Meg Totusek

A quick commercial announcement: through 11:59 PST tonight, if you buy or own the Kindle edition of Libriomancer, you can pick up the audio book for $0.99.

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Meg Totusek is one of the moderators of the Journeyplatypi of Fandom group. As a big platypus fan myself, that was enough information for me to put her onto my list of Generally Awesome People.

Meg was kind enough to talk about conrunning, fandom, conflicts, and more of the behind-the-scenes stuff fans don’t always see.

Also, I’m told her mother has promised to kick my butt at WindyCon and make me eat nothing but healthy food if anyone is mean to Meg, so please be nice!

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1. For those of us who might not be familiar with SMOFs and JOFs, what are the Journeyplatypi of Fandom, and how did you come to count yourself among this august company?

The Journey Platypi are a group of con runners similar to the SMOFs (and some of us happen to be both!) who converse on Facebook about a wide variety of topics including registration queues, facilities, marketing, harassment policies and really anything that our members want to talk about. We work really hard to make sure that the group has a positive feel — we being myself and four other awesome mods: Warren Buff, Cathy Mullican, Crystal Huff and James Bacon — so that hopefully the group has a better chance of being productive. The Platypus became our mascot after a discussion about keeping things gender neutral, and because we love ridiculous things.

I’ve been in fandom literally all my life, but really got involved in running cons on a higher level in the last few years, and with JOF more than a year ago when it started up. I couldn’t tell you an exact date because the Facebook logs won’t tell me any more than that and I was too busy to note it myself.

2. You said you focus on running cons and fixing problems. Tell us a bit more about what’s involved there, and what kind of problems you work on.

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