ARC giveaway results!

Totally irrelevant to the actual choosing of a winner, but relevant to my curiosity: here’s how the “favorite character” voting fell out.

Natalie had an early lead and never lost it. Though for a brief time in the middle the second-place contender drew near, she wound up with twice as many votes as her closest competitor, making her the clear victor. Yay, Natalie!

Second place was . . . . Suhail! And behind him, Jake. Other candidates included Tom, Jacob, Heali’i, the dragons en masse, and the sparklings in specific. πŸ™‚ If I count secondary votes, though — the respondents who said “Character A, but I also really love character B,” then Greenie got a vote, Heali’i got more support, and Jake pulls up to be tied with Suhail for second place. Natalie also got a secondary vote, though, so she remains ahead of even Suhail + Jake + Jake’s secondary votes combined. So I guess y’all like her. πŸ˜‰

But I’ve made you wait long enough. According to my highly scientific random number generation method*, the winner is . . .

. . . beccastareyes, on Livejournal!

Send me your address, and I’ll get the ARC out to you as soon as I can!

Thanks to everybody who sent in their votes. Keep an eye on this space for more giveaways in the upcoming weeks!

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*i.e. dice

Stop. Just — stop.

(This post theoretically contains spoilers for Castle — but only if you consider it a spoiler when I talk about something done by practically every TV show ever.)

So my husband and I have been watching Castle lately. We really like the Castle/Beckett relationship; it doesn’t make the mistake committed by so many other buddy stories that pair up a free spirit with a by-the-book type, of making the by-the-book type a humorless automaton. Beckett gives as good as she gets, in her own way. And the show does a semi-decent job of explaining why it takes them years to get together: Castle’s had a string of failed marriages; Beckett has some major hangups. But eventually they do actually sort themselves out and start a relationship —

— whereupon, of course, the show has to start playing the OH MY GOD THEY’RE GOING TO BREAK UP card.

Foz Meadows had a post recently about bad TV romance wherein she rants quite eloquently about the investment of TV writers in the “will they or won’t they” dynamic. UST gets strung out for years, with the characters sitting on the fence long after the point at which they would have either hooked up or moved on — and then when they finally hook up, the implied verb of “will they or won’t they” is “split” instead of “get together.” Because the vast majority of TV writers (or possibly just the vast majority of the execs they answer to) have no freaking clue what to do with a romantic pairing that isn’t either impending or in peril.

And as Foz points out, the obnoxious thing is: they know exactly how to write that kind of thing, because they do it all the time — with male friendships. On Castle, Ryan and Esposito don’t always agree; sometimes they’re competing with one another or at odds over some issue. But in eight seasons, the show has never once relied on baiting us with the question of whether they’ll settle down as working partners, or whether they’ll split up and start working with other people. The writers don’t need those tricks to make the characters interesting to watch. Their banter is enough, and the pleasure of watching them do things together.

Ah, you say, but they aren’t the protagonists.

To which I say: so what? Why do the central figures of every male/female buddy show ever* have to not only get romantically involved with one another, but spend almost their entire existence in romantic limbo? Why can’t we have more Mr. and Mrs. Smith-style teamups? More couples with the exact same dynamic given to male/male buddy pairs, except with bonus smooching? As Foz points out, insisting on the uncertainty model for the romances means that all kinds of other tasty narrative material — “shared interests, complex histories, mutual respect, in-jokes, magnetic antagonism, slowly kindled alliances and a dozen other things” — is now off-limits.

It wasn’t entirely off-limits in Castle because the show let those things build between Castle and Beckett, during the period of time where they were sorting out their nonsense. But of course now we need Tension — we need Doubt in the Relationship — so all of a sudden they’re barely talking to one another. Bye-bye, in-jokes. Farewell, alliance. All those shared interests and complex histories? Irrelevant now. Because BY GOD we need the audience to be asking themselves “will they or won’t they?”

Even though the audience knows the goddamned answer.

Stop. Just stop. We know what’s going to happen with Castle and Beckett, and in the meantime, everything I like about their relationship has been squandered for the sake of that fake uncertainty. Quit it. Let the two of them behave like functional adults, and trust that the rest of the story is interesting even if that question has been answered.

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*Exception that proves the rule: Will and Grace, because Will was gay. Though for all I know, the show spent its time pretending they weren’t going to wind up being best friends/oh my god maybe they’ll stop being friends.

Win an ARC of IN THE LABYRINTH OF DRAKES!

