Author: Amber Raden

REMINDER: Film Festival Deadline April 21

Our #WhoItYourself campaign is all about celebrating you, the Whovians, and what better way to honor our favorite film success than with a little film of your own? We introduced our first Film Festival this year for that very reason, and the deadline is approaching faster than you can say “Allons-y!”

Remember that you have until April 21 at 11:59PM CDT to submit your entry into our Film Festival. The festival is open to filmmakers of all ages. For more rules and to learn how to enter, visit our Film Festival page. Good luck!

Lars Pearson Returns to CONsole Room

We are pleased to announce that Lars Pearson will be returning to CONsole Room as a Featured Guest this year!

LARS PEARSON is founder, publisher and editor-in-chief of Mad Norwegian Press and one of the foremost experts on Doctor Who in North America. He thanks God that the new Doctor Who has finally silenced those who preferred to overlook the original show’s imagination in favor of giggling over how the spaceships looked like dish soap bottles. He’s also pleased that the new show has gotten his wife interested in Doctor Who. (Although her rabid interest in Doctor Who fanfic is slightly disturbing. It worries him when she starts randomly asking him under what conditions the TARDIS console pulsates.)

Pearson grew up on a horse farm in Story City, and is fairly certain he was a youngster at the very first DemiCon. At that event, he breathlessly watched The Curse of Fenric – then a new(ish) Doctor Who story – on grubby videotape in someone’s hotel room, but had to leave early to keep his parents from realizing that he was at one of those shows devoted to that weird Sci-Fi stuff.

As a Coe College graduate, Pearson cut his teeth as a newspaper editor (and reported on such stories as a burning brothel), then became an editor for Wizard Entertainment in New York (working on such magazines as Wizard: The Guide to Comics, ToyFare and InQuest Gamer) before a brief stint as one of two Sci-Fi/ Comics Writers at the doomed Thirsty.com in Los Angeles.

He founded Mad Norwegian Press — a publisher of SF reference guides, essay books and novels — in 2001. The company ethnically made less sense when it was based in New Orleans (he had the option of getting married by a voodoo priestess, if that tells you anything), but it now resides in Des Moines, where it is surrounded on all sides by corn and pastry-baking Scandinavians.

Along with Lance Parkin, Pearson is the co-author of Ahistory, a definitive Doctor Who text that’s now 326,000 words longer than War and Peace, and will soon incorporate nearly 2000 Who-related stories into a single timeline. Despite the obvious impediment of having a Y chromosome, Pearson was the top editor on the company’s newly formed range of essay books pertaining to women and fandom. To date, these include Chicks Dig Time Lords (2011 Hugo Award Winner, Best Related Work), Whedonistas!, Chicks Dig Comics (Hugo Award nominated, 2013), Chicks Unravel Time (Hugo Award nominated, 2013), the related Queers Dig Time Lords (Hugo Award nominated, 2014), Chicks Dig Gaming (ENnie Award nominated, 2015) and Companion Piece.

All told, Pearson has written or edited more than 40 Sci-Fi guidebooks and novels through Mad Norwegian, and in 2016 alone processed (gulp) more than a million words of Sci-Fi analysis. Having lived in the biggest and second biggest cities in America (and the most voodoo-flavored), he can personally attest that Des Moines is the best of all of them.

To read more about our Guests of Honour and Featured Guests, visit our Guests page.

Paint with Plasmavores at Our New Social Painting Events

Introducing our very first social painting events! That’s right, CONsole Room will be offering TWO original Doctor Who-themed painting events at our convention this year.

The best part? No experience is required to participate in our painting events! In each two-hour session, an artist leads you step-by-step through one of our original paintings, teaching you how to recreate the image yourself. Capture your inner Plasmavore and join us for our stand-alone GALLIFREYAN painting on Friday, or come in on Sunday with a friend or family member to paint a MONSTER-themed duo painting. All participants leave after these two-hour sessions with a 16×20 painting that they painted themselves.

Space is very limited in each session, so we encourage you to sign up soon if you’re interested in participating. More information, including images of the paintings you’ll be creating, is coming very soon. Keep an eye on our Painting with Plasmavores page for info and updates.