elfs | Entries tagged with conventions

Like Foolscap, I could only do one day of Rainfurrest. I went alone. I hadn't intended on doing much, and didn't look at the schedule before going. I should have; according to friends of mine who were there, the writing track could have used me.

When I arrived, there was a wave of Fursuits come out and lining up for photographs. There had to be almost 300 there, and it was quite the impressive crowd. Fursuiting seems to be the one thing that really moves the Furry community. The art is so ubiquitous and yet so ordinary that it doesn't reach out much anymore, nobody cares about writers, and there wasn't a single furry-oriented game being sold or promoted anywhere. The dancing at night was about fursuits.

Fursuits and sex. There were two people selling bondage wares at the convention, as well as Bad Dragon [warning: NSFW]. I must be getting old and responsible; while I was tempted by a great many toys, I did not buy any. Maybe later.

I managed to run into Jimmy Chin, and went to dinner with him and a bunch of his friends. They pretty much confirmed my suspicions: aside from fursuiting, there really is no way to stand out in the Furry community, and now that there are so many fursuiters, even that's becoming a smear across the general haze of interests.

Furry's biggest problem remains that it has no central narrative. Its center does not hold. In the end, any single furry narrative is either using furries as placeholders for collections of personality traits, cutouts for collections of physical traits (which is fundamentally no different than fetishizing about race), or as stand-ins for some other fundamental Other. My writing is no different in this regard; I've used furries as fetish objects, and I've used them to represent Otherness to highlight issues around disability and able-bodiedness, infertility, and other compatibility narratives. (I have avoided condemning an entire species to being stand-ins for any given crippling neurosis that afflicts only some humans.) And thus far, I don't see a way out of this essential conundrum.

Current Mood: tired
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1526315.html

Foolscap was nice and quiet this year. Given that we have teenage daughters with busy lives, Omaha, Kouryou-chan and I were only able to go on Saturday, and even then we had to wait until after K-chan's morning ballet class.

I ran into some old friends and played a good round of cutthroat Quiddler with Shaterri and two others. Omaha, the kid and I all went out to dinner with Edd Vick, Amy Thompson and their small. By coincidence, she's one grade above K-chan in the same school, so they see each other often.

Sadly, I bought nothing at the dealer's room. The few things I had come to buy, they didn't have. It looks like I'll be acquire the next issue of The Society of Steam in ePub instead, if I can find it from an independent dealer.

Current Mood: tired
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1526156.html

I had a lovely Foolscap this weekend too. Kouryou-chan and I only went for one day, but it was still a lovely day. I had a frackton of conversations about writing, programming, getting along with geek culture, even a couple of incredibly unapologetic conversations about racial politics.

Best line of the night on privilege: "I understand that some people have more keys on their keychain that I do. I don't mind that. It makes me mad when they won't acknowledge that they have more keys on their keychain."

I spent over $100 on books: Stross's Rule 34, Mieville's Embassytown, The Falling Machine (The Society of Steam, Book One) by Andrew P. Mayer (which I started reading and looks like a kick-ass superhero steampunk set in 1880s New York, with a steampunk version of Machine Man sidekicking a very able yet chronically dismissed young woman with a knack for inventing), Jim Hine's The Snow-Queen's Shadow, Cooking For Geeks, and a collection of steampunk romance short stories. (I've been reading a lot of steampunk recently, debating whether or not to make Toby and Kasserine steampunk. I think I won't, not that pair. Getting fin de siècle right is hard enough in the first place.)

Kouryou-chan tore up the place with two young ladies as accomplices, all of whom showed that headstrong leadership quality young women growing up in geekdom frequently do. They're all getting so tall. I don't feel that old!

Good times. But watch out for Haiku Sushi Buffet in Redmond. Nothing wrong with the food but for the prices they charge, you're better off going to a kaiten place like Blue C or Sushiland.

And the Borders Books next to the hotel where the convention was held was one of the saddest yet: down to a tiny corner of non-fiction and romance novels nobody will ever love.

Current Mood: satisfied

It was a lovely Saturday at Foolscap. We could only go for one day, our finances being what they are. I spent most of it talking with publishers about the state of the publication, and a relatively strong rant on how self-publication is never going to match "the big houses." Especially not for genre because people will always trust editors over the guesswork of a cover art and back cover blurb, i.e., when you buy Baen or Tor, you know, more or less, what you're getting.

There was good dinner with Ed & Amy Thompson and their kid at an awesome Mexican place. Kouryou-chan got roped into being the voice of "Wesson" in a radio play edition of Buck Godot, Zap Gun For Hire, and she did an awesome job of playing a fast-talking, snark-filled laser pistol.

Sadly, what I did not find at Foolscap was my writing mojo. Several other writers confessed a similar feeling: the general mood of the country ate too many brain cells with neurotic concerns for our own personal futures, and writing about other futures had become that much harder. I wonder if a decline in the quantity of SF written can be an economic marker?

Current Mood: tired

Other than getting Kouryou-chan's money stolen, the con was pretty good. Attended a few panels, had one drop out on me because nobody else showed up, and enjoyed the masquerade a lot.

It felt... older than it has in the past. Fewer young people. Lot of greybeards. I don't know if that's economy or we're already living in the most likely future, and the kids already know it.

The panel on e-publishing was kinda a wash. It mostly came down to "Nobody knows what's going to be happening in the future, but we'd really like everyone to settle on one standard for e-books." Whee. The same wash was true for "writing a novel in a year." Overwhelmingly, I've been made aware that the problem, my problem, is that I get "ooh, shiny!" from a new story idea and abandon the old one. I must conquer my da Vinci Syndrome or I'll never get anything done. Every one of the people on that panel said "Finish the rough draft. It'll be crap. But it'll be done crap."

