Day in the Life of an Idiot

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.


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. 

 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 (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.



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?

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. 

I had hoped to write all of these up shortly after they happened, but, as you see, I am composing everything post-final curtain, as it were. I did take notes, however, so hopefully I can recapture the gist of everything.

DAY TWO (Saturday):

I woke up to snow and ice. Being a morning person, I didn't bother to set an alarm because I knew that even though I'd stayed up late, there was no danger of oversleeping my 10 am kaffeeklatsch. Indeed, I was up by 7 am. I got partially dressed (in that I put on regular clothes, not CON clothes) and slipped my way across the parking lot of the hotel to the little strip mall directly across the street. There was a Caribou there as well as a Bruegger's bagels. I got my large mocha and had an egg bagel sandwich. The back of my badge said that my kaffeeklatsch would be held at "bar," but MiniCON has a "con bar" and the hotel also usually has a bar, so I wasn't entirely sure where things would be held. I figured that if we ended up at the hotel restaurant, it was still okay for me to have eaten something, because then I could talk and entertain people while THEY ate.

Turns out it was held at the "con bar," anyway. The con bar is basically just a party room, so labeled. My liaison, Tayna (who was amazing all weekend), made sure there was actual coffee from the con suite in the con bar for us early risers.

I don't ever think of 10 am as early, but I understand that it can be for many people, especially at a convention. So, I didn't expect a lot of people to turn up. I think my sign-up sheet only had a couple of people on it officially. But... the room filled up.

I was worried pre-con about the dreaded question "what are you writing now?" I flubbed it on Thursday night at the meet-and-greet. Someone, maybe even Rachel Swirsky, asked me that... and (despite coaching from naomikritzer ) I choked and blurted out, "NOTHING." Then I fumble/flailed for a while mumbling the things I usually do about having been emotionally thrown off the horse by being dropped by Penguin, etc., etc., until I trailed off awkwardly and killed conversation for at least three whole seconds.

That flub reminded me to be READY at the kaffeeklatsch. In fact, one of the first questions was, "What are you working on now?" Naomi came up with an absolutely brilliant response, which was to turn the burden of that question back around. I said, "Honestly, not much since Penguin dropped me, so I'm looking for ideas. You guys are presumably fans of my work--or at least science fiction--what would YOU like to see me write!"

Tyler Tork suggested that I write the lesbian candy shop cozies that he made up for his mock-up web design page. I think my favorite title of his was ASSAULTED CARAMEL. Tayna suggested an alternate Renaissance Festival fic (since we met, MANY YEARS AGO, through Fest.) When Tyler was talking about his lesbian mysteries, I was reminded of another friends' suggestion which was a tabletop RPG gamer/gaming mystery, the first of which would be TWENTY-SIDED DIE (and someone else, maybe Robyn, added another called, CRITICAL MISS.)

I also discovered, much to my surprise, that a number of people in the room were anxiously awaiting the ending of UNJUST CAUSE a Wattpad experiment that I petered out on a few years back (mostly because I honestly thought no one was reading it.) They made me write in my notebook: "Finish UNJUST CAUSE or fans will kill you."

So, apparently, I need to work on that...if I want to live!

To say that was a success is almost an understatement, because, hat could have been awkward (and legitimately triggering, in terms of my depression issue around writing,) felt invigorating and up-lifting. THANK YOU, NAOMI, FOR YOUR BRILLIANT COACHING!!!

Then, I had some free time until my Guest of Honor Interview (with puppet!) at 1:00 pm. Did I have lunch? I must of had lunch. Did I end up eating with people I know or did I just have Tayna grab me a sandwich from the green room?? (To be fair, Tayna had made me a roast beef sandwich the first night, Friday, that was amazing. It had just the right amount of horseradish sauce on it.) I did have a number of meals with Rachel and her husband Mike. I have a number of recommendations from them, including a web comic that I've started and am really enjoying called "Superbutch," about a lesbian superhero from the 1940s.

I know, I know... you don't care what I had for lunch. You just want to know: HOW DID IT GO WITH THE PUPPET????



The picture is a little dark, but you can see that I'm clearly enjoying myself. I don't remember if I posted a close-up of the muppet/puppet earlier, but here it is:



This puppet was custom built by local puppeteer Gordon Smude and performed by Laura Krentz.

How did it work? Well, I'm not entirely convinced it did, though I learned some lessons from the Opening Ceremonies. At Opening Ceremonies, it was tempting to try to interact with the puppet as though Laura could speak for her... but she really can't since *I'm* also Tate. So, at the interview I mostly (once I got the hang of it) tried to indicate when I was speaking as Lyda and when I was speaking as Tate. I have no idea if this was successful, especially since the temptation to say, "Right, Tate?" was always there.

The questions themselves were good and I made the Stemple/Yolens have to raise their "I'm uncomfortable" hands when I started talking about sex scenes, which was pretty hilarious. It was cool/weird to look out into the audience and see Jane Yolen with her hand up... until I recognized that Adam and David and Betsy were doing the same thing in the back row and I realized, "Oh, right, Adam has told me about this. I need to stop saying 'throbbing member" now. I have made everyone--except Adam's daughter--deeply uncomfortable in the Stemple/Yolen clan.)

