lydamorehouse | Entries tagged with panel discussion

Image: Downtown Minneapolis (from Nicollet Mall, near the convention hotel.)

This one will probably get long, so I'll try to remember to put some of it under a cut.

I did not go to Convergence on Thursday, since I had to work that night. STUPIDLY, I also agreed to work today--so, if I don't get through the whole convention, I'll pick the story up wherever I left it off tomorrow.

FRIDAY, (my) Day One.

( Transit complaints and cosplay... )

SATURDAY, (my) Day Two

( a short day... )

SUNDAY, (my) Day Three/Final Day.
( panels and goblins... )

I should probably have sat down to write this earlier this morning, but I had another job to apply for and some appointment/interview one-car family shinanigans to untangle for tomorrow. I will see what I can remember.

I headed off to the convention hotel early on Sunday morning because I wanted to meet up with a friend with whom I played a multi-player journaling RPG called "The Machine." I was the first person to write the entries and so I had not seen how the story ended. I hung out with them in the Bozo Bus Tribune office, read the journal. I agreed to take it with me in the hopes that maybe we could find a fourth player to pass it on to as there was room in the diary, and... I literally, JUST NOW, realized I lost the journal somehwere at the con!

What is spooky about this?

The RPG actually suggests that you consider leaving the journal somewhere for others to find. Apparently, without intending to, I followed the rules.

Weird.

Anyway, I had one panel on Sunday, a panel I was dreading because not only was I moderating, but also it did not seem like something we could talk about for an hour. That is "The Second Book." As I was telling a lot of people I ran into before the panel, the problem I had was that for a lot of professionally published authors the answer to the questions posed as part of the panel description, like, "How do you know if you have a second book's worth of story?" and "When do you decide to write a sequel?" is often, "When the publisher tells me they're going to buy it." Which is kind of a bummer of an answer? Like, we *could* have had a "welcome to the cold hard truths about publishing" panel, but I did not think that was what Minicon intended for this discussion. Plus, half the panelists were self- or small press published. Clearly, they likely had different answers to the questions--fun answers! Interesting answers!

I think the panel went okay? I did try to strike a balance.

It's often hard to tell how the panel is going when you're the person moderating because, while your fellow panelists are talking, you're trying to listen for things in what they are saying to build on, while also trying to gauge the audience's interest level and making sure all the panelists who seem keen to jump in or add on or otherwise have a chance to speak get an opportunity to do so (and, of course, making sure that folks who aren't good at jumping in still have a chance to talk, if they want.) It's a lot of mental gymnastics. A job that I don't make easier for myself by preparing for. I prepare? I sometimes bring questions I don't want to forget to ask, but sometimes I show up with nothing. Not because I'm not ready to lead the discussion or ask questions, but because I really prefer, when possible, to have a dynamic, on the fly conversation among the panelists. So I just say that up front on any panel I'm moderating, ie, "I hope we can have a conversation," and then I also I encourage people to jump in when they have a thought. It can be more difficult to manage, but it tends to make for a livelier panel than those that just pose a question and go down the line to get answers from panelists 1, 2, 3, ... At least, IMHO, which, let's be honest is probably not all that humble if I'm the sort of asshole who shows up without notes. *grins*

This was a tough one though, because, as I mentioned, the answers really do depend on how you're publishing. I wrote a second book the series because my agent sold a three book contract after he sold my first novel. That was the entirity of my thought process on the matter. But, we did pull out more creative answers and we talked a bit about the "new" (it's several decades old by now) trend to have a first book just end in the middle of the adventure because the PRESUMPTION is that there will be a follow-up book that will simply pick up where the story left off. I hate these? I feel like a book should have a beginning midddle and end. I wrote my series with a larger plot also happening that built-up as the story continued, but each book can stand alone. This is really not been the done thing for some time, and it can bite an author in the butt. I got to the end of Marguette Reed's book Archangel and literally thought that I had a faulty copy as it seemed to end mid-scene. There has not been a second book to my knowledge.

And, I mean, I am currently struggling to write the sequel to Welcome to Boy. Net so there's that.

Anyway, I ended the con by helping a friend jump her car. As I told a different friend later, I do believe that it is my solemn duty as a butch lesbian not only to always offer to aid any damsel in distress, but ESPECIALLY if the trouble is car related. They might pull my butch card if I don't!

I'd forgotten to mention that one set of folks that I ran into was Paula R. B. and Erik B. Paula has been knitting Norwegian Resistance hats and asked me if I wanted one made for me. Of course, I said yes. I feel, in fact, that the only properly magical way to get one of these hats is if someone knits one for you (or you knit one for yourself.) I did not expect that she would be able to finish an entire hat in one day, but she did. By the time I was leaving the con, she handed one to me!! I have not yet taken a proper selfie in it, but I will do that ASAP and post it here.

Image: Minicon Con Suite signage done in intentional 60s/70s style.

Minicon is going to stop putting me on panels. I managed to miss another one yesterday (Saturday.) I would say through no fault of my own, but that would be a lie. I made the very intentional decision that I wanted dinner that was more than a gobbled con suite sandwhich.The only "to be fair to me" part of this equation is the fact that I had a solid block of panels fro 5:30 pm until 9:30 pm and no dinner break. Still, I probably could have made it work with a little inguinity. (Voice over: Readers, she did not.)

But, we'll get to that part of the story in a minute.

I got to the convention yesterday some time just afternoon again. Since the Con Suite seems to be the hang out and find people to chat with place at Minicon, I wandered over there with the secondary thought that more coffee is, for me, never a bad idea.I know many people for whom "more coffee" is a terrible idea or for whom it quickly reaches the level of a terrible idea, but I am one of those lucky souls who can--and do--drink caffeinated coffee right up until bedtime.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the person I ran while looking for coffee was

caffeine! He was sitting with a bunch of folks that I either did not know or did not know well. As it happens, my favorite thing about cons is talking to the people I have not yet me who might be awesome. And they were! Names, of course, now escape me, but there was a mustache that I shall never forget! Very curly! Very Salvador Dali!

I had a lovely chat for a good long while with everyone there about various Apple+ shows we'd seen and now I have a recommendation to try to watch Ascention, a mini-series about a generational ship. This rather highly specific conversation that started because I had brought up the Elon Musk character type that you find in science fiction novels of a certain type, often newer SF/cyberpunk--although, not always, as I would argue the Charlie Stross's Manfred Macx from Accelerando (2005) reads as Musk-like, even though it may pre-date the Real Life version's heyday. At any rate, that got me remembering For All Mankind, an alternate history series that I absolutely adore--at least the first several seasons of. Alas, unfortunately, one thing that hasn't aged well is that it has a Musk analog, though at least the character in For All Mankind is Black. (I have a hard time finding other people who have seen it because Apple+ is not as popular a streaming service, despite the fact that it has a lot of good, originally produced SF like Silo and, of course, Murderbot.)

caffeinemeantioned that he felt I was missed on the cyberpunk panel. He felt one of the panelist was of a type that he thought I would have been a good counter to. Well, poo. Again, it was a choice I made? I can't really regret that one, though. Shawn's 59th birthday comes around only once!

At some point, despite really enjoying the company and the corresponding conversation, I decided I should probably move along and so I wandered off to check out the dealer's room. I ran into Anton P. again and he wanted to introduce me to the bookseller who is going to be at Quantum Con, so we could figure out a way to have some of my books at there. (Look at me, reminding people about this con again!!)

We made our way slowly around the room, stopping first to chat with Greg Ketter, who was staffing the Dreamhaven Books & Comics table. Greg, as you may know, went viral right after Alex Pretti's execution and so one of the things I got from him was a donation for Da'Wah Institute, a local mosque that I regularly patrol (even still.) Da'Wah is having a lot of finanical woes thanks to Operation Metro surge and is running a fundraiser: https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-with-minnesota-dawah-institute-during-a-difficult-time. Greg is not a fan of the GoFundMe model and so we arranged for me to pick up an actual direct donation. He told me a little bit about all the other causes he's been giving money to and how weird it is that people are STILL just randomly sending the store/him $20-$100 bills, sometimes with no note at all.

I managed to not buy anything in the Dealer's Room, despite being sorely tempted by a woman who makes these absolutely incredible spider brooches. I just ran out to the car to see if I was smart enough to grab one of her business cards, but, alas, I was not. If I remember to today, I will, so you all (at least all of you who are not spider-phobic) can look at these amazing objects d'art.

Then, I need to confess that I have some very dear friends, Laurie and Cate, who I run into who at cons, during the resistance, etc... (and I think because god hates me)... I always, ALWAYS flub their names. For some reason, in my head, I always want to call Cate, Cat, and Laurie, Laurel. It's annoying. I tell you this as a confession of my sins in the hope that the universe will absolve me and I CAN START GETTING IT RIGHT. Because I was talking to Anna W. and Anton and they came up to chat. I went to introduce them and completely fucked up their names again. Gods, I love for that to never happen again. (Voice over: Readers, she will do it again, later, in this very story.)

I finally went to my first panel around 4:30 pm and it was "Greg and Naomi are Still F*cking Angry." This was basically a panel for collective healing from the trauma many of us are feeling around the federal occupation that was ICE. Despite (or maybe because) of that, it was a really good panel. For those of you unfamiliar with Minicon or Twin Cities are fandom, there was ZERO push-back. Not one question from the audience of the "but aren't you all domestic terroritsts?" or "but we need to get rid of criminal immigrants, right??" variety. Not one. THIS is largely why the metro area of the Twin Cities was NOT the city/cities to fuck with. It is not 100% blue, but it is REALLY 99.9% blue here.

rant/

As a side-note. I do think it's funny in a sad way that everyone on our side who talks about this tends to forget Saint Paul and suburbs like Columbia Heights (where Liam, the Bunny hat boy is from) and will use "Minneapolis" as a short had for where EVERYTHING happened (sometimes even while filming in front of the SAINT PAUL capitol building), and, ironically, the more inclusive term for all of us is "the metro area" which fucking Trump and his cronnies got right when they called their evil, "Operation Metro Surge."

/mini rant

Anyway, my point? A good panel. Well with it.

Then, I had a panel with Naomi at 5:30 called "Evil Overlords." That one was fun, but I will admit that other than writing about Morningstar/Lucifier, I don't have a huge amount of personal experience writing about Evil Overlords. The good news is that GoH Pat Wrede does. I happen to know that

naomikritzerproposed this panel, in part, to make sure that Pat had a chance to talk about her newest novel The Dark Lord's Daughter. This panel was also an excuse to introduce a new generation to Peter's Evil Overlord, aka "The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I were an Evil Overlord" list: http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html We almost got off the rails when someone brought up some real life evil (again, why do people do that?) but the heart of the audience member's question was actually about how one DEFINES evil, generally, and so we were able to wrestle it back to true before everyone started to implode over the morality of the bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The panel I skipped in favor of dinner with Lois McMaster Bujold and Naomi Kritzer (the sheer number of Hugo awards I dined with was astronomical!) was "On Writing Badly." As I noted to the two of them, I guess I know a lot about that since my career has utterly tanked? I will have to ask around, but I sort of presume the panel was not about writers who suck at writing, but more about how important it is to allow first drafts to suck, etc.

The final panel of the evening was "Reading Dystoria vs. Living Dystopia" which turned into a very lively discussion, despite the fact that it STARTED at 8:30 pm. Again, Naomi moderated. Adam Stemple and

pegkerrwere on the panel with me. Peg started us off in a good direction talking about how writing the fan-project Alternity surprised her by how many responses to an evil overlord (Voldemort in this case) used in the local response to Metro Surge that they predicted. Naomi asked us what we thought dystopia novels and stories got wrong in comparison to Real Life Dystopia and what they got right? A lot of the responses to the first question seemed to revolve around the fact that none of us expected evil to be this obvious and this stupid. Books and other media have prepared us largely for smart and clever evil. I tried to talk a bit about the fact that I feel like one of the things that books about dystopia get wrong is the idea that it takes someone special (or with a special McGuffin, like the One Ring) to resist. This met with some push-back (and not necessarily wrongly) from the audience who wanted to argue that the Hobbits were supposed to represent ordinary people. I agree with that? My issue is that Frodo did inherit the One Ring, so it's not like he stepped up JUST BECAUSE. He was called because he had the McGuffin and had to choose to be a hero. Most of the people I know who faced guns with whistles were ordinary people, some in their pajamas, who decided that evil simply must be stopped right here, right now. I think I made my point better when I suggested that a way to think about it is how different a triology LotR would have been if the first town that the Nazgul stopped at looking for "Baggins" simply grabbed their whistles and formed a human chain saying, "We don't know any Baggins, but we will not let you take them!"

Because that's what happened here, in essence.The Nagzul showed up and we said, "We see evil and we are willing die to make sure that it does not spread."

Obviously, that didn't fully happen yet, but that was what the vibe of our response was.

ANYWAY. That very naturally led to me hanging out in the con suite way too late, drinking coffee with a dear friend who was a former A.I.M. member, and swapping "war stories" from the ICE raids. (Side note: my friend obviously generally has more expreience facting down Federal Agents and it made me feel weird about the work I've done for the resistance. Like? Was I brave enough? Does any of it count if I never saw an ICE agent FOR CERTAIN? Of course, in the morning light, I see that all actions against fascism are acts of bravery, but it is so weirdly easy to turn this into a heirarchy of activism.)

Right! Well, that got long! Apologies for that. I'm off now to hopefully hang out with a friend who I played a journaling RPG with. I started the project, mailed it to Poland, and then the person in Poland mailed it to this friend who wrapped up the adventure. So, I haven't seen the finished project. I have one panel today that I am moderating called "Second Book in the Series." I'll let you know tomorrow how all that goes!

It's about a quarter to ten in the morning on Saturday as I start this. I am planning on heading over the convention in a little while, but, once again, I thought I'd try to do an old-timey con report (even though the last time I did this for Capclave, I was well and truly burned by the experience.) Well, you know what they say! Never let the bastards get you down!

As you know, gentle reader, I had a conflict with my two evening panels. For those of you just now tuning in, the conflict was my wife's birthday (observed.) Her actual birthday is (and it is no joke) April 1. We did a bunch of things for her birthday (actual) because, no matter how old she is, she always takes the day off.

Here's a lovely picture of the charcuterie we had for a "light lunch."

charuterie

Image: a table set with fancy cheeses, fancy crackers, and fancy salami

But, you may be saying, that was Wednesday! What happened yesterday at con!?

I did end up missing all of my evening panels, but I went over to the convention around noonish yesterday in order to register/pick-up my badge and to make sure to drop off the reading materials for my body double.

Again, for those of you just tuning in, knowing that I'd be missing a my own reading, I put out a call yesterday on Facebook for folks going to Minicon who might be willing to read my work for any folks who might not get the word that I was unable to attend. I got a DM almost right away from Anna Waltz. She reported to me last night that the reading seemed to go well. Likewise, I got my answers to the moderator's questions for the cyberpunk panel that I also thought I'd be missing. The moderator of that reported this morning that the audience appreicated my additional thoughts, even though I couldn't be there in person. ADULTING for the win! Look at me, being all responsible and everything.

So, as I said I went over to the hotel, got my badge, and then hung around long enough to see if I could run into Anna or

naomikritzer , who I had designated as my contact person for Anna. I ran into Anton P. who spent a lot of time reminding me that I need to let people know that I am going to be one of the guests of honor for his convention in May 15-17, Quantum Con. https://quantum-con.org/ Consider yourselves reminded!

