yonmei

12:04 am: Women who weren't shortlisted for a Hugo
One of our non-feminist readers read my post on Late Business at the Hugo Awards and decided to find out who would have been added to the shortlists had the Joanna Russ Amendment passed and been ratified before the 2000 Hugos. Their thought was: "I had wondered if the rule came with a built-in weakness, forcing Hugo Administrators to reach so far down the list that the stories would lack excellence, or have gotten trivial numbers of votes."

The writers who would have been shortlisted were: Eleanor Arnason, Kage Baker, Judith Berman, Claire Brialey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Nancy Kress (three times), Ellen Klages, Margo Lanagan, Evelyn Leeper, Ursula K. LeGuin, Elizabeth Malarette, Maureen McHugh, Vonda N. McIntyre, Cheryl Morgan, M. Ricker, J. K. Rowling (twice), and Jo Walton.

This reader adds, sedately "From this list I see that particular problem would not have been much of an issue."

I've added the specific stories, place on the top-15 list, and number of votes to my post at feministsf-blog.



Tags: bujold, harry potter, leguin, worldcon

11:15 am: Late Business at the Hugo Awards
I added a longer entry with piles of data about the Joanna Russ Amendment I put forward at the Worldcon to remedy the statistical bias against women writers getting nominated: Yonmei at feministSF the blog.

Tags: feminism, worldcon

02:30 pm: At the Worldcon: Day Four, morning
I am writing this at the same tiny hut-cafe in the Park St Louis where I ate tea on Tuesday evening: I will soon be having lunch, buckwheat crepe with tomato and cheese and a glass of freshly-pressed orange juice.

It's Tuesday again. The con's over. It was a major experience – worth the £120 I paid for membership: this and my days in Montreal were worth the £600 I paid for the flight. This Saturday I shall be wandering around the farmer's market again, this time next week I'll be back at work: but for these past days I was in another world. How do you put a price on intellectual experience?

( Sunday morning )

Sunday afternoon was something I was really looking forward to, because there was a trifecta of panels all related to each other – I was on the last panel (Writing Gender Issues), I had originally been invited to be on the middle panel (Rainbow Futures), and I was fascinated by the first panel (Human Reproductive Variants). But, it's quarter past two: I should finish up, post this, and take my freshly-charged battery out with my camera to go on photographing Vieux-Montreal. Or rather, be damned to “should”: I want to!

PS: Went in, paid ($9.08 for my crepe and orange juice) and while the woman was sorting out change for my $50, I tipped $2. Then when she handed me my change, I tossed the 2c in the change bowl, and she said "Merci" in a way that made me wonder if she'd noticed me tipping $2. Oh dear. Okay. I was back at my B&B to collect my camera battery and post this before it dawned on me that given I'm not likely to be back, it doesn't really matter if she knows I tipped $2.02 or thinks I only tipped 2c...



Tags: i am a feminist, racefail 09, worldcon

12:13 pm: Marked and unmarked: other thoughts
Connie Willis to me (I was invisibly at the back of the audience) "I think you have a major misconception about how writers work" and went on to explain to me that a writer gets an idea for a story because something comes alive for them - as I myself sometimes put it, "something clicks". The story is there - you can write it or refuse to write it, but the essential elements are by that time a given.

My question had been born out of the thought, sitting at the back of the room, listening to four North American voices from people I could not see (none of whose books I was familiar with, though of course I had heard of Sterling and of Willis as writers) why these four North Americans, when they were talking about "writing history" were all talking about British/European history. (One of them clarified, when I asked why they were writing in the histories of continents not their own, that he also writes Japanese history).

Backing up a day, when I was at the Writing Gender Issues panel, I said that I thought I had been invited to be on it because I am a lesbian who writes m/m slash stories: I habitually and regularly write people whose gender is not my own. And of course (even sometimes by other slash fans) I'm asked why. Why do I, a lesbian, want to write about two men and their relationship?

I could answer, as Connie Willis answered me, that this is because the ideas for stories that click for me are pretty much always fanfic about two men in a sexual/sexually charged relationship. Or I could answer, as (I think it was Sterling) answered me, "Because that's what we're taught in school" (because our cultural values are such that writing about that topic is just easy/obvious - we're taught to value men - we're taught to value British/European history - )

And with that response, things clicked for me, and I walked over to Cafe Momus for lunch and to find a computer to post this thought, which relates to the Werewolves of Brigadoon thing too:

For North Americans, at least for white North Americans, writing about British/European history by preference to their own is unmarked. "Medieval England" is an unmarked period for North Americans to be interested in, to research, to write novels about, but writing novels in the same time period in North America would be a marked choice - it would put you outside the circle, to acknowledge that period as part of American history.