I neglected to mention this on the release date, but: A Natural History of Dragons is out in French! (Or rather, Une histoire naturelle des dragons.) That makes the first translation to hit the shelves, though there are others in progress.

As it is now four weeks to the release of In the Labyrinth of Drakes, it seems a prime time for an ARC giveaway! All you have to do is tell me — in comments, by email, or on Twitter — who your favorite character from the series is, OTHER than Isabella. (Ruling her out because, judging by the fanmail I get, she’d be 90% of the answers.) Deadline is noon PST tomorrow; I’ll pick a winner at random and ship out the ARC.

Books read, February 2016

The Wicked + the Divine, vol. 1: The Faust Act, Kieron Gillen (writer) and James McKelvie (artist).
The Wicked + the Divine, vol. 2: Fandemonium, Kieron Gillen (writer) and James McKelvie (artist).
The Wicked + the Divine, vol. 3: Commercial Suicide, Kieron Gillen (writer) and James McKelvie (artist).

(I’m listing them all together for the sake of convenience, but they were interspersed with other things.)

This is a comic book series set in a slightly alternate version of our world, where every 90 years there is a “Recurrence”: twelve gods manifest in twelve mortal hosts (not the same gods every time). They become instant rock stars, or period equivalent, with people falling at their feet in ecstasy; within two years all twelve are dead.

The storytelling here is a little bit disjointed — especially in the third volume, which is basically a collection of one-off issues that go into more detail on a selection of this particular Recurrence’s pantheon. But even when the story is moving forward, it often does so in a fashion that’s a little hard for me to follow; what I thought was the through-line turned out very much not to be. Despite that, I’m enjoying the series. I like the variety of gods: at the start of the series, not all twelve have manifested yet, but you’ve got Amaterasu, Baphomet, Minerva, Lucifer, the Morrigan (and Badb and “Gentle Annie” — she switches between aspects), Inanna, Woden, one of the Baals, and a Tara nobody’s quite sure of — there are several different Taras she could be. The gods appear to be no respecters of detail; Lucifer is a woman, Inanna is a man, and there’s discussion of what it means that Amaterasu showed up in the body of a white Englishwoman.

The main thing I will say — and I don’t think this is a spoiler — is that I don’t trust a single word that comes out of Ananke’s mouth. She is (in some theogonies) the Greek personification of Necessity, and she seems to be some kind of mentor figure to the pantheon each time around. She is also a highly dubious character, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s really up with her and the whole Recurrence thing.

Sorcerer to the Crown, Zen Cho. A fun romp, though ultimately it didn’t hang together as much as I wanted it to. You’ve got the decline of magic resource in England, the challenges to Zacharias as the Sorcerer Royal, the troubles on Janda Baik, and Prunella’s mysterious legacy — but because all the Janda Baik stuff was offstage, being reported second-hand by characters who mostly didn’t stick around long enough to make much of an impression, it felt more tacked-on than I would have liked. And Prunella’s backstory wound up being wholly unrelated, except insofar as she happened to be involved with the rest of it. Certainly it’s possible to go too far with linking things, tying every narrative strand up in such a neat little bow that it comes across as entirely contrived. But this didn’t link them enough for my taste (a Big Revelation doesn’t mean much if the facts revealed are entirely without context), and the resolution of some of the problems felt much too convenient — all the stuff at the seaside, basically. But I very much liked the complexity of the relationships between the two protagonists and their surrogate parent figures, and the fact that Prunella keeps one very practical eye on the necessity of securing her future by ordinary means.

Yamada Monogatari: To Break the Demon Gate, Richard Parks. Set in the same continuity as his Lord Yamada stories. I mentioned after reading the collection that the last piece felt much less like a short story and much more like setup for the novel; well, it turns out that it’s literally the beginning of the novel. It works much better in that context. Overall, though, I prefer the short stories — not necessarily because there’s anything wrong with this book, but just because I like what the stories are doing better. Each one of them tends to be a bite-sized look at some aspect of Japanese folklore, with Lord Yamada investigating and solving the mystery, then resolving the spiritual problem; here the same thing is generally true, but the additional wordage is almost entirely filled with politics instead of additional supernatural things, and that’s not really what engages me with this series. Plus, I do think Parks leaned overly hard on the “my protagonist and narrator has figured out what’s going on, but you the reader must remain in the dark” trick — which I know is a trope of a certain kind of mystery fiction, but it works better for me in third-person stories, or at shorter lengths. It made the Lady Snow stuff fall kind of flat in the end. Still, I’ll go on to read The War God’s Son at some point.