The girls alternated between being thrilled, and being bored. Yamaraashi-chan, especially, is champing at the bit to be 13 and allowed to go to panels on her own, with her own friends.

All in all, a good time. Very little money was spent; we actually brought lunches from home. We got back home Sunday afternoon and napped for an hour, and still managed to sleep soundly when it was bedtime.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Mai Hime OST, Himeboshi

Omaha and I are spending the day at Conflikt. It's nice, as a lot of people I know are here. I'm not much of a filk person myself, I'm afraid, but I can appreciate the effort other people put into their art and their practice. Kouryou-chan is stuffing her face with every cookie and muffin she can get her hands on.

Yamaraashi-chan is here with her mother. At first they just blew by; Yamaraashi-chan is deathly afraid of angering her mother by showing me any signs of affection or acceptance. But I managed to ask her if she had done her homework, and so far so good; she's gotten one assignment done, and I reminded her that there were two more to finish before the weekend ended.

Sigh. I so wish I was more of a convention-going, socializing kind of person, but I've spent a lot of time with my nose in my book.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: The Legend of Zelda, The Ocarina of Time Symphony, Gerudo Valley

Well, Norwescon day three has come and gone already. I never did get to see what Alexander James Adams looks like. That's okay. I performed the Ritual of Coffee, and then we all went over to the hotel for the buffet. Omaha took Kouryou-chan to the egg hunt while I went to the panel "Characters are People Too," where we went over all the ways that you can accessorize your character to make them seem more human. Things like tics, habits, different personalities in different roles, different drives, what a character pays attention to, so forth. That was a really good panel.

I found Omaha down in the Amateur Medievalist Group room. She was relaxing with a book while Kouryou-chan and another child shot padded arrows at hobbits. I took a few practice shots myself: I shot Sam in the head, Merry took one right in the crotch and Frodo took a leg wound so he won't be gettin' far, muahahahahah.

Omaha then took Kouryou-chan to some kid-friendly thing while I went to "Maintaining a Long Running Series," which wasn't as useful as it sounds: it was really a "buy our books, please" panel by Mike Sheperd and someone whose name I can't now remember.

We left after that, drained, disconnected. It's been a crappy weekend. We need some better luck.

Current Mood: tired

Norwescon's second day was much like the first. We got up late, swung by the donut shop and then headed over to the convention. I'd like to say we had a good time, but both Omaha and I are feeling burned out following the latest legal twists and turns in our private battle to keep Yamaraashi-chan safe.

Balloon Beasties
Hosted on Flickr!. Click to enlarge.

Still, I did get to take Kouryou-chan to a great session on making balloon animals while Omaha went off to a panel entitled "Cutting Edge Sci-Fi". The light blue one is Kouryou-chan's unicorn before we fitted it with mane and horn. Mine only got a horn; the mane popped. After that, we went to Denny's for lunch, where we ran into Josh and FallenPegasus, where the wait for a seat was forever, and where the service was great after we got seated. We conversed with the table opposite us about beer, guns, and the movie Tremors.

Kouryou-chan and I hung out while Omaha went to something called "Norma Editorial," which turned out to be more about graphic novels than anything else. Omaha found that disappointing, so we let Kouryou-chan go to the swimming pool instead, where the met two other girls and had a great time. We also had one heck of a giggle listening to Kouryou-chan read aloud The Adventures of Darth Mad, a painfully cute web comic about an evil Jedi. No, really, that's what webcomics are for. The artist was laughing so hard she gave Kouryou-chan a free print of the dead tree cover of the comic.

Omaha watched over Kouryou-chan while I went to "Getting the Novel Finished," which was much more about wordcount than it was about plot and denouement and since I don't have a problem with wordcount it wasn't really my thing. Still, we did talk a bit and I ended up describing Sterlings this way: "It started as a riff on bad seventies new-wave SF themes but it's ending up more like Tales of the City... in Space!" To which one of the panelists said, "Okay, you've lost me already. I have no idea what you're talking about."

Then Omaha and I switched kid duties again so she could go to the Talebones reading and Kouryou-chan and I went to Lazer Tag. They started late and in the free-for-all Kouryou-chan just kept getting killed so finally she gave up. We went back over to the reading hall where she read a comic book while we waited for Omaha to be done with her event.

We let Kouryou-chan dance after that for a little while, but the adults' energy was low so we finally just all packed into the car and went home. It's less than ten minutes from the hotel to the house (y'know, I still can't believe there's not a single bus that goes up 188th street) but Kouryou-chan was asleep by the time we got home.

I ran into so many lovely and wonderful people.

animegothgirl did a terrible, tragic thing to her hair. A woman I've known for years said to me, "I have a badass sword, a tail, and a big butt. I'm the perfect woman." I was inclined to agree.

intrepid_reason flirted shamelessly, and I told her to warn me before she shifted to flirting with intent, as I can never tell and tend to err on the side of caution. Dara and I talked a lot about dealing with AJ Adams' transformation: she's apparently going all fangirl on him, and trying to do it in a good way. I advised her to learn to enjoy the thought of her vices. Saw

shemayazi in the dealer's room. She looked better-rested and hale. So many friends with hugs and condolences. I should have enjoyed it more. It would have been a much nicer convention if I hadn't felt so emotionally drained by the toil of the previous week.