Day in the Life of an Idiot

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.

It seems that, lately, when science fiction writers gather, the conversation inevitably turns to race.

One of my fellow writers asked a question last night that I've been thinking about ever since: "Why can't science fiction be about JUST science fiction?"

My answer at the time was two fold. First off, science fiction has almost always been about people (there were some disagreements about that, of course,) but my second point was more personal. That is, that I have always been proud that science fiction has always been the genre of subversive ideas.

Unrelated to race, one of the first stories that I read that profoundly shook my world view was "A World Well Lost" by Theodore Sturgeon, published in 1953. I've talked about the effect that story had on my life in my blogs before, but, though it couldn't be called a happy, queer-romantic story by any means, I had my head blown off by the concept that gender roles / expectatoins, etc. are often projected, rather than innate (ie as in how one of the main characters thinks about the "lovebirds" until their same sex-ness is revealed.) Later, after discovering writers like Elizabeth A. Lynn, I realized science fiction and fantasy was awesome not only because it had the cool trappings I liked (as in spaceships and telepathic dragons), but also because I could see myeslf reflected there... even if I wasn't quite ready to claim my GLBT status.

More importantly, with the help of the authors I admired, I could see a future for myself... possibly even a better one.

I explained all this at Wyrdsmiths last night, and I think I made a compelling case, but something else occurred to me at home while I was falling asleep. One of the reasons race (or the absence of people of color) in the future is so important is because it says something about not only who we will become, who we want to be, but also WHO OWNS SCIENCE.

Any story written today with only white people in space suits is dishonest to the world as it exists today. China seems much more keen on its space program than we do in ours (and it's dishonest... or at least grossly inaccurate to imagine NASA is staffed only by white folks too.) Scientist and science goes beyond race and gender, but it comes from places and people... some of whom are often ignored or forgotten or silenced.

It's the same issue I have with "boy geniuses." I am so sick of that trope, I can hardly enjoy BIG BANG THEORY. I'd like to see some girl geniuses. I'd like to see some geniuses of color. Why? Because showing them in fiction make them easier to identify and nuture in real life. Because it's hard in my own life to say which came first: did I feel comfortable reading SF/F because it was a safe place to consider being gay, or did I first consider the idea that it might be okay to be gay while reading SF/F?

And in the end, I hope science fiction continues to be the genre of subversion, if you will. A genre where everyone can see a bit of themselves in the futures we imagine. I'd like to be some future generatoin's Theodore Sturgeon (oh, to be so lucky!), but even a relatively obscure Elizabeth A. Lynn to some teenage girl opening science fiction for the first time and seeing herself and her reality reflected in a future she wants to build.