s, just before he moved from Tampa off to the LA area. What might be Zjonni's best-known art is connected with what's likely my best-known story: he did the art in YARF! for A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood. (MUCKers might not know the story, but unless they have their heads in a lot of virtual sand they've heard the name of the female lead, Revar the vampire bat--she's been played online for years by the chief programmer of the server FurryMUCK and Furtoonia, and many other systems, run.) Zjonni is interested in resurrecting an old idea that's been on back burners for years--a Gift of Fire comic book adaptation. We'll see what happens on it.

The panel on Fuzzball 6.0 (the next generation of the server software mentioned above) might not have been interesting to everyone, but the new version may end up affecting a lot of the online fan community. Definitely some interesting things planned, including [short burst of geek talk ahead] server-level support for ANSI color and many, many more programming functions in MUF, ranging from for-next loops, switch statements and arrays to support for TCP/IP sockets. The latter's peculiar, but intriguing--possible applications could be transparent connections between MUCKs, and even some more esoteric ones, like writing a MUF routine which could run in the background and allow people to use Microsoft Exchange to check their pagemail. There was also further description of Trebuchet, the client that Revar's been writing in Tcl/Tk and that'll likely give TinyFugue serious competition.

The History of Furry Fandom panel was also interesting, although it was mostly stuff I already knew. Its host was Fred Patten, who's putting together a book for publication next year called Animal Masks that will be a fifteen-year history of the fandom, apparently a coffee-table compendium useful both to give older fans a clear idea of where the fandom actually came from and to be an introduction to new fans. This is a welcome idea; some of the complaints batted about relating to fan behavior, online and off, trace back to people having very little idea what furrydom really is. The very small number who are ongoing problems seem to take a perverse pride in having no interest in the fandom's history, though--but I suppose the book really isn't aimed at fuggheads. It was also nice to see Mark Merlino at the panel looking relatively relaxed, a state I don't think I've seen him in for years.

Throughout the day the most common comment I received was, "You look different. You shaved!" Well, I did look different, because my hair's much longer than it was at the last ConFurence; but I'd shaved before CF8.

At some point Revar's player gave me an "RSS Con" badge. I observed that the other people wearing them had filled in a character name and a "job title" on theirs, so I wrote in "Jemara, sociopath."

Mel. White and I had a brief conversation about the disrepair of the comics industry. Apparently things are getting so bad that even many Marvel and DC books are selling in the 5-10K range, with "top flight" books hitting maybe 20-30K. This is a hell of a drop from a few years ago. I may have to revise my thoughts about the shrinking audience for furry books--it might be argued that furry titles are shrinking proportionately less than non-furry ones.

This isn't a convincing argument for companies to produce furry books, though--I'm not sure tiny Radio Comix will be able to survive indefinitely on the margins they must have, and a company like Dark Horse surely wouldn't deal with books selling in the 2K range. I still hold that when most modern books--even some of the good ones--are compared on a qualitative level to titles like The Dreamery and Critters, they don't come off too well. Would getting back to the level of the old Fantagraphics books recover any lost market share? Might it be possible for a quality-driven company--granted, with sufficient marketing capital, savvy promotion, razor-perfect timing and more than a little sheer chutzpah--to produce a furry book that outsold at least the midline superhero titles? A seeming pipe-dream, but worth pursuing.

We ate dinner at a Japanese restaurant with a bunch of folks from a mostly-private roleplaying MUCK that I'm on, although I seem to never have time to actually roleplay there. It was nice to see the group, even though the restaurant itself was notable only for humor value. When they seated us, they said that things might be a bit slow. They weren't kidding. We'd been there nearly a half-hour before our orders were taken, and it took well over a half-hour longer before they brought the salads. Some of them. Food was brought sporadically over the next hour, not always the right food to the right person. At least the food itself wasn't that interesting.

Saturday I learned that Bart Fox spent Friday at the con with one of Chip Unicorn's two name badges. Saturday, though, he's to be Toivo, as Toivo has decided that after one day of the con he's "seen everything" and would like to rent a car and drive to the ocean. For myself, I was vaguely annoyed that my room still smelled like mold--penicillin, I think--and that the staff hadn't brought any new coffee for the in-room coffee maker.

This day was to be my buying day. I bought both issues of Tygger Graf's comic Guardian Knights, as well as both issues of Matt Henry's Milikardo Knights. The former I simply never saw anywhere; the latter I saw at cons, but never got around to buying, partially for the highly logical and rational reason that I didn't like the cover typography. Okay, kick me. I still don't like the cover typography, but it's a darn good book. Anyway, I also bought a few fanzines, and decided to get a con name badge drawn by Genesis (Cook) Whitmore, featuring one of my less well-known FurryMUCK characters. (There are a few people who've played more characters there than I have over the years, but--given that I lost count sometime in '96, when the number was around 40, not that many.)