Technically, Tate Hallaway will be the guest as Quantum Con is a paranormal/fantasy con, but, as it happens, Lyda Morehouse will also be there, since we come as a set. I think Anton has a fantasy that I will appear as Tate, in full drag, but that is NOT happening. I gave up on dresses some time ago and, at this point in my life, have none in the house that would fit me, even if I wanted to cosplay my pen name.

I also felt a little bit... I guess hungover? I was at a seder the night before and, because I actually like Mogen David, I was offered not only my cup, but Elijah's too. I did NOT actually drink that much, because I would not have made it home, if I had. (Reader, I am the lightest of the light weights when it comes to alcohol.) But, I do think I ended up drinking a little too much for me? Because I felt cloudy, distracted, and grumpy kind of all morning. Anton took me to the Green Room and filled me up on strong coffee and that seemed to do the trick at least.

After coffee, I ran into Eric H. and Polly, which... is always a little hard, since part of my mind always remembers Eric from before he got sick. Still we had some good back and forth, almost like the old days. Eventually I ran into Naomi and the two of us wandered around trying to find something for her to have that would pass as a late lunch. I suggested we brave the out of doors for the taco place that's just up the street, but unbenownst to me, it had started raining. She ended up having con suite food, which is always fine.

I hung out talking to Greg J., who is somoene I only ever run into at cons, about his early days as a music geek and his recent experience at the Bruce Springstein concert. (This reminds me that I failed to post about No Kings? I will end this post with a picture of me there. I went with Naomi as a rally buddy and we had a lovely time.) But, I really only had a little while before I had to jump back in the car and head back to pick up Shawn.

The thing I was most disappointed to have missed was Terry Garey's memorial. It started exactly when I needed to leave, but Naomi informed me this morning that she picked up the sampler someone had made of Terry's writing. At least I'll have that.

Not much convention news in my con report yet, but I should have much more about the panels and whatnot in tomorrow's round-up.

Me, No Kings, 2026 (Saint Paul)

Me looking dorky at No Kings in Saint Paul, MN. I'm holding my We Keep Us Safe poster with the loon with a baby on its back. I am also holding some signs that a stranger handed to us that is the Minnesota flag (upside down) with H-OPE written on it.

Last night, Shawn had a volunteer gig at the Ramsey County Library in Shoreview. As longtime readers know, my wife really doesn't like to drive. She's licensed, but she's generally a nervous and timid driver. On top of that, Shawn has some PTSD from an accident that happened while she was pregnant with Mason. Thus she mostly avoids driving, outside of emergencies (though she did some while I was in DC at Capclave. Go, Shawn!)

Anyway, what this means that I tagged along to the event as taxi driver. Shawn was in her meeting with the Friends for an hour... and I was left alone like a kid in a candy store.

I brought home eleven manga. Like, my bag was literally stuffed with books.

I finished one already: Two Guys at the Vet Clinic / Doubutsu Byouin no Ofutari-san by Sinonome. It's a boys' love/yaoi about a one-sided crush between a veterinarian and his boss. I'd say it's nothing to write home about, but I'll end up writing all about it over on my manga review site which you can check out if that sort of stuff interests you: https://mangakast.wordpress.com/

Okay, onward!

-----
Gaylaxicon, SUNDAY

There are a couple of things that I forgot to talk about on Saturday. One of the coolest things that happened on Saturday is that at the Murderbot panel I ran into a polycule that I'd met at the last ConFABulous. I instantly recognized them because they all wear matching rainbow masks, but also they're half the age of most of the people at our con. Plus, I feel like I would recognize them anywhere they all (there are at least four members of this polycule) because they played in a last minute Thirsty Sword Lesbians game that I threw together last ConFABulous when it was revealed to me that one of their number had come all the way from Chicago JUST to try playing this game (and when they arrived the sign-up was filled.) I still use a term that one of the players came up with for the future social media, which is "Blab" (as a Twitter/Insta/Facebook stand in.)

Anyway, I gave them my contact info and I hope they actually reach out. Three of the four are local and so they invited me to possibly come run a game with them at some point. I hope they actually do reach out. I liked the four of them quite a lot.

So that was really cool. Plus, I finally got to meet

pameladean 's partner Cameron. She was deep in discussion with my friend Rachel Gold and their partner(? friend?) Stephanie, so I think we exchanged nothing more than a confused back and forth (because Rachel bought a copy of Cameron's book for me, but it wasn't clear who was paying and if the book had gone to me or Rachel.) Still, it was nice. I'm only sorry that Cameron wasn't feeling up for being on more panels. I would have loved to have showcased her and her work more. ConFABulous is less of the kind of con where writers go, but maybe since she'll have a new book out maybe we could consider if she'd make a good GoH (again, if she's up for such a thing.) ConFABulous really doesn't do GoHs, but at least Cameron is local so it's not like it would cost the con a lot.

Sunday, of course, is generally the low key day at most conventions. Anywhere else people are hungover, etc. I, myself, was crispy. That midnight performance meant I got only five hours of sleep. So, I was definitely feeling "Sunday at the Con" in a very traditional way.

I put several "not to miss" panels on early, in the hopes of catching any folks who weren't conned out by that point. I really wanted to catch "Problematic Favs" at 10:30 AM, because it was a panel that David Lenander suggested and I had initially resisted writing up, in part because Greg Ketter was a GoH. Greg, for those of you who aren't from the Twin Cities and/or don't know, runs Dreamhaven Books & Comics. Dreamhaven was the literal mailing address for Neil Gaiman for many, many years--so much so that the Minnesota Book Awards assumed that Neil actually lived in Minneapolis (he didn't, at the time he was living in Wisconsin, which disqualified him for the award and I was at leat partly responsible for making that clear to the MN Book Awards folks. That, however, is a story for another time.) Lisa Freitag, Greg's wife, had told me at some point that Greg is still very much in denial and won't talk about Neil. So, I started to self-censor myself/the convention, but then I thought, "No. That's not cool." David L. clearly really needed to process some of this stuff, so probably that means a lot of our local community does, too. Also, so many of us in the fannish queer community, particularly trans folks, are still pissed at the active harm that JKR continues to do. So, I decided, no, let's have at it. But, to make it work, I had put

naomikritzer in charge because I know that Naomi has the skillset (and the wherewithal) to actually shout someone down and cut off the ramblers--which a lot of people (including myself) often THINK they have, but which Naomi has actively demonstrated on other panels I've seen her on.

Turns out this was a good choice.

Most of the discussion was high level--there were some real, meaningful confessions and feeling and advice, but, inevitably, someone wants to relitigate this or that. Naomi just wasn't having it. In fact, at one point the person she had to actively cut off was David L., and I'm not sure I'd've been able to do that since he's an actual friend of mine (and Naomi's, to be fair. Also, I hope David is okay and knows it was done out of love.) We also had another guy, who I later found out was also disruptive in the "Superman is WOKE and other Media Malarky" panel, who was apparently wandering back and forth between the two panels demanding to be caught up on what he'd missed while listening to the other one.

Maybe not the best start to Sunday, but you can't say it wasn't high energy! *makes awkward face*

Post that start to the day, a bunch of us hung around and debreifed in the little lounge area behind registration. This is where I got a chance to talk to one of our special guests, Blue Delliquanti (https://www.bluedelliquanti.com/ <--if you are at all a fan of graphic novels and don't know their work, here's my recommendation: GO READ THEM NOW.) It was from Blue and Lee Brontide, however, that I found out that that one guy was bothering both panels. Apparently, the only panel that went off without a hitch during the first hour was "Gay Vikings," which is only hilarious because I heard from both Dax and Eleanor Arnason that they felt unprepared. Adam Stemple who moderated the panel said that they were both so knowledgable and prepared it was almost ridiculously smart. I'm sort of sad that I coudn't be in three places at once.

I conspired with

tallgeese to blow off my final panel of the con, "Ask a GM" in order to finish the Star Trek session we started on Saturday. This was another one of those probably-not-a-good-adult-decision moment for me, but I tried to mitigate it by warning Don K., one of my co-panelist that I was intending not to be there. I totally got the Disapproving Dad look from him, which normally I can't withstand, but the truth was I was so exhausted at this point I would not have made a good panelist. I probably should have explained it that way, but I didn't. Now I have to live with my guilt.

And while that sounds flippant, I do actually feel a guilty even now. I'd put myself on that panel so that there would be a woman GM to represent. I also know that several people were curious what I might have to say about GMing, so I feel like I let them down.

But, God got me. I was, in fact, punished for my sins.

I decided to try to play a new character at the Star Trek game (a Vulcan doctor) and there was so little for the Chief Medical Officer to do in the third act of that game, that I literally threw her on a grenade at the end of the game just TO HAVE SOMETHING TO DO.

Despite that, I'd say it was, generally, a really good convention. It helps that I was able to recruit so many skilled panelists. However, I think that, should we do a Gaylaxicon again (and if I lose my mind an volunteer for the programming committee again) I would do a few things differently.

Three tracks of programming was a bit ambitious, I think. I mean, you can't know how many attendees you're going to get, but three tracks is probably best for conventions that are regularly pulling THOUSANDS, rather than hundreds, especially since our crowd was also dipursed into two tracks of gaming as well. So, we essentially had five tracks of programming (if you count the games) and that just split the numbers too much. So, even the most popular panels weren't filling the rooms as much as I'd've liked. Maybe two tracks going forward? Two + gaming, at any rate.
The other really big mistake of mine was my assumption that someone else would've alerted Dreamhaven to the names of our attending professionals. I heard through the grapevine that JM Lee left the convention early (and irritated) because he discovered that none of his books were available in the dealer's room. I will make it a point to--as EARLY as possible--start feeding any book dealers a list of people's books to have on hand and/or alerting authors that they should bring their own books to sell at the signing tables. Joey (JM) was a really early recruit of mine (and he's trad published), so I can see why he was shocked not to see any of this books available. I will complain here, only breifly, that Greg is terrible about answering emails (as is Lisa). I would have had to make a regular DRIVE to Dreamhaven to physically talk to someone in the store, but I should have done it, anyway.
Then, obviously, as much previously discussed, I think the new rule going forward (again, if there is a forward) is no paneling after 7:00 pm. We just don't stay up that late. People can find their own fun the games room if they're late nighters, I guess. Midnight slash panel? Nope, "After dinner hour slash," is more like it.
Plan an actual lunch break for panelists. That way there's no way to accidentally (which I did to both Haddayr and Naomi) book someone over a period when they should go get a food. I had initially thought that the hotel restaurant would mitigate this since we had half hour passing time between panels, but it turned out they were closed at a time when someone could have popped down and grabbed a sandwich to go or whatever.
People really liked that half-hour passing time, though. So, that's a keeper.

Obviously, there were a number of things that I heard compliments about, regarding programming. Adam could not get over the quality of the topics and how amazing his fellow panelists were. I got this note from a lot of people, actually, so that made me feel pretty good. The other comment I heard a lot was that people were having trouble deciding among the topics in any given hour because they were all interesting. Again, I'll take that as a win, actually (though you could read it another way, I suppose. Depending on your preference for these kinds of conventions. There are people who like one-track paneling for a reason.)

I don't know a lot about how the other departments did. Obviously, I participated in gaming, which, for me went well. I think the banquet was, at least, a financial success. There were a ton of people there. I talked about some of the issues with the comedy show, but comedy is always a weird one for conventions as far as I'm concerned since, as I noted, humor can so easily fall flat with us neuro-spicy nerd types. The dealer's room seemed full and active, which is good, though

tallgeese noted with some shock that we didn't seem to have a single vendor selling dice. Two of the community tables were perpetually empty: the Dungeons, Dragons & Drinks folks seemed to only show up long enough to refresh their free dice packages and Free Mom Hugs seemed entirely AWOL every time I passed their table, which was kind of weird. Possibly both groups thought we were a bigger con? I don't know what happened there.

But, yeah, otherwise, I felt it went off well.

As the person who did much of the programming planning, I knew that Saturday was our action-packed day. This was intentional. If people buy day passes, it's usually for Saturday only. I wanted it to be worth it for those folks.

Having ended my night around 11:00 pm, I had a 10:00 am panel the next morning. Last weekend was also the Twin Cities Marathon. It used to be that the marathon only screwed up traffic on Sunday, but now there are a bunch of other half-marathons and such like on Saturday as well. So, I got up extra early in order to drive around all of that and still pick up coffee for myself on the way into the con. I normally am somewhat unhappy to live as close as I do to a highway, but I was grateful for it both Saturday and Sunday because I could just swing around into downtown really easily.

Was this the morning that I spotted Kyell Gold (https://www.kyellgold.com/news.html) headed off to coffee before the convention started? I think it had to be because Friday nothing started until after noon. Yeah, this makes sense because I had budgeted so much extra time to get around the marathon that I actually ended up at the hotel far earlier than I intended. I saw him leaving the hotel and, of course, tried to shout his name from the car. But that rarely works. So, before trying to text him, I parked--in by the way, the scariest most under construction parking ramp that I've been in, in a long while. Like, it is never a safe feeling to be driving under temporary load-bearing scaffolding. Anyway, Kyell was up for some company and so I agreed to meet him at Backstory Coffee. The coffee shop was about a block and a half from the hotel and--for future ConFABulous reference--is EXTREMELY queer friendly. The signs on their door remind patrons not to use gendered language when speaking to the staff!! Love this! Also, the coffeeshop had cheap, hot breakfast options. I got myself a bean burrito wrap which, while messy to eat, was extremely good (and way cheaper than anything at the hotel restaurant.)

Kyell and I hung out together and chatted on their outdoor patio, something we could only do this year because who would have expected 80-90+ degrees in October?

Kyell and I walked back to the hotel together and I must have stopped in at the hotel restaurant (I think when Anton waved at me or because I saw Eleanor Arnason or both) because that's when I first discovered that KD Edwards had recruited so many of his own fans to show up for the convention.

My first panel was fantastic. It was one where I'd smooshed together two ideas that were similar. "Writing Queer/Different Stories in Times Like These: Hope A Little Bit Every Day." I mean, it's 2025, y'all. I don't know if you've looked outside, but it's rough out there, especially for trans folks. So the panel basically tackled how we continue to hope, despite what's going on. Dax, our moderator, asked us in our introduction to note where on the hope scale we were, with ten being the most hope. I was the only one who confessed to be hardcore hanging out around 2 most days. I'm not without ANY hope, but this presidential election, for me, felt like an extinction level event. I don't talk about that much because it brings down the room and the human mind needs more hope than I feel on a daily basis. But this panel was about how we go on despite a lack of hope and there were some real solutions that weren't just "go get involved" from the panelists. One of the more fascinating connections that got made was by Kelly Barnhill (and supported by naomikritzer ) which is that anger is just as important a tool as hope. Naomi referenced a recent Locus Award ceremony speech on the same idea: https://stone-soup.ghost.io/hammer-speech/

When I came out of the panel, there was a line for registration. Eventbrite clocked our total paid tickets as just over 200, but I believe that does not include all of our attending professionals (20+), performers (Ms. Shannan Paul, +3), a whole slew of community tables, a few other random badges that were comped for reasons of ad swaps, etc., and five guests of honor. With all those added back in our badge numbers were close to 260, which should probably still be adjusted downward a bit, due to some duplications, but IS STILL F*CKING AMAZING.

The largest Gaylaxicon has been according to its wikipedia page is 350 (in 1994 in Rockville, MD.) So, I feel pretty good about even just the raw number of 200.

