Readercon XXV

Sorry with the Roman numerals. Still have Chicago XXXVI on the brain. (Shut up!)

So Readercon 25 happened!  And for once, I'm not going to wait months to blog about it.  Just gonna dump it all out of my head in one burst.  (It's actually part of a bigger plan to not overthink my blog posts so I put out more of them.)

Anywho....

1

Last year, I complained about the hotel renovations and how they hampered people from just running into each other and chatting.  But I didn't realize how much I missed that until this year when I really got it all back!  And so my con was filled with old friends, people I met again for the first time (yes, you read that right), and new people I'd never met before!

1a

I liked the lobby/restaurant renovation with the expanded seating that ensured I never had to wait to get a table for breakfast.  The jacked-up prices of the appetizer menu?  Not so much.  I could almost live with what they charged for calamari, but the $12 cheeseburger was not a $12 cheeseburger.  Plus, how does any bar in the Boston area stop serving Smithwick's?  I'll say this for the service, though: my experience is that it wasn't one scintilla worse than previous years.

2
The program highlight for me was the workshop "From Page to Stage: Adapting Your Work for an Audience" by C.S.E. Cooney, Amal El-Mohtar, and Caitlyn Paxson. As wonderful as Readercon programming has been over the five years I've attended, there are a select few things that have stuck with me--this is the newest.  After some exercises, we were invited to read a paragraph or so of something we brought.  I brought the story I'd already recorded for Lakeside Circus, "Life After Wartime".  I wish I'd waited until after this workshop.  I surprised myself with how differently I read! It's been suggested that I record it again, but I don't want to be one of those people who goes back and retcons their own work. You know the type.

3
But the con highlight for me was getting a few minutes alone at a table with Mary Rickert and Ellen Datlow, who gave me advice as to the shelf life of mentioning my old McSweeney's Internet Tendency piece. (Apparently, the answer is forever... and that I should lead with it!). Close second: Dancing in a circle of the best and brightest in today's award-winning fantasy and sci-fi literature as a bad DJ spun '80s tunes (from the '90s).

4

The lack of physical space of my home, not to mention my reading backlog, forces me to make choices about what books I get at cons. This year's purchases/gifts/swag...

So who's gonna be at WFC next year?  At Readercon next year?  At WFC 2015 (which is going to be near-ish to me)?

@SF Signal's Mind Meld

...I answer a question of mythic proportions!

MIND MELD: What is the Literary Appeal of Gods, Goddesses and Myths? | SF Signal

I could've gone a lot of places with my answer, starting with my extensive knowledge of Norse mythology in third grade, starting with Marvel Comics' The Mighty Thor, through my extensive cross-referencing with The Encyclopedia Brittanica and poring through the footnotes of every mythology book I could get from my grade-school library.  But, that would've just been geeking out instead of answering the question.  And when the big kids at SF Signal offer you a seat at their table and ask you a question, you best answer it!

@Functional Nerds

Today, I d/b/a "The Retro Nerd" for the crew at Functional Nerds.

Check out "Repurposing Nostalgia!"

"And as you stay for the play Fantasy has in store for you, glowing light will see you through..."

My brain has finally recharged after my first World Fantasy Convention evar! I met so many people, renewed some old acquaintances, and once again was shown just how much Barcon and Con-Suite-Hallway-Con and people's individual readings are slowly starting to matter more to me than panel programming. Unless I'm on a panel, of course, which I was!

Here's what else I learned...

"Keep on talking all you want. Well you don't waste a minute of time..."

Next weekend, I'll be at the 2012 World Fantasy Convention in Toronto.  Won't get there until late Thursday, though.  If you aren't able to find me at the bar, or with the Dagan Books crew, you'll be able to catch me at Vaughn East at 3:00 pm Friday at my first panel ever...

You're probably thinking, "There goes the neighborh..." "How did a yahoo like you get on a WFC panel?"  Probably because of the book I co-edited, Bibliotheca Fantastica.