Whereas for me, a lesbian writing m/m slash stories, I think it partly confuses people so much (and I have had to explain it/think about it so much that I think in all honesty it's Connie Willis who has a major misconception about "how writers work", not me: I think I've thought about it a lot more than she has) because it mixes things up: what is marked? What is unmarked? I am a lesbian writing: I write about gay male relationships: I am a woman writing about men: I am a fan writing fanfic.

I have had a splendid con, and there is still the Are Fans Slans? panel with Kate Nepvau and Patrick Nielsen Hayden to go. Hee.

(I may sneak out if Kate isn't on it: but oh boy, do I ever want to watch this cage match!)

Tags: connie willis, i write fanfic, racefail 09, worldcon

07:52 am: Photobucket are ASSES
Really.

I've been getting unexplained error messages the last couple of days about difficulty uploading images.

Then today I got told that the last seven images on my "I walk to the worldcon" album couldn't be uploaded because the album had exceeded 1GB. No other explanation given.

I googled, and found that somewhere on the Internet was the answer (though not on the Photobucket site): my entire account has hit 1GB, which means I either upgrade to PhotobucketPro and get an extra 4GB for as long as I keep paying for Pro, or I stop using this account. (From the discussion thread, deleting old photos does nothing useful.)

Hitting Photobucket's free storage limits is irritating, but reasonable enough - I knew they must have them, I just didn't know what they were or how far I'd filled them.

But Photobucket's failure to clearly signal that I was getting close to the size limits is annoying, and their lack of explanatory text on site is just idiotic.

So. Sorry, and all: I will post no more photos today because I want to decide what to do with Photobucket. If you want to see what I did upload for 9th August, most of them are here under my Montreal album.

Tags: photos, worldcon

12:21 pm: Kathryn Cramer on "Minorities in a Large Field"
There was a panel at 10am this morning called "X, Why? Minorities in a Large Field or the Majority in our own?" which was blurbed as "Joanna Russ said in 1983: 'But remember, one can't get minority work into the canon by pretending it's about the same things or uses the same techniques as majority work." Does this mean we should think of feminist SF (or that written by gay or black people) as a separate field? How much should minority-advocacy SF speak to people who aren't part of the minority?"

I circled the panel on my first pass through the programme on Wednesday evening, and only noticed when I came to read the list of panellists yesterday that one of them was Kathryn Cramer. She was not on the panel in the first draft, still available online: Kate Nepveu was, but refused to be on it when Kathryn Cramer was invited. (We know this because the_shoshanna overheard Cramer saying so as she came in.)

I came in five minutes late, having had a discussion with ide_cyan about whether either of us was going, and Ide promised to restrain me.

I will write more coherently about this later, but here are some of things Kathryn Cramer said (based on scribbled notes made at the time):
---
Everything after this except what's in brackets is based on my notes of what Cramer said: I've put it in "quotes" where I'm giving pretty much a transcription (though it may not be exact) and without quotes where I'm summarising.
---
"Do we have to play the game of the publisher? What if you're going to write for someone who isn't the publisher's idea of the average SF fan?"

Australian writers mix fantasy/SF/Horror in a way that "sounds wrong" to an American audience.

"Getting into a Years Best anthology it's an advantage to be a minority because you have a different voice" but a novel publication is a different matter "What colour central character ends up on the cover?"

Betsy Mitchell - "her husband's black" - has done most to promote black writers in New York publishing.

Samuel R. Delany wrote an essay on racism in science-fiction where he pointed out that he and Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson are grouped together on panels at cons as if they have something in common.

[izzybelbooks pointed out that Delany had noted there were only panels on race at Readercon when Delany was going to be there. ]

"Many people are oppressed in many different ways"

Pulp fiction magazines sold hugely in Harlem in the 1930s - we don't know how many of the early pulp writers were not white because there was a huge concealment of ethnicity and gender in early pulp fiction magazines,

"What's supposed to happen with a character on the cover is that the cover should be a correct representation of the content"

(izzybelbooks pointed out that the panel was supposed to be about what gets into the canon, and how it gets into the canon)

"The Hugo voters are a collective" - the quality of awards is much higher from award-giving committees than from a democratic representation.

(Some conversation about paperback distribution, which Cramer had earlier said was not economically viable, and reference to e-books: the_shoshanna whispered Verbe Noire to me.)

E-books are going in the direction of a central distribution system - Amazonfic and Kindle.

"I want to return the discussion to the word Oppression" (she had earlier invited ide_cyan to join her and Henry Melton on the panel) "How does oppression work?"