The Dragon Round, Stephen S. Power. Read for blurbing purposes. This was pitched to me as “the Count of Monte Cristo, with dragons” — which, yes, thank you, I’ll take that. As it turns out, it was less Monte Cristo-ish than I anticipated; it lacks the element of “mysterious and fabulously wealthy nobleman” which I think of as being the defining characteristic of that story type. But it’s a revenge tale, and one with certain kinds of complexity I very much like: for starters, when Jeryon is dumped into a boat by his mutinous crew and set adrift, he’s not alone. There’s an apothecary with him, a woman who refused to go along with the mutiny. And it turns out that the whole survival at sea/on a deserted island narrative feels 300% fresher when it isn’t just a tale of Rugged, Manly Individualism; Jeryon and the poth (as she mostly gets called, though she does have a name) have complementary skills that are both necessary, and along with struggling to survive, they have to figure out how not to kill each other during the lengthy period of time when they’re the only two human beings around.

As for the rest of the story — it doesn’t go the way you expect it to, and knowing not to expect the usual is probably helpful. I didn’t actually realize while I was reading this that it’s the start of a series, and the series is not about Jeryon getting his revenge. According to Power’s website, it’s about changes in the way humans and dragons interrelate — and Jeryon’s quest for revenge is more of an inciting incident than the spine of the tale. So if “revenge story” is not your cuppa, this may still be interesting to you.

Month of Letters followup

Just a quick notice to say that, unsurprisingly, the end of the month brought in a mini-flood of letters. I’m working diligently to get through them, and should have replies out the door by the end of next week at the latest. But I figure you all would prefer that I prioritize finishing the draft of the final book — not to mention that if I don’t take frequent and lengthy breaks, my cursive gets even worse than it usually is. πŸ˜› So it’s one letter here, one letter there, in between other things. And of course a few more may yet come in, things that were mailed before the end of February but took a while to reach Lady Trent’s mailbox.

a thing I would love to watch

We had our usual Oscar party the other night, and at one point during all the interviewing (which I mostly don’t listen to, because I’m there to enjoy the fashion), I caught Faye Dunaway saying something about how Brie Larson is an amazing actress.

And it got me thinking: I would love to watch something that involves one or more actors sitting around discussing clips from different performances, talking about what makes them so awesome. What little touches of timing or intonation really bring the character to life, what techniques are being used, etc — basically, the kind of thing I sometimes get up to with fellow writers, when we let our professional squee flags fly and really dig into the craft aspects of our job. I genuinely don’t know what a craft-based appreciation of acting would look like, what kinds of things an actor notices and admires while the rest of us are just sitting there going, “that was a really great scene.” Tony Zhou’s “Every Frame a Painting” series gets into this from the standpoint of cinematography and directing, but not acting; I’d love to get that angle as well.

Can anybody recommend examples of this? A YouTube series, a commentary track on a DVD, anything like that.

the unexpected queerness of Google Translate

Every so often a review for one of my books pops up in a foreign language. Of course, being a nosy author, I want to know what it says — so if it isn’t in a language I read fluently*, I hop over to Google Translate and pop in the address to get a look at it.

Of course machine translation isn’t great. </Scandianvian> Despite our best efforts to date, “vaguely comprehensible” is often the best we can do, because it turns out that language comprehension depends heavily on a million contextual cues that are really difficult to program for. But for my purposes that’s fine; mostly all I want to know is whether they liked the book or not. What amuses me, though, is the unexpected gender-queerness that sometimes greets me as I read.

“Isabella begins his life as a young wife”

Not every language handles personal pronouns the way English does. A lot of them (Spanish, for example) don’t always differentiate gender in the third person singular; the possessive in particular is often gender-neutral. So Google Translate, missing the contextual cues, proudly declares that Isabella is a man, railing against the restrictions he suffers as a woman. Or sometimes she’s a neuter “it” instead. Meanwhile, in other languages, all kinds of things that would be “it” in English frolick along as boys and girls, because their pronouns are gendered in the language of the review.

So for all the (many, many) flaws of machine translation . . . sometimes it amuses me. *^_^*

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*Which is pretty much just English. Neither my Spanish nor my Japanese is good enough for me to really feel like wading through the hard way, especially when I’m pretty sure even machine translation does a better job of it than I will.

Leverage

A while ago somebody started a movement in fandom called The Backup Project. You can put a Backup Project ribbon on your badge, and what it signals is that if somebody finds themselves targeted by harassment or otherwise feeling unsafe at the convention, you will back them up: be their conversational partner to get them away from the dude who won’t shut up, escort them to where they’re going so they don’t have to walk alone, etc.