Anyway, at this point I stood around chatting with passing people in the halls and ended up being gangpressed on a lunch outing. If I have any complaint about Gaylaxicon, it would be about the hotel. I love the location and set-up of this particular hotel, I always have. It's been the site of many of my fondest memories, including getting to know jiawen for the first time during, IIRC, a Marscon. But, since becoming an Aire apartment complex as well as a hotel, something has changed. For one, there was a weird amount of fruit flies--that might have been due to the heat, but I had to wonder if it had to do with the fact that more people were LIVING at the hotel and thus creating more garbage and other opportunities for fruit flies. Eleanor told me on Sunday that when she called Patrick to tell him how things were going at the con, she started with "Calling from fruit fly central." I mean, they're harmless? But it was noticeable. Second, as happens at a lot of cons (always to my bafflement), the hotel seemed wholly unprepared for people to want to use their on site restaurant. I think due to its proximity to both the airport and the Mall of America, the Crowne Plaza's management just presumed that people would eat elsewhere and that's probably even true for other mundane conventions. Fans like to stick close to home. I think there's a number of reasons for this, but the most obvious one is that there's fantastic programming and games and dealer's rooms to get back to! So, you just want to be able to grab a quick bite and get back to the con.

So, the lunch outing became a sort of comedy of WHY ARE CON HOTELS LIKE THIS? Someone had checked in with the front desk to see what was good within walking distance and we were directed to a Mexican restaurant in the office building across the parking lot. Fantastic, cheap and close. It was a little weird to get to as it turned out to be in the basement and, for reasons of weekend, I guess, the front doors which faced the hotel were locked. But we figure it out and... lo, and behold, the Mexican restaurant has a handwritten sign on it that says "Sorry, closed October 3-5"--like, literally the exact days of the convention. Okay, fine. Let's just go back to the Crowne Plaza. We arrived in time to find that they're closing--the hotel restaurant was only open until 1 pm. After that they didn't open again until dinner time. Naomi's blood sugar is dropping precipitously at this point and everyone has a panel at 2:30 pm. So people are arguing things like should we doordash? What do we do? What can arrive in time? Someone has found a pizza place nearby, but they're not answering the phone. Someone--Dax, maybe?--notes there is another hotel, a Hilton just across the street. We all march over there expecting a disaster (or high prices) but, other than aggressive misgendering from the waiter, we finally manage to eat. Luckily Emma has worked in food service before and cleverly told the server to bring our bills out before we even started eating. That way people could leave as a soon as food was consumed.

Everyone finally relaxed and we had this tremendous conversation about life, the universe, and everything.

Then, just as people were starting to talk about what else they had on for the day, haddayr discovered that she's actually supposed to have been moderating a panel that started at 1:00 pm. It's now 2:00. There were panicked tears. I felt bad, too, because I automatically said "don't cry" and, you know what? You can always cry. What is so weird about that impulse is that my son, who is 22, literally never heard me say "don't cry" in his entire life because I never wanted him to feel like emotions were unwelcome. I don't know what came over me, honestly--I think, and I told Haddayr this later, that what I meant to say was "if what you're feeling is shame for having failed a responsibility to the convention, then please don't. The convention will survive beyond what is, ultimately, a small mistake." But, of course, what she was really feeling was responsibility to her idol Eleanor Arnason, because the panel she missed was "Honoring Eleanor."

So that sucked, but we all hurried back to the hotel and I left Haddayr in deep apology to Eleanor.

Next up for me was "Murderbot: Sec Units and Gender and Sexuality" and that started on topic but ended up being all about the Murderbot Diaries generally. I was the moderator so the off-topicness was entirely my fault, but the room was standing-room only and people just really wanted to squee (or, in some cases, complain or further examine some of the differences between the Apple TV series and the novellas/novels.) That was super high energy and, what was fun (? though somewhat annoying for the audience) is that we could hear the chatter in the hallway, which gave the impression (accurate or not) of a lively, busy con.

I didn't go right away to the Chocolate Symposium, but I did head up there eventually.

My next big thing was running my Thirsty Sword Lesbians cyberpunk one shot which started at 4:00 and ran until 7:00 pm (with a half hour dinner break, as the con had a free buffet dinner in the banquet hall room.) I was overbooked with 8 players, but one of them couldn't make it, so we had a full table. That was a lot of fun, actually. I was a little worried that we'd be too loud in the shared game room, but I tucked us into the far corner so I think it was fine. I was smart and figured out how to pause the action before the dinner break with a cliffhanger (so people would come back!) Once again, even with only 2 and a half hours, I was able to come to a decently satisfying conclusion by the end. We only ran overtime by about fifteen minutes. My players were fantastic. Once again, however, the plot I thought we'd follow wasn't what the players latched on to--but as I've said a million times now, that's the game and the fun for the GM. Especially a system like TSL. It's 99.9% improv.

But, with an RPG to run, I missed out on seeing a lot of the really cool programming, but so I was able to stick my head in and watch a bit of Jim Johnson's presentation on Star Trek: Adventures and the end of Nghi Vo's North Country Gaylaxians reader discussion group.

So then came the comedy show at 8:30 pm...

As previously discussed, this was apparently past bedtime for a lot of our con go-ers. I wouldn't say that the mainstage room was empty, but neither was it packed. I felt really badly for the performers. We were a seriously TOUGH crowd. First, Miss Shannon wanted us to log into some site to answer some silly multiple choice questions and that took WAY TOO long. For a bunch of nerds, we all struggled much more than we should have. I, in fact, missed getting into the site in time to answer the survey, but, like it wasn't even all that funny of a bit and Miss Shannan clearly decided to just drop it after that, because I never got another chance to participate.

And, then...

There were several times in the first set where the performer was like, "Whelp, that died," like OUT LOUD. I wanted to say, "You don't know that for sure, we're just really bad at this!" but, I think that there were a couple of problems with this comedy show in general. First of all, unlike most cons by this hour, no one was drunk. This is the most sober convention I've ever been to in my life. I personally love it, as I don't drink, but there is not a lot of, shall we say, social lubrication going on. Secondly, the audience--probably for the first time for a lot of these performers-- was 100% queer. So, the "look how funny queer people are" jokes all fell a little flat because, "yeah, we know." There was one moment where the final performer made a joke involving, shall we say, the lady nether lips and it landed to a silent room. She said, "That usually kills in Edina," and I told her afterwards that, yeah, no, it was funny, it's just that your audience is actually sitting there quietly trying to decide if we'd be into that particular kink. People in Edina never think about labial folds. The whole idea that they exist is kind of shocking.

Third, sometimes humor works because we've all bought into what's supposedly "normal" behavior and so many fans, neurodivergent folks, and queers have already rejected that. Like, we know we're weird. So when people say "LOOK, THIS BEHAVIOR IS SO STRANGE! ISN'T IT FUNNY???" we're, like, yeah, I do that, so...? A surprising amount of comedy depends on people being willing to find weird people weird, you know? And that can be fine if it's done with love and respect and these performers mostly treaded that line, but I do think that a lot of their jokes ended with so much silence because fandom is a special place where weird is wonderful.

Also, sensing the low energy in the room, the final performer tried to get everyone to sing-along, which, again, should work for a queer audience (musicals! ex-theater kids! whoo!) was also really excruciating because a good 75% of us are introverts who really barely wanted to be at the show to begin with because it might be crowded and there might be audience participation just like this.

On the positive side, the middle performer lit up the room. First, she's a former marine corporal and you could see every lesbian (and bisexual, et al.,) woman in the room sit up and pay attention when she started telling stories about being in the military in what she called "the 1900s." She was sexy and funny in a way that really matched the general vibe of the room. Because her stuff was mostly personal stories, we were not expected to find any humor in a specific punchline. We could be delighted or horrified and when the funny stuff came, it could land bittersweet or out-loud guffaws without note because it wasn't "ba-dum, ba-dum, BUMP!" (cue laughter) kind of stuff. You could laugh when you wanted to. Her style reminded me of my favorite comedian Josh Johnson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Johnson_(comedian)) You might know him as "the Klan ribs" guy.

I love her, and there were funny stories that got told by the other two, but... we were a very tough audience. I felt so badly for them!

Then I went to Kyell's reading at 10 pm because I needed to be there for the midnight slash slam. After the attendance at the comedy show, I thought, "Oh crap. The place is going to be a ghost town!" Kyell's reading was great. Kyell doesn't only write furry stuff, and so the first piece he read was from a fantasy novel. It was really good and I found out from him later that he sold out of the copies he'd brought of that one. So, that's a win.

The slash panel surprised me by being, for the hour, decently well attended. It is still always just me and Kyell bravely holding forth. One of these years I'm going to get an actual slam where people jump up to an open mike, but I mean, maybe this is just all part of my continued misconception of what conventions are like these days in terms of both attendance and "what the kids are into."

Kyell started us off and read a very sweet (also rare pair) fic from the Zootopia fandom. I waffled about what to read, almost deciding on some of my original character Star Trek:Adventures fic. But, thanks to a random recitation of tags (and consequential audience curiosity about the tag "weird biology," I ended up reading a Bleach smut fic rare pair (Renji/Urahara) called "The Perverted Shopkeeper and the Beast" which you can find here (https://archiveofourown.org/works/55608391) if you want and at your own risk.

A surprisingly lively ending to a very long day. I wasn't home and in bed until 1:30 AM.

This gay still parties!

===
I took this elsewhere to edit, so this is the font we get!

*It feels a bit weird going on with this after posting about Terry, but Terry was a big con goer and would have read a con report like this with great interest.

The problem with local cons is, because I don't stay at the hotel, I don't tend to remember to take the time in the morning before the con is open to write-up the day before. But I'll do my best to try to remember the entire weekend. (EDITED TO ADD: My memory is decent enough and this is getting long enough that I think I will break this up and report on it over the next couple of days.)

FRIDAY, October 3, 2025

What I remember most about Friday was how nervous I was. I really wanted Gaylaxicon to be a success and, of course, so many things can go wrong at a convention including, but in no way limited to, people just not showing up. I knew we had a pretty decent pre-reg, but would it be enough to make the con seem lively or would it be "empty hall syndrome"? As I noted, I did managed to break into the mundane press to let people know about the con, but who know if that works? I wish, in a way, that we either had a post con evaluation form with a question like "how did you hear about Gaylaxicon?" on it, but then we'd still be gathering and collecting all that information and I am feeling just as happy to be done for awhile.

naomikritzer and I went back and forth a bunch of times via text and email about when we were headed out and whether or not Eleanor A. needed a ride... (turned out no) and eventually, unable to hold out anymore, I left for the hotel sometime right after lunch. The first panels were at 1:00 pm. One o'clock was possibly too early for programming on a workday, but my thinking had been that the people who took Friday would be happy to have something to do as early as possible. I showed up and discovered that despite my fears, things were already sort of hopping. Of course, I might have mistaken all the high energy for the fact that Adam Stemple was in the hallway chatting with a bunch of the other panelists/attending professionals who'd arrived. Adam is generally a major source of high energy. But, that worked? One thing I will say is that, throughout the weekend, even when people were scattered there was a lot of energy in the place.

I am trying to remember what I did. The program book reminds me that I either went to "Gay YA and Children's Books: Why Representation Matters (or it Doesn't)" or "Tarot in Media," or "GMing in the Age of AI," but I only remember seeing part of the first and peeking in at all three just to make sure everyone seemed happy and had at least a little bit of an audience.

KD Edwards who was on the "Tarot in Media" panel was a consumate GoH. We had many GoHs? Like, six of them, and all of them were great, but he went beyond in terms of getting the word out to his fans. His books are the kinds that inspire a strong following and he worked his butt off and made sure that as many of his loyalest fans made it to the con. I saw him both Saturday and Sunday morning conducting a clearly organized (but not by us!) breakfast gathering. I asked him about it when we passed in the hall because I wondered if these were all local people or...? He said no, there were a whole bunch of his fans who flew out special to be here. This made me suddenly really happy that we'd made space for some of his more specialized panels. He did a special panel where he and two of his colleagues--one an ancient Rome scholar (and professor, I think,) and the other a good writing friend (neither of them local!)--did a kind of "live" world-building session for the audience. I will admit that I was a little suspect that it would be a draw? But, it turned out both of the panelists he recruited to attend also did other panels for us and, as I said, he clearly brought the fans to the yard, as it were.

Impressive.

This is the sort of thing that makes me reconsider things like a newsletter, you know? I suspect that KD has one and that's how he activated the phone tree, as it were.

But, back to Friday. I had a panel at 2:30 pm "Cyberpunk and Bodily Autonomy," with my friend Lee Brontide. It was just the two of us and we were in the smallest (and, as it turned out, most out of the way) programming room. This did not deter our audience, however. The room was by no means full, but they definitely outnumbered the panelists! I should have counted, but I feel like we had more than five? I just remember thinking that it was pretty good for this early in the convention. Because it was just me and Lee, I told the audience that there wouldn't really be a moderator since I hoped it would be more of a conversation, but, then I ended up basically moderating (or at least facilitating,) anyway. Lee is super fascinating, really knowledgable and I highly recommend (if you're interested in bits and bobs of research, etc.) doing what I just did and subscribing to their newsletter: https://buttondown.com/LeeBrontide

Newsletters again. I am telling you, I am seriously reconsidering my allergy to this sort of thing.

It sounded like the other two panels went well? I had really wanted to see the one that Nghi Vo was on about the things writers end up leaving out of their writing, but, obviously, I had to attend my own panel!

After this, I sort of wandered aimlessly trying to suss out what our attendance looked like. At this point, I think we were hovering around 180 and this sort of depressed me (even though it's actually quite a good number for a small con!) and so I ended up following some folks up to the con suite. I dragged along my friend

tallgeese and we had a rousing discussion with one of the other GoHs, Emma Torsz (rhymes with dirge), Kelly Barnhill, Adam Stemple,

naomikritzer , and three or four people whose names I am spacing on. It was a conversation that ranged through publishing woes, religious upbringing, and life, the universe, and everything. My favorite kind of con conversation, actually. I got in a little trouble because Emma suggested that she was really uncertain she wanted to attend opening ceremonies and I told her that she could, in fact, skip them if she wanted. We aren't the boss of her. But, then she got nabbed by Anton and--I mean, I probably should not have suggested she could go because the opening ceremonies are the chance for con goers to be introduced to the GoHs. But, I stood out in the hallway and sort of fumed about it because my feeling is that, while we do compensate our GoHs to attend, it's not a contract written in blood. If someone is tired and people'd out they should get to make adult choices, even if those choices aren't necessarily the right ones for the con. But apparently a compromise had been struck and so Emma skipped out as soon as her introduction was over. So, that's fine. I just feel badly because Minnesotans (and, particularly women) have been socialized to be terrible at boundary setting/self-care and so when asked, "Are you sure it's okay?" The answer is often, "It's fine," even when it's not.

Anyway, I could go on about that more, but in many ways I recognize that I was wrong to have given Emma a promise of an out. The next thing that was up was the banquet. I ended up sitting at a table way in the back with a bunch of concom folks that I love, James B. (who I accidentally called by the wrong name, twice! UGH. I hate that!),

tallgeese , our mutual friend and fellow Star Trek: Adventures player, Erik, and again some other lovely folks whose names are lost to oblivion (which is a bummer as I really rather liked James' friend!) The banquet was hotel food and was fine and... I won the very last raffle prize, so I now have a Star Wars board game?