"I also experience oppression in different ways"

(The following, I swear, is a word-for-word EXACT QUOTE)

"Living in Westchester is like one step short of living in East Germany - neighbours will call the cops if they see my nine-year-old son walking down the street alone because they don't think I should let him do that."



Tags: racefail 09, worldcon

07:08 am: At the Worldcon: Day Three
In order to do Saturday justice, I would have to spend at least an hour writing it up. I do not intend to do that, because I plan to be dressed and out of the house well before eight, and while this morning I was the first of the three fans sharing it into the bathroom for a shower, that still doesn't leave me enough time to write up Saturday from my notes. (And I don't plan to take my laptop to the con, thankyouverymuchforasking.)

The panels I made it to were "Bluff Your Way in SFnal Linguistics", "Death, Illness, and Disability", "Writing the Other" - at which RaceFail09 got discussed, and I made my most incoherent and inaudible contribution to discussion (which still burns me...), a panel on "Lost" which I sat through half an hour of eating lunch with ide_cyan, listening to the sentences and not understanding a word, "Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over", "Aunts in Spaceships", a buffet dinner at the Maharaj restaurant, "What Our Things Say About Us", and finally "Brewing and Distilling In Extreme Situations".

Five out of seven of those panels were both intellectually stretching and fun - this is what I go to conventions for! To have a good time by thinking! - and the other two were fine. ("Aunts in Spaceships" was not intellectually stretching, which as an intellectually stretching aunt made me sad, but on the other hand it gave me lots of ideas about "Writing Gender" this afternoon.)

I took notes. Sketchy notes, but I hope to be able to write them up Tuesday. Hm. Maybe. ... *worried hopeful*

So I'll post the photos of costumes, and see what else I have time for...

( Costumes! )

Tags: films, photos, worldcon

06:48 am: On Day Three, I walked to the Worldcon
Breakfast here makes me want to overuse OMGdelicious quite a lot. Nevertheless today is my morning for an Eggspectations breakfast if I can possibly get out of the house before 8am, because Gingerbread Manor does not start breakfast till 8:30 and there are two panels I would like to get to by 9am: promoting SF to women and How Not To Be A Jerk Online. Obviously I cannot go to both, but one or the other....

On Saturday morning, after walnut waffles with maple syrup, I walked to the Worldcon....

( image-heavy post under cut )

Tags: montreal, photos, worldcon

07:14 am: At the Worldcon: Day Two
There's another fannish couple now staying at Gingerbread Manor (the woman, an early riser like me, expressed surprise at the coincidence, and I pointed out that we both probably used the same search criteria: easy walking distance from the con, good Metro route back, and a very nice place to stay) and so we discussed C. J. Cherryh over breakfast.

But I got out of the house before nine, because I had to get to the WSFS Preliminary Business meeting by 9:45 with the 200 copies of the amendment discussed here and here. Which I was - even stopping on the way in Cafe Momus for an espresso.

I had never been to a Worldcon business meeting before Friday, and it was more interesting than I expected, though I don't believe I'm likely to go again. Kevin Standlee made a splendid chair, running the meeting with the formality required to get everything done in time but with the fannish leaven of humour. I discovered that Worldcon has a standing committee with the charming name of Nitpicking and Flyspecking. From my particular interests, the process that WSFS is going through to ensure trademark protection for various aspects of Worldcon and the Hugos, were quite interesting in and of themselves.

I didn't do a count (and of course there were no diversity forms to fill in), but I believe that the majority of WSFS members who attended the preliminary were male: I think all of us were white: I don't think many were under 30, let alone under 25.

There were two interesting and contradictory motions which got treated in interestingly contradictory ways: The first was a couple of boyfans who had proposed a motion to get more boyfans to the Worldcon: promoting the idea that concommittees should go to conventions were young male fans are more likely to hang out and to promote the Worldcon there. (What was said explicitly, in defense of this motion, media fans like myself are not welcome: we do not read books, apparently, and so are not wanted at Worldcons.) The motion was expressed in terms of "let's get more young fans coming to the Worldcon" and there appeared to be general agreement that this would be a Good Thing (providing they are the right kind of young fan, of course - hundreds of media fans would not be welcome....)

The second was a motion that concommittees should be required by the constitution to sell memberships at a considerable discount to young fans. This motion got pretty much wiped up and thrown away. The plan would have allowed parents to plan Worldcon attendance with all their children: would have let teenagers go to the Worldcon either with their parents or alone and still get to vote: would have let people between 18 and 25 get what would have amounted to a student discount. The motion would, in other words, have provided the practical means of getting young fans to the Worldcon. It wasn't quite killed; it was amended down to a vague resolution that discounted youth memberships should be recommended to future concommittees, with one man proposing that it would be much simpler if parents were only allowed to stand in queues with their kids and buy the discounted memberships on the door, rather than being able to book well in advance.