I never remember to get and wear one of those ribbons, but as this post by Laura Anne Gilman has reminded me to say publicly, I am totally willing to be your backup — or “leverage,” as Seanan McGuire suggested, after the TV show. If you are in that kind of situation, you can walk up to me and ask for leverage. Doesn’t matter if I’m headed somewhere or in the middle of a conversation; once I realize what’s going on, I won’t hold the interruption against you.

I will listen to you.
I will be your safe space.
I will walk you to the nearest security person you feel comfortable with, and stay with you until you’re okay.
I will follow up on what I know.

This kind of thing probably wouldn’t have helped Mark Oshiro, given the nature of the appalling litany of things he and his partner were subjected to at ConQuest 36. But his account of the ways that he was belittled and harassed all weekend long is a very pointed reminder of the crap that goes on far too often at our conventions, and for somebody else? This might be exactly what they need.

transitions, blech

There are certain kinds of transition scenes I detest writing. One of them is the “holy shit, the supernatural is real!” scene common to so much urban fantasy; it was a source of great pleasure to me that I could more or less skip that scene in Midnight Never Come, on the grounds that the reaction of a sixteenth-century gentleman would not so much be “there are faeries under London?” as “there are faeries under London?” (You’ll note that nearly every pov character for the remainder of the Onyx Court series already knew about the fae by the time they showed up in the story. This was not deliberate, in the sense of being a thing I consciously decided to do . . . but I wouldn’t call it an accident, either. The sole exception that leaps to mind is Jack Ellin, and I had more than enough going on in the story to divert him, and me, while that transition happened.) It’s boring to me because the audience already knows the supernatural is real (or at the very least has no reason to be surprised by this fact), and we’ve seen that conversation so many times, making it fresh is really difficult. Your main hope is to undermine it in some fashion, like the time on Buffy when they told Oz vampires and demons were real. “I know it’s a lot to take in –” “Actually, that explains a lot.”

I’m dealing with a similar kind of thing in the fifth Memoir right now. The scene isn’t about the supernatural being real; it’s a different kind of transition, one I don’t really have a name for. And of course I can’t get into specifics, but it’s one of those deals where something very complicated is going on, only the complication is of a type that doesn’t actually make for great narrative. After the initial drama of the moment is over, there’s a lot of explaining that needs to happen, and a lot of very tedious suspicion that can’t be laid to rest with the right words or a single decisive action. Inside the story, the whole thing is going to drag on for days — probably for weeks. Making the reader sit through all of that would be dire, starting with the fact that I would have to write all of that.

It’s at moments like these when I love the retrospective, consciously-framed first person viewpoint of this series. Because I can 100% get away with Isabella saying “what followed was very tedious and dragged on for weeks, because there was nothing I could do that would resolve it with a single decisive action. But X, Y, and Z got settled — not without a great deal of wrangling and suspicion, but settled all the same, and now let’s move on to the next interesting bit.” Any viewpoint can skip over things, but this one gives me greater latitude to summarize what I’m skipping, without making it seem like the elided material is simple to deal with in real life. Isabella can acknowledge all the complications without getting bogged down in them.

I had no idea, when I started writing this series, all the advantages that would come with framing the entire thing as a series of memoirs. It just seemed like a period- and subject-appropriate way to approach the whole thing. But my god . . . it’s probably the best craft decision I’ve made all series long.

Stats for the stat god

Neither Shihan nor his wife were at the dojo tonight, which meant I felt comfortable asking the sensei who teaches on Wednesdays whether he was okay with me keeping my Fitbit on during class. He said that was fine, so for the first time, I have stats for what goes on with my body during practice.

I was surprised at how few “steps” it recorded, to be honest. Sure, we spend the first twenty minutes or so on various warmups and stretches, most of which won’t register on the Fitbit. But it only recorded 1500 for the whole hour, which is equivalent to about fifteen minutes of normal walking at my usual pace. I thought the various punches and blocks would add up to more. The real interest, though, is in the heartrate tracking: I can see where we finished the warmup and started doing basics, and I can see what happened when I ran seven kata back-to-back in preparation for my upcoming test, which is a thing I’ve been doing at every practice for about a month. Turns out that I do indeed spend most of the class in the zones generally classed as “cardio” or “peak,” and topped out the scale at 185 at one point during that block of kata. (It would be amusing to see which kata work me the hardest, but since I was only allowing myself five breaths’ pause between them, there’s no hope of differentiating one from the next via the stats.) 185 is what the American Heart Association considers the usual “maximum” for my age, so I feel safe in saying that I’m working pretty damn hard when I do that kind of set. πŸ˜›

I wish Fitbit had a way for me to save that data and label it “karate,” so that I can add it to my stats for the day any time I go to the dojo. But I also wish they made them waterproof enough to wear while swimming, and that they could make the actual unit thinner; I can’t get everything I want.

