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Posts Tagged ‘cons’

after-action report

I think I enjoy World Fantasy more every year, as I learn more of how I best operate there. When I first show up, I’m pretty useless: bad at recognizing faces I haven’t seen in a year, bad at worming my way into conversations, bad at social small talk. Warming up takes a while. But I know that now, so I don’t feel stressed by the usual “oh god I can’t find anybody I know and my foot is looking for opportunities to get into my mouth and I’m not having fun yet.” I’ll get there. It just takes time. By Friday I’m doing better, and now I know that my mental list of panels I’d like to see doesn’t even reach the status of guidelines, let alone actual rules; I’ll go if I feel inclined, but if on my way there I get waylaid by a conversation, whatever. I said this weekend, and I really mean it, that I go to WFC for the conversations. For the lunches and dinners and hallways and relatively quiet corners of room parties where I can get into discussions of Mesoamerican kingship, recent TV series, Kit Marlowe’s sexuality, butt-shot urban fantasy covers, gender issues in SFWA, and the abominations of Leviticus, to name a few topics of the last few days.

By Friday night I’m doing pretty good. Saturday’s usually a swimming success. At some point on Sunday I’ll start to hit my limit: I’m ready to put on my headphones and bury my nose in a book for the trip home. And that’s okay, too.

But it isn’t all cookie-cutter routine, either. Every year I expand the circle of people I know. And this year featured the new experience of increased contact with folks from my publisher, specifically members of the publicity departments in the US and UK. I got trotted out for a lunch with some of the book-buyers for Borders, not as the featured attraction, but to smile and make small contributions to the conversation; mostly I learned quite a bit about how the publisher sells the books to the store, before the store sells them to the customer. And I discovered that the publicity guys Have Plans for Midnight Never Come. Not national-tour level plans, but we all agreed that’s not even a good idea for someone at my stage of things. Cool website plans, though, most definitely. I don’t know how much of it will turn out to be pie-in-the-sky, but I love the notions we were batting around.

Speaking of that book, I got anecdotal proof of the quality of its cover: people were very eager to pick it up and look at it, including some total strangers during the autographing session. (And with nearly a dozen people spontaneously approving of the author photo on the back, I am finally reassured I managed to get a non-crappy picture of myself. Readers will expect me to look like that for the next thirty years, I imagine.)

And hey! Amazon has it listed for pre-order. I was going to say “at last,” but really, the book isn’t coming out for seven months. They’re plenty early. So anyway, that’s one benchmark passed. (And apparently that thing I wrote up for my editor back in June was the cover copy. Wish I’d known that then . . . though it holds up okay, despite having been written when less than a third of the book was done.)

Put all that together with a royalty statement that tells me Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch are both still doing bang-up business, and right now? Things are looking pretty good.

World Fantasy?

If anybody knows someone who is going to World Fantasy in the fall and needs someone to share a room with, please let me know; I’m having a remarkable amount of trouble finding roommates.

back from ICFA

It pleases me that I already have twenty-three comments on this weekend’s rant, without me having had a chance to answer any of them yet. For those who have contributed to the discussion so far, I will respond, but probably not until tomorrow. For those who haven’t read it: go see me compare SF elitists to nineteenth-century anthropologists. As I said to ninja_turbo, the post lacks swearing only if you think “warmed-over nineteenth century unilinear cultural evolutionary theory” isn’t me swearing.

ICFA? ICFA was good. It’s moving to Orlando next year, and from the sound of it that’s going to be all-round a positive change, but I confess I will miss the familiarity of that hotel. (And I’ve only been going for five years; what of the people who have known it for twenty?) I would still love to see someone kidnap the Con Cat and bring him to Orlando, even if he does have fleas. Because I will miss having a kitty to pet.

My paper seems to have gone over well, despite being ten pounds of idea shoved in a five-pound sack. I will probably expand it a bitsy and then try to sell it to Strange Horizons, for those who wanted to read it. The expansion will be a Good Thing, though it will necessitate another round of prioritizing information, since I still won’t be able to get remotely everything in there. (What, you mean trying to cover twenty-eight novels, three and a half editions of D&D, and thirty years of textual history in five thousand words isn’t a manageable idea?)

Every paper and discussion I attended was good. This is unique in my conferencing experience so far. Either ICFA’s getting better, or I had good karma this year.

I have a head full of thoughts, not all of them fully baked. Look out in the near future, though, for a manifesto on Anthropological Fantasy, coming to an LJ near you.

I have reached the point where I have a Manifesto.

This is an interesting place to be.

draft . . .?

Crap. I was doing so good — but then patching a hole and putting on a conclusion spiked my wordcount to 4292, when 4100 is about the most I can fit in the time limit without talking too fast.

Well, that’s what revision is for, and more ruthless reduction. Alas, Jarlaxle may end up on the cutting-room floor. (Along with other things, since I didn’t spend two hundred words on him.)