So, well. I mentioned this last debate to the woman running the Worldcon Volunteers table a bit later on in the day, and she looked at me with a feminist kind of shrug and said "Men," in that way you do.

Anyway. I thought I was going to have to run from the WSFS Prelims to my first panel at 12:30, but in fact the resolution you have all been waiting for came up at the very end at 12:05, and... was, by a large majority, killed promptly without debate. That is: the membership present read the resolution, concluded they wanted to hear nothing more whatsoever about it, and voted to "Postpone Indefinitely". I shall (post Worldcon) write up the detailed explanation and defense and post to feministsf, but in the meantime, the business meeting ended at about five past and I went to the greenroom to thank the greenroom manager for bringing me much-needed coffee (I had gone there during recess hoping to get coffee/food when it looked like the meeting would stretch out till 12:30, but the delivery of fresh supplies had not then been made) during the Prelims meeting.

( image-heavy post under cut )

Tags: doctor who, star trek, worldcon

06:36 am: On Day Two, I walked to the Worldcon
After fruit salad with the cutest little baby grapes, a cheese omelette that was to die for, a toasted bagel with blue stilton, and a banana, oh and excellent coffee, I walked to the Worldcon. (I took a slightly circuitous route and went in by the other door, because I wanted to add an update to one of yesterday's post and the price of doing that was to buy a coffee in Cafe Momos, where they have a computer free for use of customers). I hadn't had an espresso-based coffee in a week. I found I hadn't missed it.

( image heavy post under cut )

Tags: montreal, photos, worldcon

07:51 am: On Day One, I walked to the Worldcon
After French toast and glorious coffee, I walked to the Worldcon.

( very image-heavy post )

Tags: montreal, worldcon

12:40 am: At the Worldcon: Day One
After spending a couple of hours on Docking on Thursday morning (and putting up "No Entry: This Door is Alarmed (do not frighten it further)" all along the wall that separated con from behindcon, I went to the panel on the Werewolves of Brigadoon, and although it turned out in a direction I didn't expect, I enjoyed it, in an irritated kind of way.

Kari Sperring did her famous (at British cons, at least) rant about the sheer inaccuracy of much Celtic fantasy novels, beginning with Mists of Avalon and continuing (though she noted that considered as a riff on Arthurian myth, Mists isn't so bad, though all the women in it are horrifying in so many ways). Peadar O’Guillin asked "Does it matter? All cultures 'tell our story' in our own way" and George R. R. Martin, perhaps having read the blurb, veered the conversation back to novels instead of history:

And I (having been frantically scribbling notes to make sure I got my apparently spontaneous rant right, since I would only have one chance to make it as a speaker from the audience), stuck my hand up, got called on, stood up, and said that when I had proposed this panel, a couple of months ago at one in the morning, it had been because I had read one too many novels set in Scotland where werewolves live in a castle next to a village without a pub or a shop and beyond reach of tourist buses, and I wanted to read a novel in which someone asked the werewolf "What team are you?" and where there was a war going on in the Hollow Hills because the pixies were Rangers fans and the gnomes were Celtic fans and the dwarves were Partick Thistle (at which Kari called out her familiar and irritating "Write it!"), where the fairy clan was split down the middle because half the clan were Episcopalian and the other half were Catholic (and that got a laugh) - fantasy novels which reflected the reality of Scotland, which had not been written by a North American with ideas about Scotland based on Brigadoon. I pointed out that Margaret Elphinstone, who writes Scottish fantasy, goes unpublished outside Scotland because she does not write what North Americans think of as "Scottish Fantasy" - bad fantasy drives out good.

And then I sat down and did not attempt to comment again, but I had already annoyed George R. R. Martin, who declared that it sounded as if I didn't want Americans to write about Scotland, which was not really the point. Still. I got to say it. And though I did not get to say this, I thought, in response to Peadar's parallel points ("Does it matter?" - "We write the stories of our culture as we see them") that North Americans are trying to write the stories of my culture, and their publishing industry ensures that their stories of my culture are overwhelming and drowning the stories we tell of our culture. And that's why it matters. Because if (in response to George R. R. Martin) Americans want to write about Scotland instead of about their own culture, they ought to at least try to write about Scotland instead of Brigadoon...