Dice Tales at BVC – No Takebacks

My newest Dice Tales post is up at Book View Cafe: No Takebacks, in which I talk about the way that RPGs don’t really allow for revision, and what that does to the story. Comment over there!

I’ll also mention that since the BVC WordPress configuration doesn’t display the series name, I’ve switched to using a tag to sort all the Dice Tales posts. So if you’re looking for one easy way to pull them all up, now you have it!

Burnination for fun and profit

So on Twitter the other day, in a fit of frustration, I posted this:

Which of course promptly led to a bunch of people saying that no, I totally should do that. After the third or fourth of those, I issued this challenge:

And, well. I think I’m actually serious about this. If you have a crown you don’t want back (or don’t mind getting back charred and possibly warped), get in touch with me. The following requirements apply:

1) It needs to be metal, as nothing else will last long enough in the fire to be of use. (Doesn’t have to be gold, though.)

2) Should look at least vaguely royal/medieval — no bridal tiaras here.

3) Has to be full-size.

If you have something that fits that bill, send a picture of it to marie {dot} brennan {at} gmail {dot} com. As promised, if I get what I need, I will take blog/tweet the whole process, with color commentary. But I need it soon, so be prepared to act quickly if you offer up your crown!

And thanks in advance to anybody who might be able to help.

FORGOT TO ADD: If you do provide me with a crown, I’ll send you your choice of the audiobook of A Natural History of Dragons on CD, a UK trade paperback of Midnight Never Come, or an ARC of In the Labyrinth of Drakes.

Books read, uh, recently

Over the last few months I seriously fell off the horse when it came to keeping track of my reading. So this covers December and January, but only the things I can recall reading — which isn’t very much.

The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu. I know this one ate quite a lot of December, because BRICK.

I . . . really, really wanted to like it. Epic fantasy, drawing on Chinese epic tradition! Sign me up. I was totally there for the worldbuilding and the character archetypes and the nature of the plot. And, courtesy of comments I’d seen elsewhere on the internet, I was prepared for (though not pleased by) the fact that the first half of the book has virtually no women playing significant roles, because I knew that there would be more showing up in the remaining pages. As indeed there are! But anybody without that advance warning would be justified in thinking that the only women in the story would be helpful wives, distant goddesses, or deeply problematic seductresses, so I can’t really say the second half justifies the first.

But the real problem for me was the style. It read a lot like an old epic — too much so. I fundamentally did not care about any of the characters, because the text never let me get close enough to any of them to form an emotional attachment. The style is incredibly distant, telling instead of showing, often spending more time narrating to you what is happening than letting you experience it. Let me give an example — it’ll be a spoiler, but (for reasons I’ll explain in a moment) not much of one. If you’d prefer to avoid it, though, just skip the next paragraph.

So there’s a plot thread involving one of the few early female characters, who has been blackmailed by an enemy general into working for him. We don’t see her arrive in the lands of the rebels — that part I’m okay with, since it isn’t as important as what she does when she gets there. Once established among the rebels, she manipulates two men into falling in love with her: an uncle and a nephew, who have been inseparable for the nephew’s entire life. (These are major characters in the book; the nephew is essentially co-protagonist with another guy.) Once both of them are besotted with her, she plays off their jealousy, using it to create a rift between them, until they become wholly estranged and the uncle sends the nephew away at a critical moment when he needed to be present. Then she murders the uncle and commits suicide.

From beginning to end, this entire thing takes about sixteen pages.

Fully a quarter of which is spent on that last sentence, actually; the rest gets crammed into twelve pages, where it shares space with other things going on in the plot. We the readers are told that both of these guys have fallen in love with her. We’re told that they’re jealous. We get little snippets of actual interaction, a few paragraphs here and there, which present us with emotion (love! jealousy! anger!) the narrative hasn’t actually earned. I don’t consider this to be a spoiler because I don’t feel like there’s an experience to spoil; it feels more like me giving away the ending to a historical account of the Duke of Buckingham’s assassination. I majored in folklore; I’ve read a great many epics from different parts of the world, and can deal with that kind of arm’s-length approach. It is not, however, what I’m looking for in a novel. The sweeping scope of The Grace of Kings is impressive, but it only fits into one book because so many of the elements of modern fiction have been squeezed out. The result is that I found myself pronouncing the Eight Fatal Words: “I don’t care what happens to these people.” I finished the book, but have no motivation to pick up the sequel. Which is a pity, because I was so excited for the first one.

