Category: conventions

When I drew up plans to attend Chicon8 the 80th World Science Fiction Convention, my editor/publisher Steven Radecki, suggested that I might want to get some badge ribbons to promote Revin’s Heart (my steampunky fantasy adventure story with a trans protagonist that’s been serialized by Water Dragon Publishing). They had done a number of ribbons previously and he sent me a link to a site that would let you submit a design to have them manufactured. He even had a great idea for a ribbon: Airship Pirate.

I’m by no means a professional graphic designer, but I’ve done a fair amount work in this area (for example, self-publishing four books of haiku with artwork, covers, etc). And I teach students to make scientific figures and posters, which is functionally the same. But I was excited to fire up Inkscape and see what I could put together.

My first decision was that I wanted to see if I could use the trans-flag as a background. The site that Water Dragon had used previously couldn’t do that, but I had found a gay gaming company that had figured out how to do it. I asked them and they pointed me to PCNametag. We went back and forth a few times to sort out possibilities (e.g. full color yes, gold foil no.)

I ran a dozen different possible arrangements by Steve : just the words looked stark and not very interesting, so I added a dirigible, but then what should go in the dirigible? We went back and forth trying to come up with an idea. He suggested a rainbow, then I hit on the idea of using the new pride flag. We were getting close.

It was a delight to get the proof back and see that it looked like it was going to be perfect. And then to order them and receive them and they did look wonderful. But then the waiting began, because I didn’t want to reveal them until we were actually here on the ground. It was hard.

When I registered and got my badge, the first thing, I did was to put on my airship pirate ribbon as my very first. After we had successfully registered, Phil and I stopped at the bar and had a beer. While we were there, a drunk guy at the bar introduced himself saying he had a private pilot license, but had never flown in an airship and was curious about how to pilot one.

“It says, ‘airship PIRATE,'” I said. He was bemused to discover I was a writer, not an airship pilot.

When I headed to the Dealer Room, I got Dealer and Program Participant ribbons. And a Cometary Life Form ribbon.

I put a stack of the ribbons near my books and, when people approached the table, I used the ribbon as an essential part of my patter: “Would you like to be an Airship Pirate?” It frequently allowed me to initiate a conversation about my books.

The ribbons were insanely popular. Some people just collect as many ribbons as they can. (Some people end up with ribbons that reach the ground and then come all the way back up. One woman was making a skirt of ribbons.) But a lot of people were just tickled to become an airship pirate. And I think some people recognized the trans flag background and were glad for a visible symbol of their allyship.

Not everyone wants to be an airship pirate, however. Some people just said, “No!” Some quite abruptly. One woman seemed incensed and said, angrily, “I’m in too many groups already!” And she tore off some other ribbon she already had on her badge. It made me want to ask, “Who hurt you?”

But, frequently, it let me break the ice, describe my books, and make a sale. The ribbons were insanely successful from that perspective.

Beyond that, however, there was one thing I had not considered. As I walked around Worldcon, I would see people, here, there, and everywhere, wearing my ribbon. The ribbon that I had designed, gotten printed, and handed out from our dealer table. It was just unbelievably satisfying.

I’ve already gone through almost my entire stock of 100. Now, I’ll need to order 500 for Rhode Island Comic Con, Arisia, and Boskone coming up.

I am attending Chicon8, this year’s World Science Fiction Convention where I will be appearing in eight programeroj. I’m extremely grateful to the Worldcon organizers who’ve given me an excellent opportunity to debut as a new author.

I will be moderating three panels: Words Count: To Go Long or Short With Your Book Manuscript?, Relaxing Reads, and LGBTQIA+ Characters Done Right. And I will be a panelist on two more panels: Anime Is Not a Genre and Get More Mileage from Maps. These are all areas where I have deep interest and might actually be able to offer a small contribution.

I will hold a “Table Talk” where people can chat and ask me questions and I will participate in a reading with other authors from The Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy.

Finally, along with the legendary Dr. Vanessa MacLaren-Wray I will be helping offer a workshop: Manuscript Boot Camp: Get Ready for Grinder.

In addition, I will be helping run a dealer table for The Small Publishing in a Big Universe Marketplace. When I’m not in a session, I will probably hang out around the table to sell and sign books. But if you’re looking for me, I’ve tentatively signed up for 1pm every day (except Monday).

And if you’ve read this far, I’ll further mention I’ve got a special giveaway I’ll be bringing in limited numbers to pass out. I’ll include them with copies of my books. But if you ask, I could probably be persuaded to part with one separately.

Not Worldcon, but festive. From Poŝtmarkoj el Esperantujo.

I (virtually) attended Worldcon this year. Having recently published my first story, The Third Time’s the Charm, it was interesting to attend the biggest scifi/fantasy convention and see what writers, editors, and fans are talking about. It was a lot of fun, plus I got to hang out with my virtual writing community that were all also attending virtually.