So yes, I am ostensibly relevant to the panel's interests.  But still, I look at that lineup of my fellow panelists, and all I can think of is...

I switched the lyric from Steve Winwood's "Freedom Overspill" that I was going to use as the title of this post.  It was originally a line from the bridge...

You got no right going around
Talking 'bout the things that you do

But screw all that because, hey, ZOMGI'mgonnabeonaPANELatWFC!!!ZOMG!!!  So, here I am--rather, there I'll be--hopefully caffeinated, fighting off my imposter syndrome, and talking about books!

A One-Sentence Story

I woke up yesterday morning and found myself @-bombed on Twitter as I slept.  Once I had my coffee and figured out what it was all about, I saw that I was dared to come up with a one-sentence story (the longer, the better) before Wednesday.  I was going to wait until Tuesday night since I'm not the biggest taker of writing-challenges.  But then the idea struck, so I figured why not take my brain-dump now. :)

Thing was, I jumped the gun a little too fast and wrote a story that was just, IMO, too much the same as someone else's.  Kinda really ticked myself off actually, but in the end, I did (despite how often I told myself not to) the only thing I could do.

So, Anatoly, Alex, Ken, Jake, Carrie, Damien, Tom, Amanda, and whoever else I might have forgotten -- you have no one to blame for this but yourselves... :)

@Inkpunks

From a cool t-shirt.

Galen, from the Inkpunks crew, invited me to do a guest post for them.  I did a little Sally Fields "You like me! You really like me!!" dance in my head.  Little did she know how hard I was banging said head into my desk trying to come up with a worthy post, before she mentioned, "Oh yeah, a bunch of folks are doing posts about workshops."  The big ones.  The ones all of us genre writers want to go to--Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, Uncle Orson's, &c. The ones that a lot of us can't take six weeks away from life to attend.

At least, not directly...

Check out "Autodidactic Asphyxiation" at the Inkpunks blog.

Rod Serling Conference 2011

Sorry for the unimaginative title, but it was taking me too long to come up with something other than "Submitted For Your Approval."  Tell me that's not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the name Rod Serling.  But aside from being lame, my presentation at the 2011 Rod Serling Conference last month** wasn't about The Twilight Zone, but about Rod Serling's Night Gallery.  Specifically, H.P. Lovecraft Adapted for Rod Serling's Night Gallery.

I pulled the presentation off, despite massive tech fail (thanks to help from the conference's tech crew), but here's the play by play of the shindig...

Dragon*Con 2011

No, hell hasn't frozen over. I'm still missing self-imposed blogging deadlines.  I'd intended to kill two birds with one stone and doing something for Speak Out With Your Geek Out.  And, what could possibly be more geeky than going to the 25th Dragon*Con?  So, rather than consider myself two weeks overdue, I can imagine I'm only two days. ;)

Anyway... William Shatner, Martin Landau, Sylvester McCoy, Mark Sheppard, celebrity run-ins, awesome costumes, and Jefferson Starship--yes, I had an absolute total fucking blast!!

Day Late, Dollar Short

I know I know... it's been months, now.  And since Readercon, I've been to Dragon*Con and have given my presentation at the 2011 Rod Serling Conference.  But this unfinished post has been in my queue forever and my brain just won't let me move on until I've finished this one.

It's the proverbial dollar short and day late, and it's pretty long.  Here goes...

"I am dressed as the woman of the opposite sex"

The line's from the BritCom 'Allo 'Allo, which was on my mind.  Anyway... wow, I'm way, way behind on these.  Well, two weeks, actually, since ReaderCon.  I'm skipping ahead to Saturday for now.  I'll come back to Friday night after a few posts.

My first panel that day was "Daughters of the Female Man" with Elizabeth Hand, Chris Moriarty, Barbara Krasnoff, Gwendolyn Clare, and Matt Cheney.