But I think I may leave that for tomorrow. I’ll have more perspective then, which is critically important when cutting stuff. And besides, I’ve worked hard the last two days; I want to read a book for a while before I go to sleep.

Wake up — time to die.

Ruthless cutting of my paper this morning removed three hundred words or so, pulling me back from the rapidly-approaching wall that is the length limit for a conference. (I made it to 85% of the way done by bedtime; now I’m hovering just north of 75%.) Will this be enough space? Probably not. But at least I bought myself a tiny bit of breathing room.

I need to step back and let it compost a bit more, though, so I can figure out the most efficient way to organize this last section. It would be easy to bog down in detailed textual analysis, but I don’t have that luxury. Broad patterns only, thank you, analysis-brain. We have approximately 4000 words to play with, and no more. And no, just speaking more quickly isn’t an acceptable answer; we’ll lose our audience and confuse everybody. We must be succinct. You do know what “succinct” means, right?

Don’t answer that.

halfway . . . there . . .

I don’t want to think about how many hours today I have spent wrestling with an unwieldy and oversized mass of information in order to produce the half of my ICFA paper I have so far. It’s funny to think that I once contemplated finishing it in time for the February 1st grad student award deadline, given that I wrote the first sentence today. (I was going gangbusters on the reading back in January, but when I realized I just wouldn’t have the time to write it, I stalled and got almost nothing done until today.)

So it goes.

The problem is, I really did bite off more than one ought to chew for a conference paper. In addition to about two dozen novels, I’m also looking at a good dozen or more gaming supplements from four different editions of D&D. Plus artwork, which I’m hardly mentioning at all. There are all kinds of nifty-keen subtleties that have happened along the way — well, okay, most of them aren’t actually nifty-keen, but some of them are — but they just won’t make it into the paper; I’ve got another six years of publishing history to get through before I start on the analytical part of the paper, and I’m already halfway to my page limit.

Certain sayings about ten pounds into five-pound containers come to mind.

But I’m brain-melty at this point, so I think it’s time to take a break, and maybe chew on it a bit more before bed tonight. (It would be nice to finish the historical part of the paper, so I can do the analysis tomorrow and Tuesday.) And then, someday well after ICFA, I shall ponder whether I want to go back and expand the paper with some of the finer details for the purposes of submitting it to Strange Horizons.

You know, the original tongue-in-cheek title for this paper was “Drow: The Black Hole of Otherness.” I think it is also “Drow: The Black Hole of My Sunday Before ICFA,” given how much time it’s eaten today.

VeriCon

Oh, right. Con report.

VeriCon ’07: The Little Con That Could. Seriously, I’m just bursting with pride that it’s going so strong, and has lasted for seven years (with more to come!). This alone makes me happy about attending.

But there were other things to be happy about, too. Awesome guests; I was on panels with Guy Gavriel Kay, R. A. Salvatore, Sharyn November (editor of Firebird, for those who don’t follow YA stuff and aren’t giddy that she’s brought so many awesome things back into print), Vandana Singh, and Jeffrey Carver, with whom I shared a signing at the Harvard Book Store. And I got to pick Salvatore’s brain for my ICFA paper: double bonus! He gave me some invaluable intel about the backstage processes behind his dark elf series and others; I want my paper to be about not just the texts, but about how they have been produced. (Can you tell I’m an anthropologist going to a mostly-lit conference?) I also got to have a lengthy conversation with Sharyn, interesting chats with various people outside the Masq, and numerous meals with friends, thus fulfilling my social quota for the weekend. (So if I’m hermit-ish for a while, you’ll know why — that, and my pile of Stuff To Do.)

I also read “Nine Sketches, in Charcoal and Blood” at Milk and Cookies. It really was a hair on the long side, which I feel bad about, but since I wrote a large portion of it at VeriCon two years ago, I really wanted to read it there. And enough people came up to me afterwards to ask questions about it that I’m pleased with how it was received.

Now I’m back home. Apparently the cold in Boston was training me for the cold here. Hello, winter. Nice to see you. Please go away soon.

It is a very, very good thing that a month or two ago, when I actually had some spare time in which to read, I read a couple of good books and wrote up recommendations for them right away, to be used at later dates. Otherwise, I might have inaugurated my fifth year of recommendations by being late with the first one. (I very nearly was anyway.)

But the month isn’t over yet, and I have something to recommend to you: Blood and Iron, by Elizabeth Bear (aka matociquala). Tasty urban faerie fantasy goodness.

In other news, I’m off to VeriCon, in the soon-to-be hellishly cold wilds of Boston. The high tomorrow is supposed to be 12. I may, in fact, die.

updatery

World Fantasy was good. Got to see (read: stay with) Khet; got to socialize with many
friends from previous cons and make some new ones. The con itself wasn’t the best I’ve ever
been to — thin programming, too heavily focused on the topic du jour (the Robert E. Howard
Centennial), and most of the panels I went to were okay at best — but that’s only one of the
reasons I go, and not even the most important one, so I’m not upset.