Daughter of Mystery, Heather Rose Jones. I don’t remember where I heard of this one; it’s an ebook that’s been sitting on my tablet for ages. Normally when I call something “Ruritanian fantasy,” what I mean is that it’s set in a secondary world, but has no magic (e.g. Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark books). In this case, however, I mean that it’s set in the fictional European country of Alpennia, but has magic. I suspect that Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint and The Privilege of the Sword are among its literary ancestors, as one of the two protagonists, Barbara, is a woman trained as an armin (bodyguard) and duelist for an eccentric Baron. The other heroine, Margerit, unexpectedly inherits the Baron’s estate upon his demise — including Barbara, who was his property. The plot is moderately complex, involving the question of why he named his goddaughter his heir and why he failed to free Barbara as he promised (and why he owned her and trained her in the first place), running alongside a strand wherein Margerit begins to study the “mysteries” (sacred magic) and investigate why they no longer work the way they should. Overall it came together in a reasonably satisfying way, and Jones has a pleasingly solid grasp of the social politics of a nineteenth-century-type world: Margerit can’t just go “la, who cares” and blow off her obligations without consequence, however much she may want to. Plus, lesbian romance, which I know would be a selling point for many of my blog readers. πŸ™‚

Phoenix, Stephen Brust. Still working my way slowly through these. I liked Vlad’s interactions with the Empress: they struck a nice balance between the formal ceremony that accompanies such a role, and showing the Empress as a human being (well, for the contested values of “human” that apply in this setting). I’m also pleased, though not surprised, to see Brust follow through on what he began in an earlier book, with Vlad questioning his role in the Jhereg and his chosen livelihood of murdering people for money. I have no idea whether that was planned from the start, or whether Brust got a couple of books in, looked at his assassin hero, and reconsidered how good of an idea that really was, but either way it’s nice to watch the change percolate through the narrative. Where it goes in the long run . . . well, that will be interesting to see. “Phoenix stone” felt like a bit of handwavium to me, but I’d love to see more exploration of what pre-Empire sorcery was like, and how the Interregnum changed the way sorcery worked.

World Fantasy’s Safety Surcharge

Today the registration fee for the 2016 World Fantasy Convention went up by seventy-five dollars, from $150 to $225.

I registered during the previous WFC, as has been my habit for years. Unfortunately, now I realize that I need to rethink this policy. Because despite being prodded on these matters, WFC 2016 still has not posted either a harassment or an accessibility policy. The con-runner, going by her comments posted there, seems to think that “be nice to one another” and “the hotel is ADA compliant” are sufficient measures in that regard — and maybe there will be policies posted by the time the con begins, but apparently it’s totally unreasonable to ask for those things before the price of attendance gets jacked up.

This is not okay. It amounts to a safety surcharge, because if you want to attend WFC, you have two choices:

1) Buy your registration early, in the blind faith that the con will do its duty and put together an acceptable set of policies before you arrive.

2) Wait for the policies, and pay more money in exchange: seventy-five dollars more now, another fifty if they aren’t posted by mid-April, literally twice the membership price if you pick your membership up in the fall (y’know, around the time the harassment policy got posted last year). To say nothing of the difficulty in getting a hotel room if the block has sold out, which it often does — a situation that might put you in a different hotel entirely, and yeah, like that won’t cause you problems if your mobility is limited.

Oh, and let’s not forget: this is a con with a membership cap. Waiting to register might mean you can’t attend at all, because they’re sold out. So really it’s heads they win, tails you lose, because if these things matter to you, then you wind up paying more money to the con, or not showing up at all.

I’ve said that I will not attend a con without either a harassment policy or an accessibility policy. As it turns out, that pledge needs to have a rider attached to it: these things must be posted sufficiently far in advance of the con. I already have my WFC membership, but if they have not addressed this problem in a substantive way by the end of the month, I will ask to have my membership refunded. That gives them four weeks: more than enough time to look at the many fine policies posted by other cons and select their menu options. If they can’t do it in that amount of time, I really don’t have faith that they care enough to do it properly at all.