I'd gotten there 15 minutes late because I was in line getting Claude to autograph some books for me.  Again, them's the breaks of the arrangement of con panels.

Here's what I took away (directly or indirectly)...

• Sorry, but I couldn't help but pat myself on the back when shout-outs were given to Maureen McHugh and L. Timmel Duchamp, and folks in the audience were going, "Who?" and making the panelists repeat the names.
• Discussed was, to my delight, another instance--a real live instance that didn't take place back in the "Golden Age of Science Fiction"--where a speculative fiction writer was ahead of the curve.
• A whole host of books I need to check out, which I tried to note for myself rather than, as one audience member sort of suggested, relying on the panelists to spoon-feed me an annotated bibliography.
  

And these are my notes...

Feeling Very Fuzzy

I really wished the panels "Surrealism and Strong Emotion" (with Caitlyn Kiernan, Michael Cisko, Peter Dubé, and John Lawson) and "Feeling Very Post-Slipstream" (Leah Bobet, Paul DiFilippo, Elizabeth Hand, Chris Brown, and F. Brett Cox) weren't held as late in the day as they were on Friday.  Hey, them's the breaks of a con, I know.

"Surrealism and Strong Emotion"

"Feeling Very Post-Slipstream"

I did make it to both panels and as you can see, I have the pictures to prove it.  But they were just a little too heady for me.  I'm not even going to post my notes--they're too few and make absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. Plus, I was still a little nervous as the time approached for the Broken Slate release/Crossed Genres reading party.

Hey, I don't suppose anyone can point me to any write-ups?  I know about one for "Slipstream."  Anyone do one for "Surrealism?"

Foreign Deviltry

I'll just come out and say it: I come from a people who know a li'l sumpin' sumpin' about the Colonial Encounter, so yeah, I wanted to see this.  Not exactly sure what I expected, but what I didn't want (and what I didn't get, thankfully) from the panel "Complicating Colonial Encounters" with JoSelle Vanderhooft, Vandana Singh, Robert Redick, Craig Gidney, and Anil Menon was a simple list of writers and books and how they just failed, or a discourse on how Avatar sucked.  I can get those on any random sampling of blog posts in a given day.

I was a bit late getting there and I left during the Q&A 'cos I was feeling a bit punchy and hungry by that point. Still, I managed to take away some cool stuff...

• There's a school of thought that says that science-fiction essentially came from the colonial encounter.  Think Kipling, Wells, etc.  I can see it when I think of Tarzan.
• There were definite historical instances where, at least initially, the relationship between colonizer and the colonized was somewhat of a flirtatious love affair where both saw parts of the other that were exotic and something to be explored.  And even colonizers "going native."
• That there is more to the issue than just the obvious power differential.  The question was asked (by Redick, according to my notes), how can we complicate our understanding of the colonial encounter?

Speaking of notes...

Know Your Limit

I knew before I got to Readercon that I was going to attend "Writing Within Constraints" with Scott Edelman, Elaine Isaak, Michael Aondo-verr Kombol, David Malki !, John Langan, and Madeleine Robins. 

I was anxious to go since Malki ! was moderating the panel.  He's one of the editors of the Machine of Death anthology, which had a very narrow theme.  Having submitted a few stories to other, similarly tightly-themed anthologies, I wanted to see if the panel could provide any insights as to how I'd succeeded and failed.

A few ways I'd never looked at this issue before the panel...

• The many ways we writers sometimes impose constraints on ourselves.  Sometimes, by avoiding the subconscious places we just won't go.
• Sometimes, repulsion to an idea can be a constraint.  Edelman gave an example off the top of his head based on his years working in comics in the '70s: Metamorpho vs. Daredevil. 
• Another thought from Edelman: Instead of writing "in the tradition of Frank Herbert," try writing "in the tradition of you."
• It's best to keep in mind that writing for an editor is not the same as writing for the reader.
• I need to stop taking cool-sounding panel notes unless I can remember the f'ing context.

