Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Indie Gathering

Well...it's not quite what I expected...and yet it was. It's taking place in a hotel-conference building in the middle of nowhere, in a few back rooms. Everyone is very pleasant and positive-thinking. I've only seen about 3 dozen people here, so far, but I'm assuming Saturday-Sunday are the big days. They're holding seminars and lectures and all that stuff at the same time they're projecting features and shorts onto a screen -- off a Blue Ray projector.

I saw an interesting broken romance short made in Australia by a Chinese group, where a girl imagines stories about falling in love with her teacher, never realizing he's doing the same thing. And a long-winded documentary about the porn biz called "Risky Business" that could have been trimmed by half an hour and still made the same points. There were only 3 of us left in the room by the time it was over.

No one to network with, this evening...unless you count Joe Estevez, Martin Sheen's brother. He's holding a seminar on acting, tomorrow, so I may attend.

But overall, it reminds me of a Science-fiction convention a friend of mine, in Houston, put on. He owned an SF bookstore and was heavy into that and James Bond. It was at a Holiday Inn or something like that, used one conference room and had fifteen exhibitors with their wares set out on fold-out tables...five more than all the people who came to look things over, half of whom were friends like me. Nice effort, but not like the conventions I've seen.

What the heck; the awards ceremony is Sunday so I'll stick around till then. At least I came.


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