It was two o'clock when "Werewolves of Brigadoon" closed, and the rest of my day got more complicated in unexpected yet strangely enjoyable ways. I had suggested, mostly in jest, on my post about the Worldcon at feministsf that I propose an amendment to the Worldcon constitution on Friday (that's TODAY) that for a year the Hugos are required to have women-only shortlists. Which I knew would get shot down in flames, but I had hoped would inspire interesting debate. But, a SMOF and co-blogger Cheryl Morgan suggested a slightly more achievable way of phrasing it, and agreed to second it if I could get it drafted appropriately, and got it put up for workshopping at Thursday's panel explaining how the WSFS meetings on Friday and Saturday (and if necessary Sunday and Monday) work.

So I went to the WSFS panel (World Science-Fiction Society - members consist of Worldcon members from this year and the preceding year) and it had moved to 3:30 and a different room, which I found out by asking in Programme Ops. So instead I went to the Twitter panel, arriving late but enjoying it anyway: on how writers and others use Twitter. The winner of last year's John W. Campbell Award asserted that she had used Twitter and her blog to parlay 17 nominations into a win (she'd put up a sampler of her writing on her blog, it got picked up by BoingBoing and downloaded by ten thousand people the first day, and ... she won the award. Good for her. I still can't remember her name, but that does speak to the pointlessness of awards, so why I am I bothering with this Hugos thing? Good question.

It was suggested by the people there (all of them older than teenage) that "the younger generation" have less concern for privacy: that teenagers post pics and write things on Facebook and Myspace because they're accustomed to the idea that the whole world can see them. I thought but did not say that no, teenagers are as they always were: unable to conceive that there will be a problem with stuff they did and wrote later on. No teenager cares about embarrassing a thirty-year-old, not even when that thirty-year-old is themselves in twelve to fifteen years time.

(I did not say it because I had used up my debate time in pointing out that yes, the Iranian revolution had hit the American news, but the earlier example of people using Twitter and blogs to communicate about street actions against an oppressive right-wing government was in fact people demo'ing outside the Republican convention in 2008 - which street and online actions had gone largely unreported by the media: people know about them because they got recorded by individuals present at the time with access to the Internet)

Best line of that panel; "The Internet, like everything else, is an intelligence test. They failed."

Anyway, so, I had eaten a Stoats oat bar for lunch and I spent my free half hour finding Tim Hortons and getting a big cup of coffee, before I went on to the WSFS meeting. That was cool. They explained Roberts Rules of Order (the American version of Parliamentary procedure) clearly and with reference to earlier business meetings: and helpfully drafted the amendment for me.

The basic idea is: No more all-male Hugo shortlists!

The reformulated idea is: If there's an all-male Hugo shortlist, the top woman from the top fifteen nominees should be picked as a sixth nominee (the standard length of shortlist is five: there are other reasons already why there might be six: no one would know until the list of the top fifteen was published post the Worldcon if the sixth nominee was in as a result of this amendment, and no man would lose a Hugo nomination because of this amendment. (Cheryl pointed out that my original idea - all-women shortlists - would be killed instantly on Friday, which is a bit of a waste of getting 200 copies of it made.)

The actual text of the amendment is:

Moved, to amend the WSFS Constitution by inserting the following into the end of Section 3.8:

3.8.n If in the written fiction categories, no selected nominee has a female author or co-author, the highest nominee with a female author or co-author shall also be listed, provided that the nominee would appear on the list required by Section 3.11.4.

(Section 3.11.4 is the one which specifies that the top 15 nominees plus whoever gets at least 5% of the vote, must be published within 90 days of the Worldcon.)

[Note: I realise that if you are at Worldcon / reading Voyageur / attending WSFS business meetings, you now know what my real name is. Please respect my wish for Google not to be able to link my real name to Yonmei on the Internet: it's no fannish secret, I just don't want it googleable.]

I got it typed up using a borrowed laptop over in the Volunteers Space, and printed in the con office over in the Delta hotel (where they were perfectly helpful once I explained it was WSFS business - plus I got to defend it to the two guys helpfully printing it out, all 200 copies). Then I nipped down to where the con newsletter was being put to bed, and got a fifty-word news item in about the amendment, 30 seconds before deadline, thank you Giulia. And then - after the slash panel at 7pm - I got one of my co-panellists to co-sign it, since I couldn't find Cheryl. And then I walked back to the Delta hotel and delivered it to room 1814, with a note saying I'd got there by 8:45. And at 9:45 this morning I have to show up for the Preliminary business meeting, at which all amendments not considered worth debating/voting on Saturday will get thrown out/referred to committee. But hey. It was worth trying.

