Perrianne has suggested that I write an article about our move to a new weekend. She has done a remarkable job of adapting traditional pirate methods of employee persuasion to the fulfillment of her editorial duties. She calls her methods, "The Seven Deadly Habits of Highly Effective Pirates."
I had covered the basic advantages and disadvantages of our move to a different weekend in a letter written back in October. This letter was mailed out along with the second edition of our newsletter to over one thousand of our pre-supporters. Please request a copy if you are a new crew member and would like to read it.
Briefly stated, we learned back in August that the National Guard has signed a contract with the Baltimore Convention Center for the 1998 Labor Day weekend. Naturally, our committee had the first option on that weekend. But we had not signed a contract since it would have required a substantial monetary deposit in advance.
Our committee officers searched for a solution to our dilemma prior to making an public announcement. First we looked for alternative locations that would be available for the 1998 Labor Day weekend but found nothing in either the Baltimore or Washington area.
That left us with the choice of trying to obtain the Baltimore Convention Center for a different weekend. The people at the Convention Center were very helpful in getting us in contact with the other groups that had options on the weekends around Labor Day in 1998. And the group with the first option on the weekend of August 8-9 was willing to transfer that option to us. At our October committee meeting, we voted unanimously to move our bid to August 5-9, 1998 (Wednesday through Sunday).
We have gotten a good response to our decision to continue our Worldcon bid for a different weekend. Many fans are now parents, teachers, or students. In recent years, they have found it difficult to attend a Worldcon on the Labor Day weekend since some schools are now opening just after Labor Day. In many cases, college students and teachers even have to go back to school before Labor Day to prepare for classes.
Now we can get on to some juicy stuff. Yes, as I had stated above, some of our committee members knew that we had lost the 1998 Labor Day weekend before Con-Adian, the 1994 Worldcon. The officers made a decision to not make any announcements at Winnipeg until they knew which course of action we would be taking.
I've heard that there is a certain Big Name Writer bad-mouthing our bid at conventions. We have committed the sin of deliberately avoiding the weekend chosen for the Society for Creative Anachronism's annual Pennsic War in Pennsylvania. I'm sorry he feels that way but I'm glad we didn't have to schedule our Worldcon bid for that same weekend. Many members of the SCA are science fiction fans. In fact, Poul Anderson was one of the founding members of the SCA. (Wait until that writer finds out that we also avoided choosing the weekend of the 1998 San Diego Comic Convention.)