I also went through the art show that day; unfortunately--or maybe fortunately--I didn't make it back in time for Roz Gibson's informal "worst of show" awards. On a more serious level, the show was bigger than ever (according to Mark Merlino, it's surpassed WorldCon's art show in size). It had some pretty knockout pieces by artists like Heather Bruton, April Lee, Conrad Wong and Susan Van Camp. And, a condescending "warning" on the entrance to the adults-only section that's been there in past years wasn't present this time, removing one of my few real pet peeves with the con.

There was an interesting comment made during the meet the guests panel, when the guests were asked whether or not there was really a bias in publishing against Furry books. The reply was that editors are ultimately looking for books which will sell enough to get past the break-even point. They have to believe that there's a market for them, that they can reach that market, and that the book is good enough to sell to that market. The implication is that furry fandom itself isn't a big enough market to accomplish that, which is likely true: a "furry" book would have to have enough appeal to sell ten thousand copies, not just one thousand.

Mel. White also added comments about manuscript format--that it's up to the writer to make sure that they're hitting all the required notes, i.e., manuscript format, cover letter style, synopsis if required, manuscript length, and so on. Is most furry stuff hip to that? In my experience, no. I've done five issues of furry and semi-furry publications (the original three-issue run of Mythagoras, and a single issue each of the amazing self-destructing zines Zoomorphica and the literary incarnation of Mythagoras). Consistently, the manuscripts that came in formatted correctly were from previously published authors--or, in the most recent case, from non-furry authors. Most of the stuff by furry fans, even ones who were good writers (even one who's had a furry novel published!), wasn't in proper format. To add a faintly ironic footnote, the original question mentioned Paul Kidd's comic Fangs of Ka'ath and the trouble Paul had trying to sell it as a novel--but the person asking the question attributed the writing to Javier Ruiz, the comic's artist, rather than to Mr. Kidd.

Later in the day I went to the web serial panel that Regan Pylman hosted, with contribution from Elf Sternberg. Regan seemed as nice a person as you'd be likely to meet there, which I expected, and was in high spirits--definitely good. I'm not sure what I took from the panel, other than the realization that Elf is a poster child for a college writing class. The man writes down his characters and plot ideas on color-coded index cards, for God's sake. My own plotting style is closer to Regan's, with the caveat that she's actually producing things on a regular basis and I'm not. I'm not closer to starting the web serial idea I kicked around a long time ago (based on a novelette I wrote, Only With Thine Eyes, that perhaps four people in furrydom probably remember), but I am more convinced there'd be an audience for it.

That evening was an unusually quiet dinner for a con--Scott, Bill, Toivo and I drove north on Beach Boulevard and ate at a Mexican restaurant about twenty minutes from the hotel. Despite being in California, I don't know that it was any more authentic than a Mexican restaurant in Florida, although Bill had an unusual dish best described as squid wiener schnitzel. Or maybe nothing is best described that way.

Part of Sunday doesn't belong in the con report, if you take a strict view. Toivo was still basically uninterested in being at the convention, and Scott and I were willing to go along to "the hills," Toivo's ostensible destination for the day. So after another run through the dealers' room and confirmation that the Lynx picture in the art show I was interested in had left my price range, we all headed out, first in a direction no more specific than "to the east." This quickly became "to the desert."

We took a charmingly winding route through wine country near San Diego to eventually arrive at Anzo-Borrego Desert State Park. The landscape there is like a Road Runner cartoon, roads cut into the sides of rocky mountains and wending between rockslide areas. I haven't been in a desert since the road trip to CF2 that Jimmy Chin and I made; it's easy to forget how alive the Southwestern desert really is. I'm not used to being at a real loss for words, but I still haven't found the best way to describe this side trip.

When we returned, Kim was interested in dinner, and a group headed out to Knott's Berry Farm--only to return when the dinner wait was 90 minutes. Kim's plan at that point was essentially to walk in a straight line until he hit a restaurant that had a reasonable wait, and a group of about fifteen went with him on this. (Scott referred to this as "linear accelerator logic.") In the meantime, though, Cary Sandvig had asked me if I wanted to go out for "expensive Japanese food," so that's what Toivo, Scott and I ended up doing--driving about 30 minutes south to a restaurant in Newport called Koto. As it turned out, the other group ended up at IHOP.

That evening I exchanged a few words with Mark, and a few words with Steve Gattuso, who seems quite happy that he's not going to be running the dealers' room next year.

So how was the con overall? I'm never sure what specifics to expect, but I did expect it to be better than CF8, and it was. (In case anyone asks, yes, I liked CF8, too.) And I expect CF10 to be better still--but different. For one, being held over Easter weekend will prevent some people from returning, like Scott and Gen Whitmore. For another, Dwight Dutton pointed out that (despite that weekend being a religious holiday) several more "mainstream" science fiction cons are held that weekend, which may pull away some of the fans whose interest in furrydom is more casual. I don't know if these factors will cause a drop in attendance (the new digs in San Diego have a lot more space, not to mention more growing room), nor--following Dwight's theory--if they'll have a discernible affect on the interests of the attendees. But, even as more furry-specific and furry-friendly cons fire up around the country, it seems clear that ConFurence will remain the furry con to get to for the foreseeable future.

-- Watts Martin