The virtual conference experience was only mediocre. They used Discord, but it was not used nearly as well as at Readercon. In particular, they had a chat tool that appeared in the browser window next to the videos of presentations, but it was clunky, didn’t scroll back very far (100 entries) and was lost once the window closed. It would have been a lot better if they used Discord for all of the chats, to provide more scrollback and to keep all of the conversations in the same place. And don’t get me started on the Virtual Dealer Room: it was just a webpage with unrequested motion all over it (which makes it unusable for people with vestibular disorders, like myself.) But to participate at all during a global pandemic is kind of a miracle, so I don’t want to make it seem like I’m actually complaining.

The first panel I attended, How Magazines are Changing, had a diverse, international group of magazine editors. I was curious to understand the economic pressures magazines are under, how they’re responding, and how that is creating change in their business and practices. In particular, I’m particularly interested in understanding how if magazines are using some external source of funding (e.g. kickstarter), does it really make sense to talk about magazines as being “markets” for fiction? Instead the discussion was almost entirely focused on the cultural changes associated with decentering publishing from whiteness, cisness, heterosexualness, and maleness. As a white, cis-het man, it was slightly uncomfortable to be in the room while my characteristics were identified as everything that’s seemingly wrong with publishing. The two, white, male panelists, spoke little and both made statements disclaiming their views as white, cis-het men.

The second panel, Publishing in Africa, had a diverse pool of native and diaspora African authors and editors who had a far ranging conversation about the challenges of supporting a native publishing industry in Africa. Hearing about the huge differences among the different countries reminded me of something: In Ugly Delicious, David Chang’s television program about food and diaspora, he refused to identify ethnic food by nationality. That is, he talked about food from India and China without using the terms “Indian food” and “Chinese food”. I eventually realized this was an intentional decision to reject reductivist labels that ignore regional diversity. This conversation made me wonder: Is Africa monolithic enough to have “African” be meaningful as a label? Or are there essential regional differences that require being approached separately?

I also attended a panel about Gender and African SF with mostly African women. Many countries in Africa have draconian laws and cultural practices policing gender and sexual identity. I was kind of distracted during this panel and didn’t take many notes. My take away quote from this presentation was by Tlotlo Tsamaase: “Stories about us can be damaging, but stories BY us can be so much more damaging.”

The panel Beyond the Hero’s Journey was a lot of fun. Since I’ve basically never really studied literature, I have much less familiarity with story structure than most authors or editors. The result was that I felt kind of lost through a lot of the panel as people put up and then shot down various straw men about the hero’s journey as an archetypal organizing myth. This was perhaps the most passionate panel of the entire convention for me, but a lot of it went over my head. I did relate when someone mentioned how anime and manga were exposing readers in the west to alternative models, like slice-of-life stories. One panelist reminded participants that “the structure serves the story.” OK. If you say so.

An international panel discussed Decolonising Secondary World Fantasy. I didn’t take a lot of notes during this presentation either. There was a fair amount of discussion of why secondary worlds end up looking so much like our history and whether it’s just lazy worldbuilding to not imagine structures that are more different.

The Prejudices of Urban Fantasy panel seemed to spend a lot of time just arguing about labels. Is it Urban Fantasy if it’s set in the past? How big does the city the story is set in for it to qualify as “urban”? It made me wonder if I was writing “rural fantasy.” I kind of lost interest in arguing about the semantic differences among labels, which didn’t really delve into story structure all that much, as far as I could tell.

Our own Steven Radecki presented Preparing Your Manuscript for Submission. As I had been able to preview this presentation, I knew what to expect. But I learned several things. Steven prefers a more formal and lengthy “cover letter” than I had been lead to expect from other resources I had read, which recommended a truly minimal cover letter. He also requests a synopsis or story summary that is longer than I was expecting to write. I’ve generally written something more like a logline for these. I asked a couple of questions: (1) What are ways authors can get involved to learn more about the editorial/publication process? (Attend conventions, remember that writing/publishing is a business, and an agent can help with the business side of things) and (2) Is becoming a slush reader useful? How can you find these opportunities? (Maybe, if you want to read a bunch of bad writing, just ask.)

The last panel I attended was Manifestations of Gender that had three short presentations: Jennifer Zwahr-Castro: Author and Character gender in the Hugos, Nick Hubble: Where Will it All Lead?: Gwyneth Jones’s Life, and Marcia D. Nichols: Gynoids, Fembots, and other Mechanized Women. The first was mostly a presentation about the gender (male or female) of both the authors and characters of Hugo award nominees and winners by decade. It showed that that in earlier decades, they were almost all male, and there has been a trend toward equity. OK. The second presentation was about comparing literature stuff I don’t know anything about. OK. The final presentation was about very early sci-fi or pre-sci-fi stories about men building female robots as sex objects and the madness, mayhem, and death that universally followed. I asked a question about how this story compared with the early history of android stories. The presenter responded that the main difference was that people didn’t view androids as sex objects, which seems fair. One participant made several statements about how old white men should be thrown off Worldcon panels. I felt a bit sorry for the older white male panelist. And a panelist reported that RBG had a made a statement that the SCOTUS should have 12 (sic) female jurists that several commenters enthusiastically endorsed — as if the injustice that prevented women from serving on the supreme court for generations was a model that should be replicated. Sigh…

I’ve already signed up for Worldcon for next year in Chicago. Sign up soon! The rates go up after Dec 20, 2021.