Speaking of, I ran off around 7 pm to play a Star Trek:Adventures game GM'd by one of our other GoHs, Jim Johnson (of Modiphius.) That was fun! I had to duck out before the time was over, however, because I had a 10 pm panel where, at least, I was able to apologize to Emma because she was on that panel with me and Kyell Gold. I just wanted to say sorry not only for getting her hopes up, but also in case I'd gotten her into any kind of trouble. That panel went well, but we probably needed a moderator who wasn't me? Ten is WAAAAY past my bedtime, so the conversation which was supposed to be about "When Magic is Queer-Coded" veered so far off topic that we talked about whether or not we dreamed in conversations and if birds had language. That can be fun to watch? But, you know, I also feel sort of beholden to stick to the subject at hand, which we decidedly did NOT and my sleep deprived brain could not summon the spoons to keep us on track.

So, oops.

Generally, I'm not sure what I was thinking with such late night paneling. I think I was remembering the Minicons of old when there were enough people still up (and we were ALL so much younger) to make those make sense. Again, I will confess? I thought Teh Gayz partied??? The place this misconception was most noticible was the caberet. Like, I thought that room might end up standing room only, but it was barely at half capacity and that was scheduled for Saturday night at 7:30 pm.

Oh well. Lessons learned. Either I have to actively recruit the youngs or I should just never have programming beyond RPG and board gaming and those sorts of things past the dinner hour. Which, actually, would have been fine.

Speaking of RPGs and such, I should go back and talk a bit more about the Star Trek game. I have watched Jim Johnson play Star Trek before because Modiphius has a YouTube channel where you can watch all sorts of things about their RPGs including interviews with

bcholmes . (Sidebar: we had initially wanted BC to come be a GoH, but traveling to the US was very reasonably out of the question. Jim was actually our second choice, but don't tell him.)

Jim was a good GM, I thought. I always push a bit for more than a little bit of roleplay, which I did here, as well. Not too much, though. I knew, of course, that a lot of people game at cons to try out new systems so I try not to push TOO hard for roleplay uber allis at one-shots at cons, because I understand that there are people at the table who are solely there for the mechanics. However, I lucked out in that I came early enough to the game room that I had a chance to pick which character I wanted out of the pre-generated sheets. There was an Andorian chief of security that was the right kind of hothead for me and I think I was able to add a little flare to the game without being too disruptive.

The could-have-been a distaster distruption was to my left, as it turned out. We had a very young, very deep into the spectrum player who was still learning when it was okay to blurt out actions or thoughts. I will say to Jim's credit he handled this person (a high schooler) with grace and kindness. Meanwhile, it may have helped that I FULLY adopted this player, whom I will refer to by their character's name Lt. Hernandez. This wasn't a rescue to be clear. I adored this young person. Yes, Hernadez struggled with volume control (but so do I when I'm excited) and, yes, their insistence in returning to some elements of their character over and over again could have been (and may have been) more than a little annoying to folks who wanted the game to continue at a pace. But, what ended up happening is that we consciously (as in me and Hernandez) chose to decide that in the world of the space utopia of Star Trek, neurodiversity continued to exist and that, if this was a true utopia, things like ADHD would not only exist, they would be accomodated and cherished. The turning point happened when I, as player, announced that I'd like to spend the momentum to retroactively create a trait in which we had regular security check-ins with the USS Challenger. Hernandez joked that sometimes that character would be bad at responding because they were enthusiastically focused on sciencing. I noted that probably given that this seemed to be a character trait, probably even on the ship there was a Hernendez Protocol so that someone periodically checked-in with Hernandez to make sure she had eaten a food and drunk water. This then became a funny, fully accepted running joke with the crew. And Hernandez leaned into that aspect of role-playing much to their obvious pleasure.

I found the whole thing with Hernandez delightful.

I'm sure there were players at the table who would disagree with me. But, you know, when you're at a con, you get the players at the table. It's not cool to shun or ignore someone unless what their doing is a disruption more akin to the kind of harassment (sexual or bullying or like) where the GM should then really just tell them to leave the table, full stop.

And, you know, us problematic players need to stick together. I'm atypically problematic because I will push to do as much personal interaction as possible which people tend to see as a positive, but like my Andorian had a pastime of poetry and so at one point, in the shuttle craft, I had him randomly recite a poem I'd desperately scribbed into my notes. And I did so without comment. So, later, when a group of us decided to finish off this episode (which is what ST:A likes to call its sessions) one of the returning players was, like, was that in character or just.. you writing spontaneous poetry? I was like, "Oh, I was just so into character that I didn't remember to explain what the hell I was doing!" So, it totally came off like me randomly blurting out poetry, possibly just as a player??? Hilarious.

Anyway, the scenario was what it was and it's a preview of one of Modiphius's mission briefs so I won't say too much about the actual events since it would be a spoiler.

This got long, so I'll end it here.

Image: classic image of the Washington monument at night.

Sunday morning started out much better than the day before as Naomi and I had been invited to breakfast with Joe and Gay Haldeman. We ended up having a rather leisurely brunch talking about life, the universe, and everything. Everything that everyone says about how nice and welcoming Gay and Joe are is one hundred percent true.

I, thankfully, had no panels at all on Sunday. I’d love to say that meant no one mispronunced my name, but alas. A couple of the people on concom just never got it right, despite the fact that I spent a lot of time making sure I put names to faces and knew at least one fact about them, ie, Kathy the former postal lawyer; Zen Lizard (one of the many Sams) who, shockingly, is a fan of lizards; Kim who loves animals and volunteered at the zoo; Roger, the IT guy; and Kimbery, who is easy since he’s a man named Kimberly, but also he was Naomi’s liason and so we heard his entire lifestory on the 30 minute drive from the airport (highlight reel includes, but it not limited to, his extensive time in the foreign service, being a Mormon, and a member of MENSA.)

I think all of them called me Lid-ah.

Ah well.

Knowing that we’d be starting our adventures after the con ended, I wandered over to the metro station--which is directly across from the hotel--and purchased a three day pass for myself and Naomi. That would cover Sunday night, all day Monday, and our trip to the airport on Tuesday.

I wandered back to the con hotel in time to see Scott Edelman in his fish head rushing off to do a reading. I probably should have followed him, since I did want to hear him read, but I figured (wrongly) that the program guide would direct me to where I needed to go when I was feeling ready. But, no! Not only was Scott’s reading not in the program, I could not figure out what room he was in until I overheard someone saying that their reading was around the corner and down the hall near the Green Room. I managed to walk right in during Scott’s Q&A. I’d missed the reading! Curses!

I stayed in the room to listen to the next person (who, unlike Scott, was listed in the program,) Morgan Hazelwood. Morgan was the delightful moderator of our Romance in SF panel and it was fun to hear her read her work.

From there, I sat in the back to listen to the last half hour of “Religion in SF” which Naomi was on with our mutual friend Walter Hunt.

The funny thing about Capclave is that while it is much larger than Diversicon, on occasion, it felt much smaller. Naomi and I discussed this later and we decided that possibly this sense came from the fact that in addition to a three track (four or five if you count the two rooms devoted to author’s readings) there was a gaming room and a dealer’s room. This ended up spreading out the hundred plus members quite a bit. I counted. There were fifteen people listening to a six person panel. So, the energy of the convention was always sort of low.

I have now, of course, been struck with fear that John and I have over-programmed Gaylaxicon. I guess we’ll see how it plays out!

After the religion panel, Naomi had another panel in the same room, which was “Genre Fiction versus Lit Fic.” Despite having even fewer people in the audience, the panel was lively. I think because we all get kind of worked up about mainstream literature and who gets to cross over to it and who doesn’t. (Or we get worked up because we never want to and we have FEELINGS about lit fic.) It was a good mix of panelists, too--some from the “I don’t even like the term speculative fic because it’s too fancy” camp to the PhD and MFA student. It was a great way to end the con, as far as I was concerned.

Afterwards, Naomi did some last minute hanging out with folks and I headed upstairs to prep for adventure, by which I mean snoozling.

At some point around 3 pm, we headed to DC.

I have been desperately trying to replenish my stationary stock and so we got a hot tip from a native that we should check out Jenni Bick in Dupont Circle. The red line, which our hotel is on, goes direct to Dupont Circle and add to that Naomi had a restaurant she wanted to revisit from a previous trip to DC, City Lights of China, that was nearby. So off we went.

I am a huge fan of public transportation. I find the DC metro system to be fantastic in this regard. Plus, their day passes include buses. Rockford/our hotel is, during rush hour, about a half hour from DC. I don’t know why, but that time goes faster on trains.

Jenni Bick was, alas, a bust. Americans do not understand stationary any more. (We did? In the 1970s and even into the 80s you could find huge pads of stationary at all sorts of stores.) Nowadays, we seem to that think ten sheets and ten envelopes for $30 is a great deal. Y’all, ten sheets is two letters--or, on a good day, ONE. I want a packet of 30 super-thin sheets with weird cartoon people on it for $10 to $20, what is wrong with you all???

Sigh.

It was a delightfully pretty shop and I am proud of myself for not buying all the postcards they had in the window.

From there, we stopped at a great comic book shop called Fantom Comics. This was possibly the first comicbook shop I have ever been to where all the graphic novels were organized by subject, like “action/adventure,” “horror,” “romance,” etc., and MANGA WAS MIXED IN. There was no separate manga section! It was kind of nice, actually? It felt weirdly less stigmatizing. I didn’t buy anything, but I took a lot of pictures of titles I want to look up.

Their unisex bathroom had the best art!

Image: bathroom art at Fantom

We ended up taking a bus to where Naomi’s restaurant was--only to discover it was now only a takeout window. Alas! Luckily, it was on a strip of a ton of restaurants and we were able to find a lovely ramen place just up the street.

Then, because we wanted to see some of the monuments lit up at night, we hopped another bus for a quick jaunt and then wandered towards the Lincoln memorial. What was striking was, in fact, the number of National Guard everwhere. I knew they’d be there thanks to the news, etc., but yet somehow I forgot? Someone at the con said that the Guard tend to hang out in large clots at the subway stations and wander the Smithsonian Mall area, and that did, in fact, seem to be true. Naomi was curious and so asked some of the Guard that we ran into where they were originally from and they were all from West Virginia. (Which kind of explained HOW WHITE they all were. Like, the reason we started asking was because they were noticeably missing PoCs.)

Anyway, the walk around the monuments was a bit of a hike.

There was a sign I pointed out to Naomi which read “The Mall is big! Think about renting a bike!” Because, yes. I forgot how much walking a person ends up doing in DC. My feet were a bit sore at the end of the day. Hopefully, I’ll be up for all we have planned for tomorrow which, at the moment, includes checking out the fish market, the Black History museum (Smithsonian) and/or maybe the Postal Museum. I intentionally did not plan a lot for us because frankly, even though both Naomi and I have been to DC and the Smithsonian Mall before… there’s just no way to ever see it all I suspect, unless you live here.

Okay! Off for more adventure!

When last we left our intrepid heroines, Naomi and were off to see what fun Japanese shops we could shop. The only place that was open when we set out (around 10 am) was Maruichi, a grocery store, 1.1 miles from the hotel. It was probably the most fun we had shopping. I tried Boss Coffee Black hot, not out of a vending machine (as it proper) but, even so, it was quite good. I liked this place because I could listen to customers and shop workers speaking a language I’m trying to learn.

I think I’ve talked about this already but I’m at the halfway point in the 13th Warrior language acquisition montage with Japanese. I will embed the video I’m referencing below, so you know what I mean. But, the point in the scene where Antonio can pick out about ten words out of a hundred? That’s me right now.

Watch on YouTube

In the same mall was a kielbasa shop which was filled with other fun Polish goods and goodies. We spent a decent amount of time just window shopping (and gift buying) at these two places.

The other Japanese shops, however, weren’t open for another hour or more and so Naomi and I wandered back down the Rockville Pike checking out all the other little places along the way. We found a fun little tea shop run by an Indian couple who were very charming. Since Mason never reads my blog, I can tell you that I picked up a couple of really nice gifts for him (as my son has turned into a bit of a loose tea connoisseur,) including a cute tea ball where the counterweight is a book reading cat.

Surprisingly, the Tesco (the departo) was a bit of a bust for me. Naomi’s guest liaison had hyped up this store’s stationary section and so I’d gotten my hopes up. Alas, what they called stationary was actually just a packet of lined paper. Not even with a cute bit of art at the top. Very strange. Very disappointing. Tesco, however, had an absolutely mind-boggling number of Lay’s chip flavors and Kit-Kats, etc. It was interesting, thinking back on the Reddit thread comments, that the only language besides English that I heard spoken there seemed to be Mandarin. (I can not say for sure, but it certainly wasn’t Japanese.)

Naomi then took me out for my very first ever conveyor belt sushi. What fun!

Image: the conveyor belt with sushi

I was brave and tried raw squid (not sure I’ll be doing that again!), but otherwise we ate far too much. This place also had robot servers--two different types, a little train that brought small snacks, and an actual robot that brought bigger appetizers and then complained that it had to get back to work. I found it very charming.

Image: the little train-like robot that delivered small snacks. I failed to get a picture of the larger robot.

Then we came back to the hotel room long enough to take a quick break and rest our feet.

I will admit that at this point I “snoozled.” Snoozling is what my family calls those kinds of half-naps where you’re easily wakeable for a chat, but also just as likely to drift into the zone where you might start snoring. You know, snoozling.
From there we went to registration to begin the con. Program participants all got individualized schedules printed on the back--and I was reminded that this was something I wanted to be able to do for our Gaylaxicon folks. This means, I’ll be doing them? But it’s really SO NICE. It feels like a perk to the programming participant, you know?

Naomi had a panel right away at 4 pm called “Morally Grey Characters” which I sat and listened to. Zack Be was the moderator and he did an excellent job, actually. He’s apparently a psychologist by trade and you could kind of tell from the way he talked to some of the folks who asked questions at the end--like he was able to coax out the shy ones, and firmly, but respectfully shut down the rambling ones. I will admit that I wasn’t super riveted by the topic. I am a fan of morally grey characters, but the panel ended up focusing more on how to write them than recommendations on where to find them. I wanted the latter.

Then I was on an absolutely banger of a panel on SF and Romance. The other folks on the panel were fantastic:JL Gribble, Morgan Hazelwood, Sherin Nicole and Andrija Popovic. The conversation was dynamic and informative and I had a tremendous time.

Even cooler, I was wandering towards the con suite thinking I might scrounge up dinner there when JL Gribble invited me out to dinner. I hung out with them and one of their writer friends and had one of those fun con experiences where you go out to a meal with someone you barely know and have a fantastic conversation. At the same time Naomi was off being interviewed in a very similar vein by Scott Edelman for “Eating the Fantastic,” (https://www.scottedelman.com/wordpress/tag/eating-the-fantastic/) which basically hopes to recreate that magical con experience. So, that was kind of a cool coincidence!

Naomi and I met up again at her reading, whereafter I turned into a pumpkin.

There is something that is happening to me now that I am older where I just don’t want to talk to people after 9 pm. I don’t know what that’s about. I still consider myself an extrovert, but I am starting to experience the uniquely introverted experience of being “peopled out.” I’d had my fill of strangers. Time for bed.

I was up this morning early enough to discover that the Starbucks in the hotel has a broken espresso machine. So, I ended up across the street for our lattes again. Today is my busiest day, so I'll have a lot to report tomorrow.

