{"id":6006,"date":"2011-09-04T08:32:03","date_gmt":"2011-09-04T13:32:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.net\/?p=6006"},"modified":"2016-01-15T15:59:41","modified_gmt":"2016-01-15T20:59:41","slug":"on-contemplating-philcon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=6006","title":{"rendered":"On Contemplating Philcon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"philcon2011-logo\"Yesterday evening I received a surprising e-mail — it was a pre-invite to Philcon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Well, it was surprising to me<\/i>; things like this are always<\/i> surprising to me.<\/p>\n

Philcon is, obviously, a science-fiction convention held every November in Philadelphia. I knew of it it when I lived outside Philly about a decade ago, but working in retail as I did, getting down to the con would have been impossible; there are times of the year that one can’t take time off from work, and the week before Thanksgiving is one of those times. After I moved to Baltimore five years ago, I got an invite to Philcon, and I went up for a day and had a nice time.<\/p>\n

But I’ve never been back.<\/p>\n

So when the pre-invite arrived yesterday, I started rolling it around in my head.<\/p>\n

Should I go to Philcon? Well, I should do lots<\/i> of things, of course I should<\/i> go… \ud83d\ude09 That’s maybe not the right question.<\/p>\n

Can I afford<\/i> Philcon. Ah, a much better question. Writers don’t make a lot of money, after all. *shrug*<\/p>\n

I priced the hotel room. Which actually wasn’t bad, much less than I was expecting.<\/p>\n

I figured up what gas would be likely to be for driving up and driving back.<\/p>\n

Meals? Well, I can always stop at Dollar Tree and stock up on off-brand (and shockingly dry) apple newtons for the weekend. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

To make a long story short, if I set aside a certain amount of money from the next five paychecks, Philcon should be doable. I try to live a frugal life anyway<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The ironic thing? Until about a month ago, I had an emergency fund that would have covered this. (Okay, it was emergency fund\/trip to Scotland fund, since I’ve never been to Scotland and would really like to go.) But I had to spend the emergency fund; some of it went to my grandmother’s funeral, the rest went to replacing my parents’ hot water heater.<\/p>\n

Philcon’s a little different than the kind of conventions I normally attend. More literary, for one thing. A kind of terra incognita<\/i>, I suppose. It’s always good to break out of one’s comfort zone.<\/p>\n

Mark me down for a tentative leaning toward certain, then. Philcon. November 18th through 20th in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Now I just have to come up with some programming to pitch. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

And this reminds me that I need to get Farpoint<\/a> squared away, too. That’s just five months away. Tempus fugit<\/i>…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday evening I received a surprising e-mail — it was a pre-invite to Philcon. Well, it was surprising to me; things like this are always surprising to me. Philcon is, obviously, a science-fiction convention held every November in Philadelphia. I knew of it it when I lived outside Philly about a decade ago, but workingContinue reading “On Contemplating Philcon”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[50,463,53,54,4102],"class_list":["post-6006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-convention","tag-philadelphia","tag-philcon","tag-science-fiction","tag-writing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6006\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}