World Fantasy Con 2025
Last week, I travelled down from Nottingham to Brighton to attend 2025’s World Fantasy Convention. I’d booked my tickets before I fell ill with chronic fatigue syndrome, so I knew that I’d have to pace myself and put my health first. This involved lots of breaks, returning to the hotel to sleep in the afternoons, and sadly admitting that I couldn’t attend every fabulous panel I wanted to.
BUT
What I did manage to do with my time was just as magical as I’d hoped. I attended sessions about:
AI in the publishing industry (and the future is not as bleak as you might think – more on that in a different blog post)
magic systems in fantasy (I took many notes and completely nerded out on what I hope is going to be my PhD one day)
injuries and wounds in fantasy fiction (led by the fabulous Jenni Coutts) which was perhaps the most enjoyable and engaging session of the whole convention for me. If you want to write injuries right, you need to do your research; and stop having characters knocked out only to awaken hours later completely symptom-free!
What else did I do?
Well, I met a lot of fabulous people. I bumped into two lecturers from when I was a Creative Writing student at the University of Bedfordshire (hi Tim and Ed!), met my Writing Fantasy tutor in person for the first time (hi Lucy!), and had fantastic conversations with agents, editors, aspiring writers, established authors, artists and specialists/experts in various aspects of the genre.
It felt amazing to be out of the house, and though my chronic fatigue restricted a lot of what I could do, I gained so much from all the talks I had and the panels I attended. I only wish I’d felt well enough to attend the awards evening and see the author collect his award for the category I was a juror for this year (non-fiction)! Congratulations to Sacha Coward for your work Queer as Folklore: The Hidden Queer History of Myths and Monsters.
To finish this blog, because I’m still riding the high of the event but fatigue is, well, fatigue-ing, I will leave you with one final photo of me meeting one of my favourite fantasy writers, Kristen Britain. If you haven’t read the Green Rider series, check it out!
I actually met KRISTEN BRITAIN!!!!
Until next time!
Heather