Diversicon selfie with (left to right) me, Naomi Kritzer, and Scott Lohman

It's Wednesday, so I'm back on Dreamwidth. It is really starting to amuse me that I spend so much time intending to get over here to blog and then, inevitibly, it is somehow ALWAYS a Wednesday when I do. Seriously, I had been planning on doing a daily con report from Diversicon, but I somehow did not manage it. To be fair, we were "on" a lot at the con.

Okay, so--how did it go?

I will be honest. I was really uncertain that this convention had its ducks in a row. There were duck in the pond, clearly, but I wasn't sure, at first, that anything meaningful was going to happen with said ducks.

naomikritzer , for instance, only HAPPENED to notice that the Diversicon programming grid had us at a reading at Webber Library on Thursday earlier that week. She checked the HCL schedule and an author appearance at Webber was nowhere to be found. Well, that turned out to be because Diversicon had privately rented a room. But, regardless, I wasn't sure if I was going to a library in NE Minneapolis or not! Or, if I did go, if anyone other than Naomi would be there. We did try to ask, but only got a confirmation the day of.

Like much of what follows, everything turned out not only to be FINE but actually kind of great (??)

reading

Image: Naomi reading. The library meeting room was smallish, but the event was decently well attended!

I am not in this picture because I took it, but I would say that despite the fact that I feel like the whole thing went off last minute, the event was very well attended. I ended up reading from my newest book, which I am kind of struggling with. So it was nice to have some audience reaction to it and to get a chance to gauge how it read out loud in a very specific way. For instance, I regularly read my stuff out loud for flow, but I rarely read it out loud to other people to guage involvement. The bonus of being neurotypical (besldes the obvious) is that I can feel attention leaving the story when I read it out loud in a room like this and, of course, when the audience ignites. So both this and my reading at Diversicon really shaped my sense of the novel. (So thank you to everyone who was there!)

I sort of thought that we'd lucked out with the Thursday night reading. I did not necessarily think that the luck would hold all weekend.

But it did.

I do not know what black magic Diversicon had going on, but despite the fact that behind the scenes the programming schedule seemed to be changing minute by minute right up until the doors opened, once things started, not only did they run smoothly, but the energy of the convention increased as the con went on.

Friday was the most chaotic for me because I had a lot going on at home. I didn't really see (or remember to ask or check) my Diversicon schedule, so I had to let Diversicon know that I couldn't make it to the convention until almost 4 pm. That turned out not to be true. Mason was done with his interview by 2 pm and I was able to be on my way to pick up Eleanor Arnason and off to the convention by 3 pm, which meant I made it into the con by 3:30 pm.

In another wierd bit of black magic, both Friday and Saturday, we arrived exactly at the same time as Eleanor's friend Ruth Burman. This was great for Eleanor because the one thing I couldn't provide was an EARLY ride home for her. Eleanor, who is even less of a night owl than I am, would have had to stay at the con until nearly midnight on Saturday if it wasn't for Ruth.

My first panel was about something I wasn't sure I knew anything about. "Queens of the Apocalypse." When I was waiting for Mason to finish his interview before I headed to the con, I had a chance to ponder this. I think the panel title had gotten a bit lost in translation because Naomi has been known recently as the queen of the cozy apocalypse thanks, in part to stories like "So Much Cooking" and "The Year Without Sunshine." Since I was listed as the only panelist, I decided that what I'd do was introduce the audience to the subgenre of "Soft Apocalypses" which is a Thing and hopefully start a conversation about what the appeal of such things are, etc., etc. LUCKILY, Naomi didn't have a panel scheduled opposite this one and so she joined me in the discussion. Given that I planned it out in the car on the way to the con, it went surprisingly well. As you can see in the selfie above, one of the fun things about the convention hotel (there weren't a whole lot of them, it being way out in Plymouth and laid out extremely strangely) is that the panel rooms all had whiteboards, which we just decided to use. So, I was able to write out all of my recommendations. People took photos of the whiteboard after the panel!

Then, I attempted to get dinner in the hotel, which was a complete disaster.

They had a "make your own" sandwhich which listed chicken as a substitute for hamburger, but I apparently made a mistake choosing that option. I just wanted a simple chicken sandwhich--chicken, American cheese, lettuce, and mayo. That's it. But, not only did my food never arrive until everyone was finished, when it did it had no cheese, lettuce that seemed to have salad dressing on it, and a dollop of salsa? Which was not great because thanks to GERDS I really can't eat raw onions anymore and I'm not a fan of tomatoes, I never have been. But, whatever, I was so starved at that point that I ate it. The only nice thing? The waiter could tell how irritated I was and comped my meal.

But, like that's the other weird thing about this hotel? NO LUNCH service.

I hung around after dinner because as GoHs, it's expected that you attend both opening and closing ceremonies. Scott L, who is chairing this year, asked me to say an opening statement, which I should have expected that I'd be called upon to do, but somehow didn't. I fumbled a little bit, but then thinking about how this might be our last Diversicon, I launched into a whole schpiel about what I have loved about Diversicon since its inception.

Eleanor had gotten a ride home with Ruth at that point and so I hung around a little bit longer, but bailed early under the assumption that Saturday would be the late night.

---

Saturday got complicated by the fact that I was picking up Eleanor again and Saint Paul, in its infinite wisdom, decided to close down eastbound highway 94. I got myself coffee, but I still managed to be kind of bolluxed up by the whole construction situation. I was fifteen mintues late to pick up Eleanor, who admitted that had Patrick not sat with her, she was considering bailing. But, the highway going west was open and, shockingly, traffic free, so despite my delay we managed to get to the hotel on time. And, as noted above, right on the heels of Ruth Burman.

My first panel on Saturday was "SF Writers and D&D," which Naomi and I had proposed for a couple of reasons. First, she and I have started playing D&D again and, secondly, one of the posthumous guests of honor, Andre Norton, wrote Quagg Keep after having been invited by Gary Gyagax to play in the Greyhawk world of D&D (citation). We started out kind of uncertain about how much we'd have to say, but about a half hour into the panel the caffeine hit my system and I went FULL CON MODE.

Some of you have seen this transformation.

That was good because it carried me though the rest of the day. I missed Naomi's reading in favor of hanging out in the hall with Greg Johnson and Martha Hood and someone else whose name I missed, who like a lot of men who are aging in fandom has gone with Wizardcore as his look. The three of us discussed the Seattle Worldcon Hugo Awards as all of us watched it, either in-person or streaming.

Then I had a reading, followed by a panel on podcasts & podcasting. I was the only panelist listed on that panel, but Naomi and Martha joined me and so we managed to have a lot of good recommendations.

At some point in here I ate lunch brought to me by our fabulous guest liason, Bast, and a bunch of us went out to dinner together in the classic convention style. Table for SEVEN at the Red Robin (which was made kind of fantastic by our drill sargent of a waitress!) In the middle of dinner I asked the question "What will post-capitalism really look like?" and a half dozen or so people in rotating shifts proceeded to spend much of the rest of the night as we wandered back to the hotel's lounge area attempting to unravel this question. This included

sraun who had to miss much of the convention due to the fact that his wife, Irene, had taken a fall on Friday night and ended up admitted to the hospital. She's home safe now, but that was NOT how anyone wanted her to have to spend the weekend!

visual break: bee on purple flower

Image: a visual break in the wall of text! A bumble bee on a purple flower.

------

Sunday.

The strangeest thing about Diversicon was the fact that the energy of this convention continued to rise throughout the weekend. Normally, there's a bit of a peak on Saturday night and Sunday feels like winding down. Not so Diversicon! We found out that one of the reasons for this is that Diversicon continued to gain memberships as the weekend wore on--they started with something like 38 and had nearly double that by the end. I know there are some of you out there thinking is 60-something really a lot? Diversicon is a small convention and this number was enough, in fact, to put the con into the black. There will be a Diversicon 33! Hooray!

Sunday started out strong, panel-wise, with "Keeping on Keeping on (Diversity in SF)" We can partly thank Elenaor Arnason, who was not able to come on Sunday, but who asked me this question as we were driving back and forth to the con. "Do we still need Diversicon? Is diversity baked into SFF now? Does it need its own convention?" This is a real question. I mean, I think the answer is an obvious "YES!" but it is notable that SFF, as a whole, has really made lifting up diverse voice a priority and it has, to many extents, worked. Obviously, there is always more work to do, but, especially with Gaylaxicon coming up, this was a question that was close to my heart.

The panel I should have prepared more for was "Hacking, Hackers & Heists," as it devolved (evolved?) into a discusion of artifical intelligence as it exists today -- LLMs. But, I think we mostly kept on topic, despite that.

I ate my lunch in the con suite and then caught the end of "End of the World Fiction and/or Hope Punk" which was pretty interesting, and then Naomi and I sat in to the Second Foundation/Rivendell Group Discussion of our work. Our final official panel was our Two-Person Book Club, which is something that Naomi and I do informally and we thought it would be fun to bring to an audience. Basically, we just trade hot takes on whatever it is we're currently reading. For poor Naomi, this often means listening to me talk about manga, but she's also been on a mainstream romance kick right now, so it seems like a fair trade. ;-)

Closing ceremonies was surprisingly high energy, like I noted, and I had hoped to hang around for the after con dinner, but my brain had, by that point, completely fried.

I had several absolutely lovely conversations with folks one-on-one and for a convention I was certain was going to be at best disorganized, Diversicon fully blew past my expectations and not only cleared the lowest bar but actually won the race (to over extend the metaphors and mix them up a bit.)

It was an unexpected pleasure all around.

For

sabotabby who is probably still on vacation and anyone else who might be interested, here's a link to our American Flagg episode of Mona Lisa Overpod: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4yFxNh4m8xcnHhLC3MB38Z

Speaking of podcasts, I had a very odd interaction with a potential panelist on a panel I proposed for Diversicon. I've been, as you know, gentle reader, fairly obsessed with doing programming committee work for a completely DIFFERENT covention, and so I haven't much talked about the fact that I will be one of the Guests of Honor at Diversicon 32, along with Naomi Kritzer. Diversicon is a local to me (Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN) convention and is coming up soon! September 5-7!

So, what happened was this: I got an email from someone in programming connecting me with a potential panelist. The initial email was very straight-forward. This person has been writing radio plays for a podcast down in Florida called the Radio Theatre Project. Sounds like a decent fit, right? But, this person added this to their communication with me, "I'd be happy to talk to Lyda and come up with a presentation" (emphasis mine). I wrote back and said, "Sure! I'm happy to try to figure out a way to combine our similar expertise into a panel of some sort. My podcast isn't fiction and I do none of the technical aspects of recording, editing, or producing it, but I'm sure there are some commonalities."

Immediately the other panelist seemed to want to back off, however. They talked about how "my audience" might not be interested in the things they were doing and that the two types of writing were fundamentally different. I acknowledged that, but tried to encourage this person, anyway, by saying that, yes, that's true, but podcasts are a thing in general and I'm happy to spend some time on the panel talking about the things they do and the things I do. This seemd to mollify this person, briefly.

BUT then they proposed getting together for a coffee to hammer out our "presentation" or to at least come up with talking points.

I have to admit, y'all? I was very confused by the continued use of the world presentation.

I had to write back and say, "It's a panel discussion, right? Something informal and off-the-cuff?" I told them I am always happy to pre-consider questions that might highlight this or that, but, like, this is one of those situations, I thought, where "this meeting could be an email." I did, however, try to say this kindly and suggest that while I was not against getting together for a coffee, per se, a panel discussion (if that's what we were having) wasn't probably worthy of something so intense.

I guess I pissed his person off somehow? I didn't mean to!

But, surprise, surprise, this person has now declined the offer to be on the panel with me. Which would be FINE, except for the fact that they felt the need to leave with this parting shot: "I listened to your MLOP 27: American Flagg podcast about cyberpunk. It is very focused and detailed. It offered a wealth of information for fans of serious science fiction. I'm not a serious sci-fi fan. I don't have the background and experience to speak about this kind of podcast. I've also found the easiest way to kill the humor in almost anything is to analyze it."

Like, is that directed at me? Or is this person saying that they don't want to analyze their own humor for fear of destroying the fun in it? (Their radio plays are humorous, apparently.) I decided to go with the latter, because it does no good to make enemies in a convention pool as small as Diversicon's. So, I told them how sorry I was that they have chosen to opt out and hoped that we could at least meet and chat at the con.

But the entire exchange was so baffling, you all. I know this person at least a little. Their name is familiar to me. They are NOT a stranger to the local science fiction and fantasy scene. They know what SFF convention panels are. The fact that they kept calling it a presentation has actually made me a little terrified that I'm actually going to be the ONLY person on this panel. SHOULD I BE PREPARING A LECTURE/PRESENTATION????? I am now a little fearful that maybe I should be!

I wouldn't be paranoid about this, but this has happened to me in the past.

I once proposed a panel for (I think) MarsCON about manga and manhwa and, when I arrived at the convention and got my hands on the program booklet, I discovered that I was, in fact, the only person talking about this subject FOR AN HOUR. Luckily, in that case, it wasn't until the next day and someone (Anton, probably,) had asked me if I needed any technical support for my panel/presentation and I said, "Okay, yes? Gimme some way to run a powerpoint presentation," and I went home that night and MADE ONE UP. I think I had exactly 5 people in the audience, but they were happy to see the covers of some titles I recommended, etc.

JFC.

If it is just me... what am I going to talk about for an hour by myself about podcasts? I mostly listen to fiction podcasts, but if people are there, as this proposed panelist suggested for my particular podcast, I don't know that there's enough to actually say about what it is that we do. I mean, Ka!lban does most of the hard work and I just show up and talk about whatever it is we've chosen as a topic. That's it. That's my entire experience. I don't know how this could possibly fill an hour!

I guess I'll find out!

Current Mood: confused

A very unstable LEGO gummie tractor made from a packet picked up at con

Image: A very unstable LEGO gummie tractor made from a packet picked up at Minicon (GPS room)

My second (and last, as it happens,) day at MInicon was a real mixed bag and I am, in fact, still sorting out a lot of how I feel about it. As I noted in the previous post, most of my panels (4 out of 5) felt no better than 'meh,' with at least two of them sinking to 'is this an unmitigated diaster??? I think this might be a disaster!!' in my book.

But, it's possible that my standards out of whack. And, at least one person in the audience of one of the panels I thought was possibly The BIGGEST trainwreck, actually said that most of what I told her about privately was not at all visible to the audience (which is good!) She had a great time and thought the panel was fun. The problem may just be me.

So, take everything below with a very large heaping of salt.

Saturday

My first panel on Saturday wasn't until 11:30 am and so Shawn and I did our usual alliterative errands. We went to the cardborad recycling place, the coffee shop and stopped for cardamom spinners at Brake Bread (yes, spelled like that. They are a drive-up and bicycle delivering--as in, home deliveries by bicycle--bakery, so it's the screeeeeeeech of braking suddenly that they are evoking, along with the pun on breaking bread, of course, I believe.) But, so I got to have fancy coffee and fancy food before heading off to Bloomington and the convention.

My first panel of the day yesterday was the one I was most concerned about, "The Monkey King Travels West." While I was willing to name names in the previous post, I am going to be a little more circumspect in this post, since the person I had the most issues with will very likely be the one to decide if I'm on paneling again next year.

I can't even say that the pre-panel chatter started well.

