Minicon 42, My Experience

Since Shawn is traveling a lot this year for work, I asked programming head Rachel Kronick to only put me on panels on Saturday. However, what this meant is that I had one SERIOUSLY busy day – twelve hours at the con.

My first panel at 11 am was “Transgender Issues in SF.” I’m never quite sure why I end up on T panels, except that, of course, Ariel in my Archangel Protocol books identifies as T. I always feel like a bit of a fraud, since I tend to spend much of the discussion taking notes on books, movies, etc., that I want to read/see. Despite that, I thought the panel went well, and I have a lot of new books on my list, specifically Theodore Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X, a manga series called “Family Combo” (in English, Rachel isn’t sure I can find it translated, though), and a non-fiction book called Vested Interest: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety.

Then, I ran to the con suite to find a power bar for lunch, and then off to “Creating Believable Religions,” which I moderated. This is a particularly difficult panel to moderate general, but in particular because Lois McMaster Bujold was on it. Lois is a fantastic person and a great author, but she’s somewhat reserved. If other panelists (or audience members) talk a lot, she simply won’t (and, being the biggest name on the panel, I suspected lots of people in the audience actually wanted to hear what she had to say.) Religion is generally a difficult subject to moderate because, even though the title nicely limited us to “made-up” religions and the creation there-in, people always have a lot they want to talk about when the topic of religion/God is on the table. The room was packed (though it was a small one). Again, I thought this panel went fairly well. We ended up off-topic a lot, but I hope the conversation was an interesting one. Someone in the audience gave me a nice opportunity to talk about Tate’s work, specifically how vampirism and religion are intertwined. I really could have gone on a great length about all the strange and cool historical vampire/church connections, but, I tried to be sensitive to the topic and shut myself down. Actually, I also really wanted to talk about the history of embalming – a subject I know far too much about.

Next, I was scheduled for a signing with Pamela Dean. By chance, I ran into Eleanor Arnason and Ruth Burman. They kindly hung out with me while I sat in a deserted hallway (one fan did find me, and I signed a book for him). Other than that my friends Joe and Andrew dropped by and joined the chat. It was actually kind of a nice breather to kind of decompress after back-to-back panels.

Then, off to “City as Character.” When I originally saw the line-up on this panel, I got a weird sort of faux-nostalgia. This was the kind of panel that I was starting to get on pre-Tate, and the kind I dreamed of when I was just starting out. I was looking forward to it, but also feeling kind of sad because of a strange sense of “what I could have been” (“I coulda been a contenda!”) had I “stayed” in SF.

Anyway, it turned out to be the panel I was most disappointed in. For whatever reason Mr. DeLint, our esteemed GoH, wasn’t into it. Given the kinds of books he writes, one would think the subject would be close to his heart or something he would have insight into. Maybe it was just that – that this was the panel he most often got asked to be one – but he was strangely divorced from our conversation. Given that he was sitting next to me, his attitude had a kind of slop-over effect on me.

Plus, since I’d sort of figured that De Lint would carry this panel, I hadn’t prepared much for it. Perhaps more importantly, we never got into the stuff I really wanted to talk about. I never broke in with my bits, because I wasn’t sure how on-topic they really were. What I really wanted to talk about was how city magic has a lot to do with city-fauna and flora. I think, for instance, when I write about magical occurrences in Madison, I’m thinking about crows, jays, deer, timber wolves, and the magic of deciduous trees and prairie flowers. I think this is part of what makes each town have its own character – flavor, particularly when used in urban fantasy. Eleanor and I ended up talking about this on the ride home that night, but I wish it had come up on the panel. I found out, for instance, that there have been cougar sighting in the southern suburbs of the Twin Cites. I shared with Eleanor the article I read in a wildlife conservancy magazine about the coyote “problem” in cities like New York and San Francisco. Neat stuff, but not really about cities as characters in fiction.

Instead, the whole room got momentarily derailed by the Minneapolis vs. Saint Paul THANG. Teresa Neilsen Hayden seemed fascinated by the sudden division (and excitement) that bringing that up caused. However, it was totally OT, and she (wisely, I think) reined that in. However, I think it would be a great deal of fun to propose a panel in for future Twin City area cons about the differences between Minneapolis and St. Paul. I promised someone in the audience that I’d give her the title of a book I was reading when I was doing research into this phenomenon for the St. Paul magic book I started. The title for her (and anyone else interested) is Mary Lethert Wingerd’s CLAIMING THE CITY: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place in Saint Paul.

Then, I went on a dinner excursion with a whole slue of people over to TGI-Fridays. I ended up bragging on Mason a lot, and we had a fascinating discussion about good chapter books for early readers that are appropriate for, well, five and six year-olds. (For the answers, check out the archives of Naomi Kritzer’s LJ.) I also got a chance to catch up with Laurel Winter and hear about her new life in North Carolina.

Post-dinner I had a pre-reading freak out since I forgot to bring reading materials. Laurie nicely agreed to let me us her computer (and the wireless sweet spot poolside) to download the latest copy of the work in progress. I read a bit of that, and the beginning of “The Second Coming of Emily” which has appeared here. Not a lot of people came, and, speaking of precocious readers, there was an eight year old in the audience so I had to on-the-fly clean up some of my language and situations.

Ironically, my next panel was on swearing.

“Frell, Frack, Feiwu! A History of SF & F Swear Words” which, also, somewhat unexpectedly turned out to be my best panel. Given that it was post the Mike Ford memorial and somewhat at the tail-end of paneling for the con, I thought it was moderately well attended.

However, I got a cup of coffee and, I dunno, a second wind. Plus, just saying “mother-fraker” makes me happy, so I said it a LOT. Plus, though I was originally baffled why I was the moderator of this panel, it turns out I am rather into the subject manner. The tangents we ended up having – about what other, particularly non-Western, cultures swear about, and about language in general – revved me up. I don’t know if I moderated particularly well, being kind of generally wound up, but I think we all had fun.

I ended up coming back to the con on Sunday with Mason in tow to collect “payment” from Dreamhaven for the books I gave them to sell. Mason enjoyed the con, particularly since Russell Letson was playing his guitar in the signing spot and we danced together there. Also, he loved showing off his badge (actually an old one from a MarsCon) which has a picture of a blue demon, that Mason has always said looks like the “monster from ‘One Night on Bald Mountain’” in Fantasia.

All and all a good con, I’d say. I’d go back.