Voted this afternoon. Most of my time was spent waiting for them to figure out what to do
with the two women in front of me who had both moved and therefore needed to jump through
administrative hoops. Link of interest: the Vote
by Mail Project is pushing the model of voting Oregon uses, which appears to be vastly
preferable on every front you can imagine. Worth taking a look at.

Also, started wading through my school e-mail that had built up over the weekend, and found
I’ve made it through the first round of cuts for my Collins course proposal. Now I have a
half-hour interview/presentation to go through, with some adjustments to be made to my
syllabus. Not sure when I’ll have the time to prep for that between now and Thursday, but I’d
better find some, as it appears I stand an actual chance of getting this through.

packy packy

After a week or so of fighting myself into a stalemate against the forces of entropy in my
life (read: trying to clean, trying to finish projects, trying to catch up on e-mail, feeling
generally like a hamster on a treadmill), I’m abandoning the battle and flying off to warmer
climes for a few days.

See some of y’all at World Fantasy.

return from Readercon

I enjoyed my first Readercon, though it’s the first time in a while I’ve gone to an sf/f con and not been on the programming, so I felt vaguely like I was slacking. That’s what I get for registering so late. Got to talk to some interesting people, though, and to learn some valuable lessons:

(1) Walking around the book room with a copy of Silverlock in one’s hands is a fantastic way to start conversations with total strangers. Everybody has their favorite bit. (Mine is the alliterative Norse rendition of the Battle of the Alamo.) And I am not, in fact, the only person convinced the book was written Just For Me.

(2) I do just fine picking up folksongs I’ve never heard before; in fact, sometimes I can predict the rhymes in advance, which is fun. If, however, I wish to attempt singing something I know, even for the purposes of a brief demonstration, I should take the time needed to coax my sense of pitch into providing me with the notes I need. Rushing this process will result in me sounding like I have no sense of pitch at all.

(3) Hanging out with fairy-tale-oriented friends and then going to the talk on quantum mechanics is either a recipe for brain meltdown or the Best Idea Ever. Or possibly both.

I didn’t get as much written on “The Last Wendy” as I wanted to while on this trip, but “Double Woman Dreamer” got unexpectedly resurrected from the dust-bin of story ideas (courtesy of one room-mate), and now I’ve got a notion for something calling itself “Schroedinger’s Crone” (courtesy of the other room-mate and Lesson Number Three). Cons always make ideas breed like flies in my head. Most of them are flashes in the pan, briefly shiny and forgotten before the con’s over, but usually there’s at least one keeper.

I’d prefer a keeper, though, which doesn’t involve someone e-mailing me a reading list in Lakota folklore, or self-lessons in quantum mechanics.

Christmas in June

My god, is it that time already? I came home from lunch today to find a box on my doorstep, full of Advance Reader Copies of Warrior and Witch. Book ain’t coming out for three months, but apparently the ARCs are already in circulation. I shall have to think of something to do with them.

Then, about five minutes later, the doorbell rang. Found a box waiting on the porch, and in it — EEEEEE!!!!!! My costume for the second Concordia game is here. I cannot wait for that game. To hell with the plot; I just want to show off the pretty. ^_^

In other news, since I’m now registered and everything, I should mention that I’m going to be at Readercon next weekend. At present I’m not on the program (having decided way too late to go), but I’m going to e-mail them and volunteer to fill any holes they might find themselves with. Regardless, come say hi to me if you’re there.

return from ICFA; contest results

The only bad part about going to Florida for a weekend in March is coming back to Indiana’s winter weather advisories.

My fourth ICFA was delightful. My paper (on Meredith Ann Pierce’s The Darkangel) went well; Pythia’s paper went better, winning the grad student paper award. Go her! The Bloomington posse is beginning its domination. I also got very publicly promoted by Rick Wilbur of the fomerly-Asimov-now-Dell Award, who, in accepting a different award for his service, talked about the successes of the finalists, and made me stand up and display a copy of Doppelganger to the entire banquet room. I am so very very glad that my author’s copies arrived in time for me to take some south.

And speaking of the novel . . . .

Adam Zolkover wins the contest for spotting Doppelganger in the wild. There will be a character named after him in the urban fantasy sequel I’m working on. Even though the contest is done, though, go ahead and send pictures! Or, if you don’t have easy access to a digital camera, just tell me when and where you see the book appearing. I’d like to track its progress. The local Barnes & Noble has called the people who special-ordered it, so the process has begun.

Time to hide under the bed, I guess.

Unfortunately, I do have an excuse for being hermit-like. Two papers and a grant proposal to write in the next week and a half. Urk. Guess I’d better get to work.