So, I mean... it was fun? I also ended up tearing up a little bit over a question you wouldn't think would cause such a reaction. It was, "What was the best fan mail you've ever gotten?" I thought about it and the answer was all the trans folks who wrote to me back in the early days who were so moved to see Ariel there, as a representative of God, being trans. And I got all choked up thinking about how important representation really is.

The next panel was "Combining the Mystery/Detective Genre with Science Fiction," which was much lower energy, so it felt less good. Also, as these sorts of panels sometimes do, it ended up being a list of recommended titles. Some that I wrote down were: Rocket to the Morgue by Anthony Boucher, The Man in the Tree by Sage Walker, The Ark by Patrick S Tomlinson, and Dr. Stone, a manga, by Boichi (which someone that wasn't ME recommended.)

Then, it was Rachel and I together for "We Suck - Winning Through Losing," which was fun, because: Rachel. The two of us, I noticed, are positive-outlook sorts, so there weren't quite so many war stories about publishing (which I have a fair amount of!!) as advice to keep going after set-backs. The thing I remember the most from that panel was the question from the audience about risk-taking. I'm not sure what entirely was intended, but Rachel and I had a lovely discussion about how, yeah, it's always better to take a chance and fail than to reach for the lowest, safest hanging fruit--in terms of where you submit, in terms of how much of your soul you put into writing, and in terms of being willing to be scared that things aren't perfect but believing in your work anyway. I remember mentioning that I always think about how the Dark Side gets its energy from hate and fear and jealousy, and that's supposed to be a bad thing, but fear is the feeling you have when you're taking risks and if you never feel it, you're probably not growing as a writer.

The last panel of Sunday was "The Meaning of Captain America," which also went really well. Sometimes, on Marvel panels, there's a divide among the panelists between MCU/comic book. I was quite happy that all of the panelist were both, they'd seen all the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) and were all comic book readers, as well. Plus, Jei and I talked a lot about how fandom (particularly on Tumblr) sees Captain America, so it was high energy and well-rounded, IMHO.

I hung around in that room because my friend Tom ran up to his room to get me the Comixology version of Mark Gerunwauld's Captain America --or maybe it was someone else's take on Cap's pre-super solider life in the late-1930s... oh, yeah, actually the Grunwauld thing is a separate recommendation because, this was actually in She-Hulk because Jen Walters is taking on a case for Steve Rogers, in which he's been accused of murder. (She-Hulk Volume 3 -8, "The Good Old Days" [Part 1])

Plus, Rachel, Jane Yolen, Adam Stemple, and Ruth Berman were all on a panel about golems that I was interested in. Besides, I had plans to go out to sushi with Rachel afterwards, so I thought I might as well listen in. The panel was pretty good, though at 9 pm, it was kind of dense subject matter for my exhausted brain. I did manage to interrupt everything at one point because I thought Adam had offered a question to the audience (OOPS!)

Then, as promised, a bunch of us went out to sushi at Raku, including Rachel and Mike. I was out until they started closing down the sushi bar at midnight. We had a lovely time eating sushi and chatting--mostly about politics, mostly, I think, because politics wasn't exactly verboten at con, but going into detail sort of was... at least by silent agreement. I don't think anyone would have STOPPED either of us GoHs if we wanted to go on a rant about this or that political thing, but I assumed nothing. I know at least one of my fellow panelists on the mystery panel was, at least before the election, a Trump supporter.

I actually drove home after that because Sunday was Shawn's birthday and I really wanted to wake up with her, so we could have some time together to open presents and have cake. The morning was somewhat interrupted by the fact that Mason forgot his sweater at his friend Andrew's house, and we could have left it until after Spring Break, but it was the ONE sweat shirt that Shawn had sewed iPad sized pockets into for the big trip to New York he left for today.

DAY THREE (Sunday)

I managed, despite the detour to Andrew's house in Phalen, to not only make it to my 10 am panel, but to also be caffeinated. Nina's was open! So, we hit there on our way to Andrew's (I made my family come along so that we could all chat.) So, after a quick change in my hotel room into con clothes (I traditionally wear a button-up shirt and vest), I was on my way.

"This Will End Well," was my chance to rant about the ending of Bleach. The moderator let me start, and I knew I could derail everything if I got too specific (even though we warned that since we were talking endings, the whole thing was a spoiler). So, while I mentioned events, I framed them in terms of 'why this sort of ending sucks for me, personally.' Which nicely let the panelists discuss 'ship endings' and 'plot-hole endings' and any number of related themes. It was a high-energy panel.

Then, I tried to go out to dim sum with a group of people, including my friend Anna. The dim sum place we tried to go to was JAM PACKED and I ended up having to bail because I had a panel at 1 pm. I waited with them from about 11:15 am until almost 12:30 pm. Almost an hour. I've VERY SAD that I had to bail, because I've actually NEVER had dim sum, and having stuck my nose in the front door, the place smelled AMAZING.

I ended up at the con hotel's Easter brunch, which was decent enough.