The lifts at the Delta hotel are interesting, and so (obviously) are the fans you meet there. But I'm not sorry I'm staying here. It's awfully oppressive. (Handier for parties, obviously. But it's nicer here.)

I enjoyed the slash panel. As I'd kind of expected, we didn't really get to talk about what the new shows are (really, who knows what's going to be slashy till it happens?), but we did all discuss what made shows slashy to us, and I think everyone had a good time.

At 9pm I went to a panel on the Future of Toilets (the flush toilet wastes a lot of water) and that was fun and interesting. Everybody craps: yet science-fiction tends not to deal with this. One point which was made that hadn't occurred to me: The problem of dealing with crap and piss from human beings with our modern diet is that toxic wastes excreted build up: you cannot simply use it for compost even after processing out the bacteria and other infectious stuff, because over time, the heavy metals that we consume daily will kill the ground being "composted". (Wetlands and bulrushes are a solution, but they're hard to scale upwards.) What I spoke about in my opportunity from the audience was that fantasies aside, any real resolution has got to be at the crap processing end - you cannot convince people to give up flush toilets and sewer pipes, but you can persuade them to process it better.

And then I got the Metro home. (I can get the metro from the Palais directly to Sherbrooke, five minutes walk at either end: very good for tired feet at the end of the day.)

( image-heavy behind the cut )



Tags: montreal, worldcon

06:51 am: Worldcon, Day Minus One
The Worldcon opens today (Thursday) but on Monday through Wednesday, people were doing move-in work (registration opened Tuesday). I'd planned to spend half of Wednesday volunteering, and did spend five hours, with a long lunchbreak in the middle (picked up the restaurant guide, which is written and researched by Jo Walton, with a photo of a spacesuited tourist on the Moon with a bowl of poutine,

Poutine is SCARY


and found a beautiful and unexpected cafe on Notre-Dame, where they did me a vegetarian sandwich and coffee). - And because those hours were pre-con, each hour counts as two, so I have already earned my volunteer's t-shirt.

What I volunteered at wasn't what I expected: I got sent to Docking, where I was issued a terribly butch luminous yellow "vest" and helped dealers get their stuff out of their vehicles, onto big trolleys, and over to the dealer's floor. 80 dealers were supposed to show yesterday: only about 10 did, so we spent a lot of time sitting around in the docking bay talking about stuff. (Healthcare came up - when I signed up to volunteer, the coordinator told me I had the coolest accent, and I did talk about the NHS - but so did the welfare state, back exercises - my back is in pretty good shape after all the lifting I was doing, thanks to the exercises one of the other docking-crew volunteers showed me - and past cons in the UK and the US and the alcohol laws and fannish culture thereof. Apparently Baltimore has had officially alcohol-free cons for years and years, since local youths discovered there was PARTY going on and used to gatecrash in order to drink: I told Susan, the fan who was telling me about this, that I could not imagine a British con going alcohol-free no matter who was trying to gatecrash - but then again, in the UK, a teenager who wants to drink would hardly need to gatecrash a convention to be able to get drunk...)

One odd thing got said, in the course of the conversation, by one of the docking crew during the long conversations we were having: about how you "couldn't help some people" because "we're not a homogenous society". And I fell silent - as did a couple of others - because I needed to think and because it had just occurred to me that everyone here at Docking station was white. (Indeed, preponderantly, the fans at the con are white, which made a notable difference from the fans and the Montrealers: but all the Docking volunteers were. Me included, of course.) And I thought that, in my experience of US online culture at least, I had never heard the phrase "We're not a homogeneous society" used except as coded racism. Especially not when it's being used about people - kids - for whom there is, in the opinion of the speaker, no point expending resources on, because "culturally" they just aren't worth it - "they go to jail as a rite of passage".

So. I don't know. I didn't get into a fight about it there and then. But it made me uncomfortable. I prefer to get into that kind of fight online, actually, where you can easily cite statistics, resources, and if necessary cartoons and essays to make your point: and where the conversation can stop after one or two link-heavy exchanges (or of course go on to light a fire to burn down fandom). But: it made me uncomfortable. I didn't know how to argue about it. I wish I did. Because "race" didn't get mentioned, except (as I thought) in USian code - everyone there aside from one Canadian and myself was USian. Just: a lot of code. How do you fight code?

Waiting for a train


(And I noticed Patrick Nielsen Hayden is on a panel about not being an asshole online. Heh.)