I was, at least, delighted to have Delia I. to my left and Anna W. to my right. ( CW: transphobia )

Because, once we got underway, I was still upset on Phoenix's behalf and on behalf of all the queer folks in the room (including myself) and so I was not really in the mood to try to follow the moderator's questions, some of which seemed a bit rambling and all over the place. Like, was this about the legendary figure of the Monkey King or was it about the cross-pollenation between Eastern media and Western and vice versa? The answer seemed to be [cue: meme] "Both! Why not both?"Which might have worked if the moderator had a better hypothesis, you know? Instead it was, as I said, disjointed at best and, of course, I was struggling to engage. This moderator, too, has a tendency to hog the microphone, which is generally not considered best practices.

Let's just say I was happy when it was over and I fled.

Delia I. was hot on my heels. Delia had heard that there was a potato/taco bar in the GPS room happing RIGHT NOW, and so, having connected up with

naomikritzer who was waiting for me outside the programming area, we all headed for much needed food and debriefing. We spent a huge amount of time in the GPS room, actually, talking to the various folks there and trying to build gummy LEGO vehicles from the packets they had available. Despite the picture above, mine was not successful in the room. We had all postulated that the gummies might work better if they were colder/stiffer, and that proved to be true of the leftover pack I took away with me--my fingers had been all over it, trying to build something (so, OF COURSE, I had to take it home!)

I ran off around 1 pm to meet up with one of my new pen pals, Roger P., who is actually in a gaming group with

caffeine , who is someone else I had a tremendous amount of fun with spending time with at con (and getting to see pictures of the newest grandbaby!) Roger was not at con, so we met at a nearby (walkable) Caribou. Roger turned out to be just my sort, so we probably chatted for an hour or more? He brought a book that he wanted me to sign and so I did that. It was a nice break to get OUT of the con, too.

Surprisingly, Naomi was just where I left her so we continued to hang out there for much of the afternoon. We'd been thinking about going out to get Szechuan at a place Naomi loves and, in retrospect, I wish we had. We ended up having a great time in the hotel restraunt continuing our conversation with Aaron V G, but the service and the food were... iffy. Naomi and I both ordered the butternut squash ravioli, and this is what we got:

Image: Mediocre food masquerading as froo-froo.

The dark droozle of stuff was, I think, supposed to be balsamic something or other, but, insted, tasted like something WAY too sweet. It was edible, but, honestly, only barely. We also lost our server for a long time (I did not even see her flitting about taking care of other people in the restaurant) and I had to flag down another server (who actually turned out to be the manager) and see if we could order more food, etc., etc. I mean, at least this I understand. The hotel probably had a lot of trouble getting people who wanted to work on the Saturday before Easter Sunday. And, I mean, no harm, really. Thank goodness I had HOURS before I needed to be at my 7 pm panel.

Even though I would have missed the company, I do think the two of us would have been better off at Szechuan.

At some point in here, I also wandered the Dealer's Room and happened to stumble across the author of O Human Star, Blue Delliquanti.

jiawen recommended this web comic to me and it is AMAZING (and made me cry the good tears.) I had an absolute fucking fan squee freak out to actually meet Blue in-person. I may have said something stupid like, "Wait, wait, YOU wrote THIS??" which, I mean, why else would someone be sitting behind a display of the graphic novel set? Anyway, I gushed pretty incoherently at Blue about their art and stories and then I absolutely blew the budget I was set by buying all three volumes of O Human Star and had them sign them.

I was wearing my ConFABulous t-shirt and so Blue mentioned that they thought they might like to attend that con sometime, and so I gave them my pitch for Gaylaxicon which is what ConFABulous will be THIS year. I need to remember to follow-up today and make sure to have John T. or Don K. reach out to them.

I am sure I am missing a bunch of other stuff that happened in here, but now we move on to Disaster #2, "The Pitfalls and Benefits of Writing Humor."

We were down a moderator because the person who was supposed to take that role was, I believe, sick or otherwise unable to come to con. I was a little thrown at the beginning of the panel when Wesley suggested that the audience boo the missing panelist, but okay. We all joked that we should take turns moderating and so Wesley assigned himself the role of "the one who reads the panel description," and I assigned myself the role of "the person who suggests we all introduce ourselves and picks who we start with." This was mostly all fine (booing aside,) and then... somehow the Monkey King came to haunt me again.

Again I am going to be a little more circumspect about the panelist I am about to discuss because she is actually a very good friend of mine, who I think just misstepped BADLY.

But, y'all, it was bad.

( CW: micro-agressions and racism )

I have NO IDEA what my friend says to Wesley or how he takes it, because I am intercepting Wesley's liason to let him know that Wesley might need a STIFF DRINK after this panel and this would be why.

I had two more panels to go before I could go home

Again, however, I asked a friend of mine who was in the audience how this whole scene played out to her, and I think we were really lucky that the microphones in that room were kind of crap and I'm not sure how sure how much of it was heard by anyone but the panelists and the first few rows. My friend was seated in the middle and said she tuned out the whole Monkey King thing because she had no interest in any of that and so had no idea anything had really happened.

After the debacle that was the Humor panel, I flagged down one of my fellow panelists, Ozgur, for the next one ("The Restaurant at the End of the Book," for which I am the moderator) and asked him if he would be willing to be a stealth co-moderator, There is one panelist that could be a problem, and I had seen that person at the bar, so 50/50 they were sober. So, I said to Ozgur that if I seem to be floundering to please jump in and help me wrestle the topic back to plumb. He agreed.

Thus armed, I went into the next one.

Turns out? This was the best panel I was on all weekend. The panelist I was worried about? A perfect addtion to the panel, extremely lively in all the right ways. We stayed on topic with only a few, very natural diversions into related topics, like the history of certain foods, etc. I think panelists were happy because I asked those that created recipes for their books to share them, and at the end, I made sure that anyone who had things they wanted to plug had the opportunity to do so. Ozgur never had to rescue me, and, more importantly, IT WAS FUN.

My last panel was "Who is Voting for Team Rocket?" and our moderator decided to take that literally and had a fun little part at the end where we voted on various villains in various catagories and whoever suggested them won a small figurine that she had picked up at the dollar store. This panel did not pop, but it also did not fail, so it slotted in nicely to the 'it was okay' set of panels.

What a wild damn ride.

This is not my usual experience at Minicon at all. I am blaming the Monkey King, because clearly I have displeased him with my lack of knowledge. Hopefully a penance of several chapters of A Journey to the West will put my life's vibe back in order.

My program book, table tent, and con notebook

Image: con material--program book, table tent, pen and notebook

Friday Night
I will not bury the lead. Thank you to everyone who wished me luck with logistics. I MADE IT TO THE CON IN PLENTY OF TIME.

I got an email from a friend shortly after I posted my pre-con report on Friday afternoon, letting me know tht 494 was so backed up that a trip that should take 11 minutes was taking 36. So, I absolutely should NOT wait until 5 pm to head out if I wanted ot get there in time. This prompted me to call Shawn who also realized that she had a meeting with the Board of the Friends of the LIbrary (her volunteer gig) at 4:30 pm so she actually couldn't stay at work as long as she wanted to, anyway. Our compromise was that I would pick her up at 3:45 pm. That gave me plenty of time to get her back home and get ready to head out.

The highway was pretty awful. But when I left it was only just after 4 pm, so I had an hour and some change before I needed to panic. Thus, when I hit the slowdown near the interchange, I just went into my Zen driving mode. I listened to the songs on the radio and just let the ebb and flow of the stop and start just be whatever it was going to be. I often have a weird amount of patience for traffic jams? The thing is, there is really no point to getting upset (unless you are late and/or you really need to pee or something) because you can't make the traffic move any faster by yelling at it. I mean, don't get me wrong. I absolutely have also spent plenty of traffic jams yelling and fretting. Sometimes it's cathartic to just tell everyone else on the road how stupid they are. But this time I was able to just relax into it... and so I made record time. Somehow managed to get to the hotel by 4:30 pm.

The upside is that it gave me a chance to orient myself.

A saucer in the center of the pool/cabana area

A saucer in the center of the pool/cabana area

Image: an inflatable saucer, in the atrium, pool side, if you will.

For those of you less familiar with this convention, this was the first time (I believe) that Minicon has returned to a hotel that used to host us nearly since time immemorial. I have spent so much of my local con life in this particlar hotel (since, for a while it also hosted CONvergence) that I actually dream about its architecture. It's nooks and crannies are all well known to me. The only draw back to this 'muscle memory,' if you will, is that I still have, in my mind, a map that no longer perfectly overlays the current configuration, ala, "Dealer's room = this spot, programming = these rooms, Con Suite = this place."

Because of this, while I likely would have had plenty of time to actually get some food at the con suite, I ended up wandering around aimlessly. The good news is that I had a chance to check out the dealer's room a bit, say hello to a number of my panelists who were handselling their books, and figure out where my panel actually was. I talked to a couple of friends that I never see anywhere other than cons, specficially Greg J. who apparently spent his vacation last year bicycling all the way to Duluth which is hella impressive to me. He was very demure. "I took it easy. I only biked 40 miles a day." Meanwhile, I was thinking I would be exhausted after mile 5, but, honestly, good for him. It's absolutely the kind of thing I would enjoy if I could actually bike for that long and that far.

Of course, just as I was heading into my panel I ran into Eleanor A. and Ruth B. who invited me to dinner with them, but, at that point, it was about fifteen mintues until the start of my panel, and so I had to decline.

My first panel was "On Learning How to Write," and I was moderating.

I have to admit that some weird vibe was in the air for me for this whole convention. I only had ONE panel that rose above "meh" for me and at least two that I might classify as "unmitigated disasters."

"On Learning " fell into the 'meh' catagory and, I guess, as the moderator, I only have myself to blame. I thought the panelists were will chosen. We had a wide range career options--self-published, small press, and traditionally published. There was a time in my career when I might have been snotty about the fact that I, a PROFESSIONAL, was seated at the table with anyone who wasn't also traditionally published, but it's not 1998 anymore and lots and lots and lots of people I respect (including many of the folks on that panel with me) are having hybrid careers and/or are making a very fine living as small press or self-published authors. Lois McMaster Bujold and Ursula Vernon self-publish these days, for crying out loud. SFWA accepts self-published authors. The lines--which never needed to be there in the fist place--have been blurred to the point of zero distinction: Writers are writers.

I bring this up because it felt to me like Wesley Chu, who was Minicon's Guest of Honor this year, seemed a little prickly about these distinctions. He seemed to keep wanting to tell us how many books he has out, generally. More speficially, when the question of beta readers came up he seemed to want to go on and on about how beta readers are worthless because they're just some randos. At this point, I may have leaned into the microphone to note that my beta readers aren't randos. Not only are they people I trust and RESPECT but a number of them are multiple Hugo award winners--so maybe Wesley just needed a better set of friends.

Do I regret this in the sober light of day?

No, actually, I do not.

First of all, I also have beta readers who are not award-winners who are amazing and for WHOM I WOULD DIE FOR. I chose them because they understand me and my writing and I have read their writing and/or respect and admire their experise and intellect. My beta readers--ALL OF THEM, including those who beta read my fanfic--have HELPED ME IMPROVE MY CRAFT, full stop.

Second, do not dis the experise of the other panelists on my watch.

I will have you know that Ozgur Sahin is an award-winning author; Douglas Van Dyke is an award-winning author; Deb Kinnard had already started the panel out with a whole thing about "not being smart enough to be a science fiction author" and "only" being a romance author. (DEB I TOO AM A ROMANCE AUTHOR, HOW ABOUT WE DON'T.) Guy Stewart, who I know less about, had just finished telling a lovely story about how his DAUGHTER is his beta reader and I'm sorry. But I don't care how many books you've had published, no one gets to call anyone's child a 'rando' or imply that they don't contribute in a meaningful way. My son has helped me work on my novels, including traditionally published ones.

So, yeah, that one probably could have gone better.

If there were extra prickly feelings afterwards, it's entirely my fault. I did pull Ozgur aside afterwards to ask what he thought of the panel (and spectifically our GoH's performance on it.) Ozgur had a generally a better sense of it and was much more willing to chalk some of the comments up to Imposter Syndrome and general nerves than I was. By chance, later, one of the audience members I ran into said that they thoughs that particular panel was very encouraging, so at least I got across what I wanted the panel to be about--which is that there are lots of ways to learn the craft and none of them are wrong (or right, for that matter.) If you are writing you should do whatever feels right for you. Get words down on the page. That's the most important thing. And, to be fair to Wesley, he also reiterated that sentiment several times.

I will say that I went into the next panel I had with Wesley on Saturday fully willing to give him a second chance, but that panel was one of the two near unmitigated disaster panels, so.... more on that later.

To finish up Friday--I ended up finally making it over to the con suite to get some food. I ran into Mike S. there and his friend Tom (whose last name I have forgotten, if I was ever told it.) They both got up and started to leave, so I asked if they could have their table. They said yes, but then talked about going somewhere else to talk and I said, "Well, stay here! I would love your company." I think they were both surprised by this? But, I like Mike a lot. I got to know him a bit outside of convention space when I was regularly working at the Maplewood Library. We would run into each other there and talk about the books he was checking out, etc. Plus, he and I are mask buddies? In fact at one point on Saturday when we had finished eating at the potato/taco bar at the GIS room, he reminded me when it was time to mask back up. Plus, he and Tom are both interesting guys. Once Micheal Mirriam joined us, the talk turned to airplane near-accidents, and I learned that Tom was in the navy in (and I'm guessing here because he didn't say, but it sounded like probably) Vietnam. I loved hanging out with all of them, and not only did we gather Michael M, but also

pegkerr so it felt very much like a classic Minicon moment.

It felt like time to drift back towards the programming area and so I stood around near registration with Adam Stemple, Ari S., and Delia I. Adam and were loud and boisterous (like we are--I later joked that we can easily be found by "echolocation," although in our case, you just follow the vibrations of our LOUDNESS until you spot us.) Eventually, it was time to go to

naomikritzer 's panel on "The Female Gaze." The people on that panel did a good job, though I will confess I was not all that invested in the topic. I was there to see Naomi. We connected after for a little bit, which was nice, but I was turning into a pumpkin, so I didn't stay terribly long after.

This is getting a bit long and the next section on Saturday is likely to be even longer, so I'm going to break these in two.

Minicon is this weekend. These are the panels to which I was assigned. There are a number on here that have me head scratching a bit, like, what do I know about the Monkey King? (Answer: almost nothing). I am, however, not going to complain about getting to be on more than one panel with Wesley Chu. That's pretty cool.

See some of you there, no doubt!