Anyway, the panel "Angels in Literature" was pretty good. It was my second panel with Steven Brust who has been somewhat of a rival of mine (he has no idea) since some time in the 1990s. Thing was, Brust was part of a writers' group in the Twin Cities that was very much the 'it' kids and I desperately wanted to surpass them. Like, in some kind of shounen anime... Because of this funky history (which is 100% IN MY OWN HEAD) I always worry about how panels are going to go with Steven Brust. And there have been some local kerfuffles that also made me a little leery...

He was delightful. I even came out of that panel with a story idea. We were talking about the circles of heaven and hell and someone, I think the moderator, Rick, started joking about how the lowest level of Hell had to be much better than the lowest level of Heaven, because, what, is that like "Heaven's Trailer Park" and that was such a delightful image in my head, I really wanted to write something about that. I mean, I have NOTHING else to stick on that yet, but what a great image!

The last panel of the con was a bit... dodgy. I was the only woman on it, and it was about Bladerunner and its sequel. The moderator was one of those guys who doesn't moderate so much as hogs the mike, and both he and Eric Heideman were super-fans in a way that I wasn't. There was also a couple of incidents at the start of the panel that put me off a bit. Sooooooo.... yeah, it was chilly when I tried to bring up some of the more un-feminist/borderline misogynistic parts of the sequel.  

You can pretty much tell everything from this picture:




Description: (right) me, literally rolling my eyes, while Eric (left) sits beside me looking decidedly GRIM.

So, yeah.....

After closing ceremonies, I dashed home to be with my wife and son.  I was home sometime around 5:30 pm. I had put some corned beef in the crock pot, since all the restaurants were closed. Shawn has decided since she spent most of her birthday packing Mason for his New York trip today, freaking out about all that, AND having to share the spotlight with BOTH April Fools (as always), me swanning off to Minicon, AND also Easter, that she wants a do-over birthday on April 15.

Seems fair to me.

Oops.

Yeah, so, I guess the last few days have escaped me. I know where yesterday went: I worked at White Bear Lake library. While there, I discovered that I may have lost a book.... one that *I* checked out. I'm going to have to go to Roseville and confess today. The dumbest part is that I think I lost one of my OWN Japanese language books in the process. I think I returned a book that I actually bought at the Friends sale, thinking it was this missing one. But, I have turned the house upside down and the book remains at large. It's so weird, because I always put my library books in one or two places. I do this because our house is otherwise quite full of books and a library book can easily get lost among all the others.

Ah, it's going to be embarrassing. But, there's nothing for it.

But, so, yes, speaking of books. Last week I quit a number of books. I had been trying to find a good mystery that had Taiwan as a backdrop, but the books I found all wanted to be mysteries more than they wanted to be travelogues. So, I quit on Toroko Gorge by Jacob Ritari and Out of Turns by Anne G. Faigan. While looking for the authors of these books, I see that Ed Lin has produced two more books in his Night Market mystery series. I liked Ghost Month quite a bit, because the mystery was really quite secondary to all the interesting bits of scenery of Taipei and Taiwanese culture. Looks like Ramsey County has the next book, Incensed, so I'll put that on request.

I'm going to be forced to quit The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter by Theodora Goss, because it was due yesterday and when I went to try to renew it, it picked up a hold. Since someone else is in the queue for it, so I'm going to have to get back in line if I want to finish it. Which is a bummer because I was actually starting to enjoy it, despite the fact that I normally despise anything that breaks the 4th Wall.

And then there was the usual manga/manhwa/manhua:

Make Me Bark by Sagold
Hamerare Host by Kaneko Ako
Gentei Kareshi / Limited Boyfriend by Uni Yamasaki
Ani no Chuukoku / Brother’s Warning by Asada Nemui
Ore Monogatari!! / My Love Story (Vols. 1 & 2) by Kawahara Kazune / Aruko

Most of the above is yaoi/boys' love/BL, with the exception of Ore Monogatari / My Love Story, which is a shoujo (a girls' romance) about the type of guy who is never the hero of love stories, except in this case he is. He's a big bruiser type, but he has a gentle heart and, for once, a girl falls for _HIM_ instead of his classically handsome best friend.

I finally broke down and started watching "Ancient Magus Bride."  I am... wow, did NOT expect it to start the way it did, so we'll see if I stick with it.  There's only one season so far, however, so it might be something I can get through reasonably quickly while washing the dishes.

As I posted before, MarsCON is this weekend.  The only panel I'm NOT looking forward to is the manhwa/manhua one, despite the fact that *I* proposed it.  I proposed it, however, hoping that I was not, in point of fact, the only local person reading these.  I'm certainly no expert, and now I'm the only person the the panel.... on top of which, they seem to have slotted me in the "teen" track (because OF COURSE) and literally the only manhwa/manhua that I've read is COMPLETE SMUT.  I'm trying to decide what to do about it.... it's possible that I won't have much of an audience anyway, in which case we just have a roundtable discussion.  But, I should prepare a list of titles, maybe?  I dunno.  UGH, I'm not looking forward to it, honestly.

Anyway, how's you? What have YOU been reading?