( image-heavy post under cut )



Tags: back hurty ow ow, photos, worldcon

06:22 am: On Day Minus One, I walked to the Worldcon
On Wednesday morning, once I'd had breakfast (freshly-made pancakes with blueberries and blueberry sauce, garlic bread with blue stilton, fruit salad, excellent coffee, omgdelicious) I walked to the Worldcon.

I'd picked this place because it sounded nice (and it is) and because it was acceptable walking distance (20 minutes) from the Palais de Congres. I took photos walking there on Wednesday morning...

( Very image heavy post inside cut )

Tags: montreal, photos, worldcon

08:15 am: Montreal, Day One: Worldcon, Day Minus Two
Yesterday I woke at 3am, slept fitfully till the sun got up about 6am, and then desultorily got dressed, it having occurred to me (breakfast at 8:30 am) I could walk down to the Palais de Congres between 7-ish and 8:30.

There will be a lot of images in this anecdote, and there are even more in the Montreal album on Photobucket.

( image-heavy post )



Tags: botanics, montreal, photos, worldcon

06:34 am: Worldcon schedule: good and bad news
Of the good: They're running the Werewolves of Brigadoon panel that I proposed to them, about cultural appropriation of Scotland, but I'm not on it. Anticipation's first thought was Charlie Stross: their second (and heh, who can complain about this?) was George R. R. Martin. Thursday at 12:30. I think that's a yay. I will definitely go along, though I doubt I'll get much chance to note that art is selectively fractal.

Of the mostly-good: Shoshanna agreed to be on the slash panel on Thursday evening when I thought I was the only person on it: but now Kathy Sands is also on it (she's the author of "Slash Wallow"), which is... interesting... but so are a couple more male fans including one whom I know and like very much but who seems probable to be there to talk about saffic (just a guess!) and another guy whom I think I probably know - at least, we seem to know the same people/read the same fanzines. Oh well. The pre-panel meetup should be fun...

Of the bad: I was on two panels on Sunday, on writing gender and on writing sexual orientation, and they were right next to each other - I mean, one started at 3:30 and ended an hour later, the other started at 4:30. I was modding the one at 3:30, so providing it started promptly we could finish promptly, but the panels needed to be within a minute or two's walk of each other, and I asked if one or other could have their time changed, if they couldn't. Instead I've been taken off the sexual orientation panel at 3:30 ("Rainbow Futures") which is a complete sod (so to speak), because it means that even if I go to it, I shall certainly have to miss the last ten minutes or so. However, it's a Worldcon, these things happen... Except:

I have been put on a new panel, Friday at 9pm, right after the panel on Doctor Who fanfic, exactly the same problem as the sexual orientation / gender panel. And the panel is about "RPGs and the Writing of Tie-In and Fan Fiction" - "Role Playing Games attract an increasingly important niche audience in fandom. Tie-in and fanfic has traditionally extrapolated on favorite media characters, but why not RPG characters as well? What’s out there? Is it any good? What’s the future of RPF inspired fiction?" - the which I have no bleeding notion why they put me on it, because I'm not actually into RPG, and while I do have ideas about RPF, it's not as if the two TLAs - RPG and RPF - have anything to do with each other.

I think I need to write back and point this out and ask them to withdraw my name from the 9pm Friday panel...

So my schedule is now:

Wednesday morning: volunteered to do con set-up stuff:

Thursday at 7pm: The Most Slash-Worthy Shows on TV
" Why do some shows lend themselves to fanfic? And what makes certain characters ripe for speculation? Which shows have inspired the best fanfic?"

Friday at 12:30pm: Snobs R Us
"What kinds of fiction in our *own* world do we ignore, put down or exceptionalise? Why do we dismiss YA books and tie-ins?"

Friday at 3pm: Frst Contact: Create and Design Aliens
"A workshop conceptualizing other beings: What sort of biology are aliens likely to have? What might they look like? What personalities/behaviors? How will this effect our communications?"

Friday at 8pm: The Doctor and the Dalek
" Where does Dr. Who fanfic go now? Are there new opportunities for slash fiction? Or should we just tiptoe quietly away?"

Sunday at 4:30 PM: Writing Gender Issues
"How do writers approach gender and gender issues? What’s taboo? Can women write men and men write women without making a mess of it? How do you write a story that explores gender issues without hitting the reader over the head?"



(Original schedule)

Tags: worldcon

02:04 pm: The subject line has nothing to do with the post.


