So I’m in Seattle getting my pre-E3 briefing from Microsoft and I plum forgot to blog until now. (If anybody knows what plum means in that sentence, feel free to let me know.) I have no idea whatsoever what’s going on in the wider world. But I wanted to write up a few notes about LeakyCon, where I was last week. I’m going to lay it on the line: LeakyCon was kind of awesome.
I didn’t really know what to expect from it. First of all it was in Boston, where I rarely go willingly, because I’m from there, and that is where the Hellmouth is. Second, I didn’t know whether fans would even want me there. The vast majority of Harry Potter fans — like human beings in general — have no idea who I am. Then there are other Harry Potter fans who have been annoyed by stuff I’ve written about Harry Potter. I mean God knows, I’ve been annoyed by some stuff I’ve written about Harry Potter. Plus I was giving a presentation about my book, which granted is related to Harry Potter, but still, why should anybody care?
But you walk in, and right off the bat you realize you are in the presence of people who are nerdy and don’t care who knows it. Some people are in costume, some aren’t. Some are old. Some are young. But all of them have paid actual money to go to a Harry Potter convention. There is a kind of moral bravery about that that just makes me happy.
And everybody was super-nice. I am not a wildly social person — in fact I am a wildly anti-social person — but every time I passed somebody with a LeakyCon name tag hanging from a LeakyCon lanyard, I felt an uncontrollable urge to talk to them. Sometimes I even did. If I say that LeakyCon felt like a very safe place, I don’t know if that will convey what I mean, but that’s what it felt like.
On Friday night there was a massive wizard rock show, in a huge hall with a cash bar at one end and a stage and a dance floor at the other. I did not dance, because I am massively old, but I did sit at a table and drink beer and grin goofily. Because that’s how I felt: goofily happy. I want to be ironic about the whole thing, but there was something about LeakyCon that just defused all attempts at irony.