Speaking of panel notes...

"Sooner or later, it comes down to you and the paper."

So, here's how I'm going to do this: write about a panel I went to, with brief impressions and takeaways.

My first Friday ReaderCon panel was "What Writing Workshops Do and Don't Offer" with Geoff Ryman, Barry Longyear, Kenneth Schneyer, Eileen Gunn, Leah Bobet, and Michael J. DeLuca (who I seem to have cut out of the picture--sorry).

The panel compared and contrasted different Milford-style workshops (Clarion, Odyssey, et al.), talked about some alternatives (Online Writing Workshop), and discussed which sorts of folks probably would or would not benefit from the Milford model.

What I learned that day (directly or indirectly):

• I probably really do need a regular Milford-model ass-whipping for my writing to improve.
• A better sense of some things I'd already kinda/sorta knew, namely the take-home benefits of a critique that go beyond "how to fix this story."
• My main take-away was a quote from Mr. Longyear (who confessed that although he's taught at workshops which use the Milford model, the model itself probably wouldn't have worked for him starting out) said, "Sooner or later, it comes down to you and the paper."  Amen.

For the interested, here are my panel notes. 

"He held the Beast of the Apocalypse by its tail, the stupid kid!"

Okay, here is, my first in a line of ReaderCon blog snippets.  I figure rather than long posts about how I spent entire days, I'd do it panel by panel. 

First panel of my ReaderCon: Mike Allen's "Speculative Poetry Workshop."  My memory could be faulty, but it seemed a bit smaller than it did last year, which was a good thing.  Allen was pleased at the small size of the audience and pretty much got right to an exercise, after having us all introduce ourselves.  Also unlike last year, I was actually pleased with the piece I wrote for the exercise enough to read it aloud.  And while it sits with the rest of my Vogon poetry for right now, it may not stay there forever.

I also got to name check my favorite speculative poet (who likely doesn't consider himself to be one), former Poet Laureate Charles Simic.  You don't agree?  Check out the piece from which the title of this post is taken.

Next time: my first full panel and maybe my panel notes, too!  Oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you? :)

ReaderCon Shout-Outs

We played the pier on Venice beach
The crowd called out for more
Zappa and the Mothers next
We finished with a roar
Jimi was so kind to us
Had us on the tour
We got some education
Like we never got before

Chicago, "Scrapbook"

I promised myself I wasn't going to put off blogging about ReaderCon for weeks like I did last year.  So, like Chicago did in this song, I'm gonna start with some shout-outs!

"People talking, people laughing. A man selling ice cream, singing Italian songs..."

The weather might've slowed the Ithaca Festival down a bit, but once the sun came out, so did most of the people.  The only things missing were some of the bands I'd seen on the Saturday part of the Ithaca Festival for years.  They either just aren't on the schedule or were playing on different days.  But still, I had my camera, and therefore, more potential story prompts.  More importantly, I ran into some cool folks!

Nope, Still No Damn Jet Packs

(via Paleofuture)

This year's local Spring (W)rites literary festival snuck up on me this year. Like last year, I made it to a single event.  Yesterday, I attended a panel on "Sci-Fi vs. Sci-Fact" with local authors Nick Sagan (yes, Carl's boy) and Paul McEuen.  I almost didn't come, because I've been to this panel at sci-fi cons before.  But the names drew me.  

"...because I must climb the mast to see what kind of weather we're going to have tomorrow."

At the 11th hour, despite a long evening of roller derby NSOing already planned, I decided to attend what I could of the first annual Pippi to Ripley: Heroines of Fantasy and Science Fiction conference.  I'd seen the flyer at my local comic book shop and was intrigued.  I figure I've read enough blogs from my favorite SF&F writers on these issues that it was long past time I educated myself at a deeper level than "GenderFail is bad."

I was only there for half of it, but I think what I saw merits at least the sort of write-up I do for conventions.