Tomorrow, October 21, is the official start of this year’s Bouchercon, the longtime world convention of crime and mystery writers and readers, this year in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

(And I hope you recognize the “take off you hosers” reference in the headline to Bob and Doug McKenzie, the Canadian brothers that Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas created for SCTV a million years ago.)

I’m not at Bcon this year but quite a few friends are up there, pre-gaming for the festivities and seeing the sights, including some of the best scenery in the world.

As a veteran of the two most recent Bcons, in Nashville and New Orleans, I’d offer some helpful tips if you’re attending, but I’m sure anybody who’s there or soon will be won’t see this until after they’re home – if they ever see it at all.

So maybe just some observations, based on my own experiences:

The facility can have a huge impact on your enjoyment. The hotel and conference rooms in New Orleans in 2025 were just about ideal, and that was especially welcome after the awful venue at the Opryland resort and conference center in Nashville in 2024. The Nashville site was, at more than 3 million square feet, way too big. It was hard to run into other writers and readers in that behemoth, even around the hospitality area and book marketplace. If you were seeking coffee, you had a slightly better chance of finding your people.

Speaking of which – your people, not your coffee – you’ll find yourself staring at people’s name tags if you have face blindness or don’t recognize people easily from real life or social media. Everybody does this awkward scoping out of credentials. That fact doesn’t make it any less awkward, but at least people understand why you’re peering at their midsection before you look up at their face.

And please, by all means, find your people, even if they only become your people during the course of the hunt for coffee, bull sessions in the bar and quick conversations between panels.

After the first day of Bcon in Nashville, I was ready to go home. I wanted to leave first thing Thursday morning. I was miserable. I was unable to connect with anyone and I wanted to make like a tree and get out of there.

I couldn’t, though, because I was on a Friday afternoon panel.

Luckily, author and all-around great person Shelley Kubitz, who I kinda knew from Mystery Writers of America Midwest, invited me to hang out with people and through Shelley I met more people.

That’s my biggest piece of advice: Find your people.

Enjoy the panels. It’s so cool to hear people talk about writing and the industry and, in my standard once-a-year panel service, I’ve made connections that continued long after everyone went home.

Attend the annual membership meeting and vote! One of the best things about Bcon is that by virtue of attending, you’re part of the Bouchercon general membership and you can vote on issues to be decided by the general membership. For example: We voted to approve Indianapolis as a future Bouchercon site. Making your voice heard and your vote count is not only applicable in the real world.

And the books! Around the edges of meeting old and new friends, enjoying the panels, making connections and being a tourist in that year’s city, you get exposed to hundreds of books written by Bouchercon authors and the best crime, thriller and mystery writers in the world. Traditionally, Bcon attendees get tickets to pick out a handful of books to keep, but there are so many great books for sale in the Bcon bookstore.

And … if you have your own book, the thrill of seeing it in the Bcon bookstore is something I’ll never forget.

My first novel, THAT OCTOBER, had been out for a few months by the time of the 2025 Bcon and I’d made arrangements with that year’s bookseller to have if offered for sale in the Bcon bookstore. My novels have since been picked up by a few brick-and-mortar bookstores – and they’re available online, of course – but seeing it displayed alongside other authors, including the top talents in the business, is an unforgettable thrill for me

So I hope all you folks, writers and readers, enjoy Bouchercon 2026 in Calgary this week and get home safely. I’ll have FOMO big time for not being there. If the world is still turning, I hope to go to Bcon in Washington DC in 2027 and Indianapolis in 2028.

And if I see you staring at my front, I’ll probably assume I’m wearing part of my lunch on my shirt until I remember you’re just trying to figure out my name. Don’t worry, I’ll be doing the same.