ON LEARNING HOW TO WRITE
Fri 5:30pm................................................................................ Veranda 1-4
The pathways to becoming a writer are many and varied. But not everyone can get a degree or attend expensive workshops. Can you learn to write by reading? How about reading and writing fan fiction? Is a beta-reader as good as an editor? Once you decide to sit down and write something, how do you improve your craft?
Deb Kinnard, Wesley Chu, Guy Stewart, Douglas Van Dyke, Ozgur K. Sahin,
Lyda Morehouse (M)

THE MONKEY KING GOES WEST
Sat 11:30am ............................................................................. Veranda 1-4
As the world becomes more diverse, the SF/F genre borrowed from everywhere. Eastern myths and magic are becoming increasingly familiar to Western audiences via books, movies and television dramas. Let’s talk about Monkey and his famous Journey to the West, martial arts, cultivators, yokai, immortal emperors, and other legends that are making their way to the rest of the world.
Peter Kacner, Anna Waltz, Delia Ihinger, Lyda Morehouse, Lisa Freitag (M)

THE PITFALLS AND BENEFITS OF WRITING HUMOR
Sat 7:00pm ................................................................Grand Ballroom East A
Great humor has the power to make the world feel a little bit sunnier. But what can you do when your slapstick falls short, your puns stink and everybody nose it, and your comedic timing…misses its cue? Come join us for a discussion about the often-underestimated work of making people laugh.
Eleanor Arnason, Wesley Chu, Melanie Meyer, Lyda Morehouse, Dex Greenbright (M)

THE RESTAURANT AT THE END OF THE BOOK
Sat 8:30pm ................................................................Grand Ballroom East A
Food often figures heavily in adventuring. Even video games have menus, these days. How do you invent food for your characters? Do you research planetary ecology, or historical cooking, or do you just make it up? Do you have any recipes? What fictional universe would you visit just to sample the cuisine?
Deb Kinnard, Wil Bastion, Steven Brust, CM Alongi, Ozgur K. Sahin, Lyda Morehouse (M)

WHO IS VOTING FOR TEAM ROCKET?
Sat 10:00pm………………………………………………….................... Veranda 1-4
The best worst anime characters: Who are your favorite villains? Who has the best evil laugh? Who has the best costume? Who would be the most fun to hang out with in bars? On missions? In the hot tub?
Lyda Morehouse, Jason Otting, Dani Sommer, Aaron Vander Giessen, Anna Waltz

OMG, this is a long convention. However! My part in it is now, officially, over.

I was once again up at the crack of dawn in order to Zoom into a panel live in Glasgow. So, I'm probably going to be a crispy critter for the rest of the day.

So, okay, let's see. Yesterday, I had one panel at 4 pm locally, which put it directly in conflict with the end of the Hugo Awards Ceremony. Because I wanted to see how

naomikritzer would do, I had my iPad open to the YouTube channel next to me on the table while I was in the online green room. I am happy to report that she won NOT ONE, but TWO Hugos Sunday night! Well done, Naomi!! (And all before I had to go live and concentrate on my panel, so thank you Powers That Be for that little gift.)

Anyway, because it was Sunday and because I'd had a Star Trek: Adventures game the night before, I will admit that I didn't attend a lot of paneling beyond my own. I did watch on Replay in the CircleCentral hub "Through an African Lens" (panelists: Lauren Beukes, T.L. Huchu, Wole Talabi -- Yvette Lisa Ndlovu was also supposed to be there, but either had unsurmountable tech issues or, like some folks, miscalculated the time difference.) It was interesting because they talked a lot about something I didn't know about, but have always suspected. According to the panelists, there is a real, if possibly unconscious, attempt to curate the kinds of stories that come out of The Continent. Some of these authors more speculative and city-centric work was considered "not marketable," in part because the Western audience doesn't tend to remember that some of the largest and most modern cities in the world are on The Continent. The West is still very much attached to the rural, giraffe roaming monolithic image of Africa. Which is just insane to me in 2024, but there you have it.

I mentally bookmarked a panel about Solarpunk that I'm hoping to catch before they close down the member portal. I should probably watch it today sometime, since I don't know how long they intend to keep any of our various features functional.

Before my Sunday afternoon panel started, I got some homemade pizza dough rising, so that, once I was finished with my panel at five (local time, 'natch), I could pop a deep dish into the oven for all of us, which was a very delicious choice on my part, I must say. (It turned out really well!)

The Sunday panel itself was not my best performance. I will take full responsibility here. If I am willing to yell at the clouds in the direction of Big Name yesterday, I do the same to myself: I should have prepared better. As far as I'm concerned a panelist as two jobs: show up on time and be fully prepared to talk about the subject at hand. I was on time. I failed the other one. Not spectacularly? But enough.

The title was "Help! I Was Reincarnated as a Worldcon Panel!" and was about a type of Japanese portal or another world fantasy manga and anime called isekai. I am, admittedly, a casual fan of isekai--but it turns out there were only three of us on that panel and NONE of us were fully prepped to do the heavy lifting. I feel pretty embarrassed about that. I had about a half-dozen titles ready, which might have been fine in a panel of four or five? Honestly, had I remembered there were only three of us, I would have had a bigger list of names of anime and manga ready and at hand. I probably should have just opened up Wikipedia to "manga type: isekai" in the middle of the panel, you know? But, I didn't.

And so we did flounder a bit.

On top of that, it never helps that, on any given anime/manga panel (unless it's about a single title), the Venn Diagram of "what I've seen" and "what the other panelist are familiar with" often has ZERO overlap. Anime is just too huge a category even when you narrow it down to a single "type" like "anime about food" or "anime about life in another world." Thus one of the big points I had been hoping to make about how difficult it is to actually define isekai fell flat because *gasp* (but also no surprise) I was the only panelist familiar enough with Bleach to make the point I wanted to argue... which is that this fighting manga, Bleach, goes to another world very often and has lots of other markers in common with isekai as a genre, but it is decidedly NOT isekai by anyone's definition. Why, right? So, obviously, I'd been hoping to go from there to spark a deeper discussion... but instead I was met with, "Huh, I don't know Bleach well enough to say one way or another." Well, okay, that might be true, but that reply doesn't exactly foster the conversation I was hoping for because explaining the entire plot of Bleach is not only off-topic, but also, in my case, likely to go WAY off into the weeds. So we just sort of let my thought hang there awkwardly. At this point, something happened to the panel's chemistry. Like, it became clear that we weren't picking up with others were putting down. If you were to watch it, you would definitely see me doing that thing that happens when there's no clicking between panelists were I say, "Did that actually answer your question?"

It was just generally like that.

Again, this probably felt WAY worse to me as a panelist than how it "read" to the audience.

This morning I Zoomed into to "If I'm Not Kira and You're Not Kira, Who is Writing in the Death Note?" which was a celebration of the fact that last year marked the 20th anniversary of the debut of Death Note's serialization in Weekly Shounen Jump Magazine (December 2003). I was initially quite worried about this panel because I had not heard much from the moderator other than receiving an invite to a Google Group and, honestly, I had to wonder what is there left to say about Death Note that hasn't already been discussed to death? But, I think it actually went very well. I mean, maybe if you watched it, you'd be like, "Why does Lyda think THIS is a better performance from her than what she did on the isekai one??" But, I think it really is about panel chemistry--at least from the inside. The people on this panel all had very good, thought-provoking ideas. Yeah, it's true that I was kind of just along for the ride in many ways, but it was a good ride.

That's a wrap, folks!

I would say that, generally, I found the Glasgow WorldCON online experience to be a good one. I am a bit disappointed that I only managed one hangout in RingCentral with people I didn't know very well. I did only try to recruit twice, however (and if you look at it that way my success rate was 50%!) Maybe if I'd had more energy on Sunday, I might have been able to drum up another meet-up. But, for whatever reason, people just weren't checking in there.

Even so, given that the majority of this conference was in-person, I felt surprisingly well-connected to the whole thing. It was BY FAR the best hybrid experience I've ever had as a panelist. I might feel differently about all of this if I didn't have quite so many panels, (It's insane that I, a relative nobody, got 5 panels. There were people way more famous than me with far fewer.) Although, I don't know. The day I had nothing on, Friday, I really enjoyed watching the livestreams and the RePlay panels. I'm sometimes really terrible about attending other people's panels when I'm physically at a con, so I guess this is one of the benefits for online for me. Also, because it's not "appointment TV," as it were, I can catch panels that were scheduled opposite things I was on or each other. So, that's just kind of nifty, I guess.

For me it was worth the cost, I guess.

Anybody else attend virtually? How was your experience?

Image: Me, on a panel at Glasgow WorldCON (hopefully not being too ridiculous.)

First, I have to say that the technical folks behind-the-scenes at WorldCON are INSANELY competent. I'm sooooo impressed. Getting into the panel was seamless. I was really impressed with how, on Zoom, we were able to not only see our fellow in-person panelists, but also a shot of the live audience (so that we could gauge reactions.) Technically, it could not have been better. I'm sure there will be various technical snafus as the con continues, but this one went off in a way that seemed effortless--though very clearly that just meant well orchestrated.

My first panel was "Let them Eat! Food in Anime." It went very well--at least from my perspective. I don't think I talked too much. This is a problem/bonus of being on a panel with me. I'm very much a cooperative overlapper, who will get excited and build on what has been said, but, in some ways, Zoom makes it easier for me to 'behave." I can put on the mute and nod along and make my "uh-huh" noises silently, and not be as tempted to leap in. Or if I am tempted, I can just mouth things to myself. I did re-watch a bit of the replay which is available on RingCentral and I *think* I did okay.

I really loved everyone on the panel. They were all very knowledgeable and I loved that An wore her bear ears! I was telling Mason afterwards: THESE ARE MY PEOPLE.

Plus, I got to have an actual squee moment when someone in the audience mentioned Mr. Villain's Day Off, which I freaking LOVE. And my insane enthusiasm made the audience laugh. So, there is that.

I'm currently listening to one of the livestream panels "Book Bans and Moral Fascism."

I was inspired by my positive experience to get my questions and agenda together for the panel I need to moderate, so hopefully that will help them as much as Ryan's outline helped me.

Okay, not much else to report! More tomorrow!

Image: me (left) and Eleanor Arnason (right) at ConFABulous this weekend. Photo by

tallgeese

This last weekend was ConFABulous a small, local con that caters (mostly) to GLBTQIA+ fans of SF/F and games of all sorts. I was in attendance all three days, though I only showed up on Sunday to do some TTRPGing.

Friday night around 6 pm, I picked up Eleanor at her place and we drove together to the con. The con hotel was a Crowne Plaza Aire, but local people will know it as "the good MarsCon hotel." (MarsCon has been at the Airport Hilton for the past decade, but some of the earlier iterations of that con were held at this hotel and I have very fond memories of those weekends.) Eleanor and I were on a panel called "Two Former Guests of Honor Talk about Whatever the [Bleep] They Want." The title is a bit of a misnomer, since we were both former GoHs of Gaylaxicon since ConFABulous doesn't really have GoHs, but since ConFABulous started as the local alternative to when Gaylaxicon was being held elsewhere, we figured close enough.

The conversation really was broad in scope. We talked about dinosaurs, yaoi, why people write SF and play RPGs in tough times, Spenser's Fairy Queen and six dozen other topics. It made sense at the time... mostly.

Eleanor was done after that, so we headed to the bar so she could decompress, have a beer and something to eat before heading home. We ran into our friend Anton and one of his partners and so we hung out and chatted for awhile before heading home.

Saturday, I had a panel on Japanese and Chinese graphic media, basically, which I shared with a fellow named David. I... found this panel somewhat difficult to be on. David, as it happens, is very new to the manga/manhwa fandom and I think to conventions, as well, at least at a guess? I mean, typically, where there are two people on a panel the first person introduces themselves says a little something about what they want to talk about, and then the other person gets a chance to introduce themselves? Well, David just started and didn't stop. If I am feeling generous, it was probably nerves? Regardless, I spent much of that panel fighting for air and a chance to direct the conversation even a little.

Me, looking at David, wondering if I will get a chance to say anything....

Me, looking at David, wondering if I will get a chance to say anything....

Image: Me, looking at David's copy of MDZS and wondering if I will ever get a word in edgewise. Photo credit same as above.

However, talking to people over food later, it's unclear that the panel felt as bad from the outside as it did from the in. I did note that it might have been nice, since the con is so small, to have checked with the level of understanding of the audience because the few people who broke in with questions and comments, seemed pretty well versed in the basics, one woman even lived in Korea for years. So, I feel like it was FINE, but there were missed opportunities.

I went home for lunch on Saturday because I knew it would be my longer day. When I came back, I played the Thieves' World roleplaying game. When I was a teenager, I loved the Thieves' World anthologies. It was one of the earliest shared world anthologies (at least that *I* knew about) and the stories tended to follow the lower classes, which, to me in 1978, was a shiny new idea. You mean you can write about the underclass and not just princes and elves?? These books probably sparked my life long interest in reading about class dynamics in SF/F. So, I ate these up. I have not tried to re-read them, though

tallgeese (the GM) did and said that he was surprised by what felt like a bit ahead of the times inclusion of gender-bending/gender-queer folks and Furries. The game itself was quite fun. In what is apparently a trend, I played a witch-barbarian, who I decided was non-binary. There was only one other player and that worked out really well, honestly? We had a good rapport. I am not one to comment on game mechanics (because I don't care if the dice ever go clickety-clack, I'm there for the playing pretend parts) But for those who might be interested, our GM used Swords of the Serpentine.

On Sunday, I came back early in the morning to play Hearts of Wulin which is a Powered by the Apocalypse game. David, of the disastrous panel joined in, and I was initially very worried how the table dynamics would shake out, but he was a very considerate and fun player, as it happened. I don't think this table's players clicked quite as well as when it was just me and one other person, but there is, as I have been thinking about ever since, a lot of pressure on the players of PbtA games to provide story elements and, what is sometimes called in D&D, "flair." So, the quality of the role-playing part of the game really depends on how into your character you are. I think this is actually why David was a good player? He basically revamped a favorite wuxia character of his and amused me (and I *think* the rest of the table, though maybe just me) by showing us the costume changes that his character was going through. For me, I felt a bit a loss because so much of why I am not a huge wuxia or xianxia fan in general--much of Chinese culture and history is opaque and unknown to me.

But, this is not to say I didn't have fun in this game. I just found role-playing in it a bit more challenging. Unlike one of our other players, I actually adore games like this that focus on relationships, but those are also more difficult to fully explore in a one-shot... though I felt very satisfied by how it all went down. I think I'd really love to try to play a Hearts of Wulin campaign at some point, but I would have to find other people into it and given that only two other players showed up to this game besides myself, I have no idea if I'd be able to drum up interest in anything more than a one-shot.

Anyway.

I would say the con was a success all around. How was your weekend?

My last day of Virtual Chicon was actually Saturday, which is two days ago now, but I'll my do my best to recap for those that are interested.

I had a great couple of panels on Thursday, despite being ten minutes late to the panel I was most excited about "Satoshi Kon: a Retrospective." The panel moderator was Alina Sidorova and she was very kind in that, despite my late arrival, she gave me an opportunity right away to dig into my theories about the transness of some of the reflective images in Kon's work. This sparked a very lively conversation. I think, generally, this was a really great group of individual fans, each with their own unique perspective. I wish, in fact, we'd had more time to explore Osawa Hirotaka's point that Kon, himself, has said that he was deeply influenced by music, and that there is often a connection between art and music. I know nothing at all about music, since I'm not actually much of a fan (I always dread the classic author interview question which is: What kind of music do you listen to when you create? My answer: none, are you nuts? How can I hear my characters talking over someone else's lyrics??? But NO ONE likes that answer. I'm supposed to have a playlist. I fail playlists.) So, I mean I would like to hear from people for whom music and their art are intrinsically linked, and we ran out of time before we could go deep on that. I was also on that panel with Nick Mamatas, who was also on my later, much more chaotic panel "Noir and SF/F."

The Noir panel was rough for me for a couple of reasons. First, my internet decided to be deeply unstable. Second, while I wrote a noir cyberpunk, I don't actually read or watch a lot of it otherwise. So, every time there was a question like, "What are you reading now in the noir genre that you would recommend?" or "Are there noir SF stories with alien detectives?" I had no clue how to answer. But, luckily, both the moderator T.C. Weber and Nick had a lot to say on pretty much everything (<--I say that with a smile, I really liked the both of them a lot.) Marissa James and I stayed out more often than not, though me more intentionally that she, I think.