I can't say I would ever be this bad, but it's mostly because I would never get married wearing a tux unless my beloved were also wearing a tux. [Update: Hm. My visual imagination seems to have invented the tux: the pastor stick figure is wearing pastor-robes, the bride stick figure is wearing foofy white dress, but the other stick figure is just a stick figure not wearing anything. Perhaps it's the kind of nightmare where you suddenly realise you're standing in a public space doing something very important with everyone looking at you... but you're NAKED. ...or maybe it's just typical cartoon sexism, as when XKCD indicates a stick figure is female by drawing long hair?] And I truly cannot imagine ever wanting to get married to someone who wanted to wear a foofy white dress to the ceremony. Whatever her name was.

Anyway. This isn't today's XKCD, but today's XKCD is kind of disturbing. So.

It's my mother's birthday today. She's 74. We're meeting this evening for a pizza and a film. Either something from the 1960s with Dirk Bogarde, whom my mother has bizarrely never seen in the cinema, or something from the 21st century about two women smuggling illegal immigrants into Canada, which my mother thinks she will like because she's Canadian. The pizza will be delectable. I expect I'll enjoy either of the films she opts for.

My birthday present to her this year is afternoon tea at the Howard Hotel on Sunday. I did momentarily think of offering her afternoon tea at the cafe next door, but actually I'd quite like to keep that a secure harbour. Besides, she will like the afternoon tea at the Howard Hotel: it's basically an enormous leisurely meal. This means running away from a picnic that HoF are organising, but I can live with that.

I still haven't told them I'm going to Canada in August. I just got the e-mail from the volunteers coordinator inquiring if we want to do pre-con work, and e-mailed back to say, yes, Wednesday morning and Thursday.

I want pink and summer dragons! Give clicky!


Tags: family stuff, worldcon, xkcd

10:09 am: My Anticipation schedule
Okay, Worldcon:

Thursday at 7pm: The Most Slash-Worthy Shows on TV
" Why do some shows lend themselves to fanfic? And what makes certain characters ripe for speculation? Which shows have inspired the best fanfic?"

Friday at 12:30pm: Snobs R Us
"What kinds of fiction in our *own* world do we ignore, put down or exceptionalise? Why do we dismiss YA books and tie-ins?"

Friday at 3pm: Frst Contact: Create and Design Aliens
"A workshop conceptualizing other beings: What sort of biology are aliens likely to have? What might they look like? What personalities/behaviors? How will this effect our communications?"

Friday at 7pm: The Doctor and the Dalek
" Where does Dr. Who fanfic go now? Are there new opportunities for slash fiction? Or should we just tiptoe quietly away?"

Sunday at 3:30pm: Rainbow Futures
"How does media SF deal with gay and lesbian characters? Is the real world moving too fast for the genre? Can SF show us a future where sexual orientation isn’t a big deal?"

Sunday at 4:30 PM: Writing Gender Issues
"How do writers approach gender and gender issues? What’s taboo? Can women write men and men write women without making a mess of it? How do you write a story that explores gender issues without hitting the reader over the head?"

"Rainbow Futures" is in P-524C and "Writing Gender Issues" is in P-513B, and those had better be within like 2 minutes walk of each other or this is not doable. Even so, it's not ideal: I'm going to write back and ask if they can shift either panel to a time where I can have at least an hour's break between them.



Tags: worldcon

05:01 pm: I only have a hundred words
"Scottish writer and political activist: recent convert to the cult of Vegan Cupcakes. Adores cats, coffee, and chocolate. Believes that if the world is going to come to an end next week, we had better all have a good cup of tea."

This is my 42-word programme participant bio that will appear in the Anticipation con programme, online and printed.

I don't want to run to my 100-word limit, because I suspect that the layout fen will be grateful for those who manage to be brief, but this is my last chance to add anything: any suggestions for what I might say to North American fandom?

Tags: worldcon

12:17 am: Just In Time
I remembered I meant to vote in the Hugo awards.

Quite a lot of the categories, I voted for No Award in 1st place, but still, it's the principle of the thing. I can say I voted.

(I think the only category where I actually was sure I really wanted to give a "1" to one of the nominees, was Best Fan Artist, because it would be lovely if Sue Mason won it. She is ace. She is also a lovely person.)

It feels like tomorrow is a present, because I'm not going to Glasgow after all. There's an Orange march. Not the phone company or the fruits, the sectarians. Ugh. But, it means I'm not working tomorrow! And my favourite literary newspaper arrived, so I can have a leisurely breakfast tomorrow and read it over coffee. Also toast, possibly. I don't rule toast out.

This evening I watched a film where Harrison Ford didn't kill a woman who wasn't his wife. (I'd seen the first half of it yesterday, until it occurred to me that I was going to drop with exhaustion and I could just stick a tape in the recorder and watch the rest tomorrow. The wonders of modern technology.) He did suffering masculinity ever so well. But I liked it.



Tags: films, worldcon