As anyone who reads this column (or my newsletter) regularly knows, I’m currently managing two very different large scale projects.
The Sacramento Book Festival is hyper local, a book event celebrating the best authors that the Sacramento region has to offer.
NebulaCon is being crafted remotely, and will be held in Chicago. It celebrates the best authors Science Fiction has to offer.
The book festival is something I helped build from the ground up along with my great team – Tim, Judith, Bel, Teri, and Lois. We all feel a great deal of personal pride about this amazing event. NebulaCon, by contrast, is a venerable tradition with a much longer history, going back to 1965. My arrival to it just three months before it happens means I’m playing catch-up with the work of all the great people who have been laboring at it for the better part of a year.
The Festival is a one-and-done – a single day which will fly by as quickly as a Thanksgiving Dinner after hours and hours of extensive preparations. NebulaCon, by contrast, spans five days, and will require my presence there for a few days beforehand to work on set-up.
The Festival celebrates works across all genres, while NebulaCon is laser focused on sci-fi and fantasy.
And yet, for all their differences, both of these events have one thing in common – a deep and abiding love for human-written books and the authors who write them. At a time when AI is being shoehorned into everything we do with no regard for whether we want it or not or if it even makes sense, it’s heartening to see institutions like these standing up for human creativity, and shining a light in the darkness.
The Sacramento Book Festival’s motto this year is Building Community Book by Book. When the world seems hell-bent on tearing itself apart, it’s empowering to be a part of two events doing the harder work of bringing us – and our ideas – together.
It matters.
If more people would roll up their sleeves and do the hard work of community building, creating bridges between different kinds of folks, maybe the world would start to heal.
I can only hope it’s so, and try my best to do my part.