Virtual panels seem to come in a lot of varieties. I actually saw at least part of one "Cyberpunk in Different Cultures" that was set up like an Academic presentation, where each expert actually ran a power point presentation. Then, after each person gave their separate speech, they would come together and discuss as a group. I am not a super fan of this? I mean, I feel it can be quite good if it's a survey topic, like "Cyberpunk in Different Cultures," where what the viewer wants at the end is a list of books or materials to consume.

There are others, like the "Noir" panel where everyone talks whenever they feel like it and it's in constant danger of devolving into chaos, albeit a fun chaos.

I actually thought that our "Satoshi Kon" panel was a good hybrid in that, while we didn't have a power point prepared, it was clear that each of us had a THING that we wanted to say about Kon's work. But, instead of waiting until the end to discuss, when ideas might get lost, we would each say our piece, have some excited cross talk, and then it would be the next person's turn. I absolutely credit the moderator for being able to orchestrate this kind of discussion. Alina was really good, too, at making sure everyone had an equal voice and ample time to speak.

It's really hard to make an online panel as fun and informative as an in-person one, but I feel like I had two really decent experiences, even the more chaotic "Noir" one.

I will say that I find that there's something about video conferencing that makes a lot of panelists into expressionless robots. I don't know what causes this, but some people go really flat, like they're staring into a TV screen. I notice that very few people smile or nod along and that brings the energy down. In an effort to counteract that I always make it my habit to smile, nod, and turn off my mic so that I can say the "uh-huh" noises to myself without breaking up their audio. It's an effort to stay engaged, but it's not that much more of an effort than it is in Real Life (tm) in my opinion.

I watched the Hugo Award ceremony on YouTube and I have opinions on that, too, but they're probably not for public consumption. The only thing I can say about it is that I think there's something very insular that happened this year. Same people, different award happened more than once. That being said, I was so happy to see Neil Clarke get a Hugo this year. I also want to be clear that I feel everyone nominated was very deserving, winner or not, it's just that... well, I had to wonder this year how much "ah, I know that name!" went into the voting decisions of WorldCon members. Though who knows what happened given that the Hugo's are decided with the run-off ballot style. Perhaps what I noticed was a matter of people winning a majority in the number 2 ranking. Who knows?

Anyway, it was still lovely to watch. Someone's speech always makes me tear up a little, and this year was no exception.

In other news, I spent far too much time today debating with a reader of my fan work about why I was not writing their favorite character the way they saw them. I tried to answer with the simple, "Because I'm writing my vision of the same character." To which they responded, "But why, though," and then dropped me a (and I kid you not) THREE PAGE GOOGLE DOC letter. The letter might have been more useful to me, but it seemed to mostly be comprised of "Why did you write him this way, when he's obviously this other way?" without any supporting documentation. This is fan fic, show me where you get this idea from canon. I want page number and panel, so I can reconstruct your thought process and reasonably discuss our differing takes on the same moment in canon. I am always, 100% up for that.

Me, discussing Bleach canon:
The conspiracy guy from "Sherlock," I believe

The conspiracy guy from "Sherlock," I believe

Image: The red string conspiracy guy from "Sherlock," I believe.

It's that, or accept that you just like Soft!Aizen and there isn't canon support for your preference and you don't care (but then don't argue with people who write Hard!Aizen.)

This person also seemed upset that my story had "an agenda." "You were trying to paint the villain as a good guy!" I had to break it to this fan that every story has an "agenda." It's called a "theme," in your English class. If a writer doesn't have something they're trying to say, they probably will run out of steam before it's finished. But, the theme or agenda it doesn't have to be as big as my exploration of "What if Aizen was evil, but also not wrong about the Soul Society and Ichigo helped him win?" It can be, "What if Ichigo really liked knitting?"

Both of these are "agendas," because the fic writer is probably also saying something about why Ichigo might like knitting or why knitting is cool. In the story, they'll PROBABLY CENTER KNITTING. (This person was really upset that I centered Aizen, and I was like, well, that's because to make the case that Aizen is evil but also not wrong, I have to let him talk about it???) But, the point is, all writing is about SOMETHING. It's also not illegal or wrong for me to want to make a political statement in my fan fic, even if canon doesn't support it. Fic writing, for me at least, is about the exploration. You've got this world you want to play in for some reason, often because you find something gnarly or toothsome in it and you want to chew on it. That, I explained to them, is the point of it all, and what that might end up feeling like is an "agenda."

I have a very bad feeling that I, at 55, might be arguing with someone who is, in point of fact, 12. I am trying to be emphatic, but not rude. Twelve or twenty or two hundred, I felt really compelled to explain that I don't owe anyone their vision of this character we have in common by the happenstance of fandom. This is fan fic.

If I want to write non-canonical, out-of-character stuff in my fan fiction, I'm actually allowed? I actually prefer to write as in character as possible, but that's my preference. It's not a requirement of the format.

Yesterday started with a conundrum.

On Thursday, I just drove directly to the con and parked in the hotel lot. It was super convenient, etc., but I never even looked at the prices. I sort of foolishly assumed that the rates would be reasonable. As I was leaving after two hours? TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS (for my international friends, that's about 31 Canadian dollars, 21 English pounds, or 24.50 Euros). INSANE. So, I woke up yesterday very determined not to bankrupt the family parking in the hotel ever again. It was raining very hard when I woke up, and so the thought of public transportation daunted me a bit. It looked like I'd be able to get a ride in with

naomikritzer , but then Mason reminded me that I'd promised him a ride to pick up some stuff at his work, so the timing didn't work out. I ended up taking the light rail in much later (my first panel was at 12:30 pm,) and that was FINE. It's a long walk down Nicollet Mall, since the light rail drops off almost at the butt end opposite part of that area of downtown, but there were buses I could have hopped on? So, it turned out okay.

I tell myself I probably needed the exercise.

My first panel was "What If...?" a fan panel about the Marvel animated series of the same name. There was nothing overtly wrong with that panel, but, as I was telling another friend of mine afterwards, something about it felt very 1996. There were five panelists, two of which were women and one woman of color. The dude bros at the far end of the table were all comic book fans and had a very insular vibe? Like, I don't think they were INTENTIONALLY ignoring the female (and queer) end of the table, but they kind of liked the sound of their own voices a lot? (I mean, that can definitely be me in some situations, so no shade, necessarily.) BUT, at one point, I just grabbed my mic and started asking my fellow lady-appearing panelist questions. And, I am also a long-time comic book fan, but I think there is value from hearing from people who are only MCU fans. A lot of value. I say that because there was a bit of an unspoken "Comic book fans are the One True Marvel Fan" vibe, as well, which no one ever said, but was heavy in the air, you know?

Anyway, I feel like I had to fight a bit to be heard on that panel and since the pandemic started the amount of spoons I have to make that happen is pretty low.

The "Faith in SF&F" panel was... well, I was talking to Naomi afterwards and I don't think she saw it as quite the disaster I felt it was. There were, in my opinion, a couple of things working against it from the start: 1) the topic is almost too broad, and 2) it was happening at CONvergence where the line between "are we talking about speculative FICTION, specifically, or are we talking about the entirety of SF/F fandom?" is very nebulous. The moderator did their very best, but religion is also a hot button topic and so, at one point, That Guy in the audience asked whether or not all of Judaism is negated by the fact that there is no archeological evidence for Exodus. If I had been the moderator, I would have said, "Either reframe this question to include spec fic, or shut the f*ck up? This is never the venue to call into question anyone's religious beliefs." BUT THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN. So, we had to have a whole ten minutes of one of the panelist making all sorts of counter arguments which were 100% unnecessary, because religions are based on faith? So who the hell cares if there is archeological evidence for any of it?? (Says the former Unitarian, now Witch, who has had to sit through these arguments, particularly among pagans who really, really want the Stone Age goddess worship to be a singular, unbroken line between then and now, rather than sh*t a bunch of weirdos thought up during the Victorian Age. For myself? If the shoe fits, who cares who made it or when!")

ANYWAY, you can see how that nonsense derailed us.

It wasn't our only moment off the rails, though? One of our panelists really, really wanted to talk about the Satanic Panic. This came up in our email chain pre-convention, and I might have tried a bit harder, if I were the moderator, to figure out exactly what they wanted to discuss--if only because its connection to SF/F is kind of tenuous? I mean, there was a whole lot of freaking out about D&D, which I remember having lived through this period in American history, but role-playing games are starting to stretch what I would consider speculative FICTION. I mean, yes, they are part of nerd culture and are a kind of private, living fiction, but are they stories in the traditional sense and, even then, what point do you want to make about the Satanic Panic and its effect on D&D or other spec fic related issues? Like, are there any novels that actually deal with this? Maybe that terrible movie with Tom Hanks, Mazes and Monsters, from 1982, which I feel like I saw a novelization of in my school library (and maybe even read), but otherwise I can't think of any bit of fiction that was either directly affected by this (banned or what have you) unless what the person on the end wanted to talk about was horror movies? Again, movies aren't technically FICTION in the strictest sense? So, I dunno. I might have been more specific as a moderator and said, "Okay, but what specifically do you want to say about how the Satanic Panic relates to spec fic?" and try to draw that person out a bit more. Like, they barely got a chance to talk at all? I would have tried to coax more out of them, in general.

But, if you ignore those two wildly divergent tangents, the panel was OK? I'm not convinced that there was more substance than flailing about, but some panels are like that.

I hung out with Naomi and a couple of other friends in between my two panels in the Con Suite (and then later outside on the Nicollet greenway, which was LOVELY,) and one of the things that kept coming up whenever I complained about how a panel went and how everything kind of felt a bit like the entire con was reverting to some less enlightened age is that apparently CONvergence is having a bit of a personnel shake-up? I don't know very many details about this, except that there was apparently some kind of great exodus of volunteers this summer due to some cult of personality types deciding to retire/quit/what have you. And we speculated that some of the things that used to be done by careful assigning of panelists, etc., might just have become, "Whelp, whatever!" in a mad rush. So, maybe that's part of why the whole thing feels like an earlier version of itself? I don't know about that, but it's interesting to consider.

Meanwhile, I got my final ChiCon panel assignments and, as my UK friends might say, I am well chuffed. I will post about them after I finish all this CONvergence write-up stuff.

Last night I was invited to be a guest lecturer at the College of Saint Katherine's by a colleague of mine at Ramsey County Library. Normally when I do these things at colleges and universities, I talk about my personal experience as a published science fiction writer--an area, on which, I am the leading expert.

This time, however, I was asked to come explain manga and graphic novels to a group of library science graduate students, aka future librarians.

It's not like I have zero experience passing myself off as qualified to talk about any number of fannish things. I do it all the time at science fiction conventions, right? But, there's something about this particular subject that oft goes awry (or 'gang aft agley,' as Robert Burns himself would say, incomprehensibly.) I don't know if the Goddess is trying to tell me that it's foolish for me to set myself up as an expert in something that is so decidedly _not_ my culture, or what?

To be fair, I was very, very, VERY clear to these students that I am a consumer of this particular media, NOT an expert. I said that at the start and I reiterated it several times.

I can't say it was an unmitigated disaster, not like that yaoi/yuri panel at WorldCon where I looked out into the audience and realized there were ACTUAL native Japanese EXPERTS in the audience and our panel was a bunch of blathering white chicks. In comparison to that, this was absolutely fine. The talk went... okay. I mean, the instructor promised me that this was a lively group and that I wasn't going to have to stand in front of them and lecture for an hour. And... I didn't? There were several glazed over eyes, but I did field a number of questions. The worst part is that there were slides. And I read them to the class. Which... yeah. I mean, to be fair, it was kind of my own fault. I sent a list of definitions to the instructor and she quite helpfully made me a powerpoint presentation, because manga does have a lot of specialized terminology.

But, I SUCK at powerpoint presentations. I am 150% better at leading discussions--class discussions or panel discussions. Lecturing, particularly on a subject like this, where I don't have all of the information at my fingertips? NOPE.

I wouldn't call it a fail, but it was not one of my better guest spots.

I started the session off asking how many of these future children's/teen librarians (some of whom were already working in middle and high school libraries) read any graphic media: comic books, manga, graphic novels. There was a noticeable lack of hands that went up. I tried casting a wider net, as it were, and asked how many folks had SEEN a Marvel superhero movie... I... I'm not sure I've ever been in a room with so many people who have apparently NEVER seen a Marvel movie. Talk about a bubble that I usually live in. I had no idea there were even a dozen people on the planet who hadn't seen Avengers, much less all of them in the same place.

That might have thrown me a bit. I was at least hoping to connect to this room of 15 graduate students over a shared appreciation of Chris Evans or Tom Hiddleston. It was very weird to me to not be able to look at this room of women and go, "Loki, am I right?"

IT WOULD HAVE FALLEN ON DEAF EARS.

What even! How does?

At that point, I had no choice to start off with, "Okay, so... manga is...." and start reading off the slides. I mean, I think, ultimately, things were learned. We did have an interesting discussion about how difficult it is to judge where certain manga should be shelved. I spent a lot of time explaining the publishing categories, like shounen, seinen, josei, shoujo--but, I realized that none of that was terribly helpful, since a manga like Chi's Sweet Home (literally the most inoffensive, sweet, simple thing--as story about a cat doing cat things, which Americans normally shelve in the juvenile section) is technically marketed in Japan as seinen, which is aimed at the ADULT (over 18) MALE audience. I tried to explain that, really, a lot of this has to do with how much kanji is understood by the audience and sometimes, simple, sweet stories are popular among adult men....which says maybe more about how rigid the West is in its marketing strategy? But, so, as a librarian, knowing that something was originally marketed to adults in Japan isn't often much of a clue as to whether or not it's "kid-friendly" in Western terms, especially since certain expressions sexuality are not nearly as taboo as they are here. (Good example being the masterbation scene in Bleach that was scrubbed for the English-Language release. Newsflash: teenagers masterbate. Americans, however, are too Puritanical to have that KNOWN, I guess. The funny part is that the scene wasn't the least bit explicit, is was much more IMPLICIT, but it was there, and, apparently, that was too much.)

But, anyway, I got an "honorarium" of a twenty-five dollar gift card to my favorite coffeeshop.

I feel like I probably gave them $25 worth of information, so that's probably fair. It's just ironic that at a con, which I do an entire weekend's worth of programming basically for free (minus the price of admission), I would probably have given hundreds of dollars worth of information. On the other hand, most of my audience at con would know what a manga _is_, so we'd already be out of Manga 101 territory.

So, that was my night.

Otherwise, I've been recovering from an extremely wonderful Thanksgiving spent with good friends. Oh, and I had a birthday in there, too. I'm 51 now, everyone! Whoo!

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Day in the Life of an Idiot

Journal of Lyda Morehouse

Entries tagged with panel discussion

Convergence 2026

Con Report: Sunday Wrap-up

Minicon (Saturday): Another Missed Panel

Con Report: Minicon 59 (Friday)

Reading Wednesday and Final Con Report

The Big Day - Gaylaxicon - Saturday*

Gaylaxicon Con Report - Friday

Last Day of Con, First Day of Adventure

Friday Afternoon, Capclave

Diversicon 32 - Con Report

...of Podcasts and Such

Old-Timey Con Report (Part 3) - Blame it on the Monkey King

Old-Timey Con Report (Part 2) - Friday Night

My Minicon Schedule

WorldCon (Days 4 & 5)

WorldCON Day 1

ConFABulous Con Report

Virtual Chicon 8 Con Report (Day 2)

Convergence (Day 2)

Future Librarians