Day in the Life of an Idiot

There were a number of factors in my decision to go to WisCON virtually this year, but the main one was that I'd have to turn around almost immediately after returning home from a road trip to do another one. Even for someone like me who loves to road trip, that was too much.

However, as I've reported in the past, WisCON has run a good virtual con, so I had no hesitation dropping the very cheap virtual membership ($25) last minute in order to attend online. This year the virtual track consisted of a Discord with multiple channels, hybrid panels (basically in-person, but streamed to Zoom), and Zoom-only panels. 

I didn't do much of anything at the con on Friday because I was busy doing things with my family. However, I got a taste of Wiscon via an email from naomikritzer in which we chatted about the workshop critique group that she'd facilitated. Emailing with her reminded me of the one time I did the workshop as a facilitator... (I remember it well because davidlevine  was in my group and he was already so sufficiently advanced that the sum of my critique consisted of where to send "Tale of the Golden Eagle.")  I think I also did the workshop as a nascent writer being critiqued, but I have no idea when that might have been--sometime in the 1990s?? I was just browsing the list of GoHs, wondering if seeing a particular name would jog my memory and the only one that did was Melissa Scott, because I interviewed her for the local gay paper, focusPOINT, and sold the unabridged interview to Science Fiction Chronicle that year, which, according to the website was 1997. Not my first WisCON, I actually attended WisCON for the first year in 1984, because Elizabeth A. Lynn was a guest and I talked my father into driving me and my then-boyfriend, Ben K., down to Madison for a day, just so I could see this lesbian writer FOR REASONS (Sorry, Ben!)

The thing is, I also remember deciding to see if I could sell that Melissa Scott interview because a friend of mine who was working at the gay paper as a reporter said, "Since you're going anyway...." so I'm sure I was attending fairly regularly before this, but when exactly I started going regularly, I have no idea. I should ask Laurie Winter if she remembers, because I used to hitch a ride with her, Terry Garey, Rebecca M., and Eleanor Arnason. 

At any rate, on Saturday my first panel was a hybrid one, which I wanted to catch because Naomi was on it. It was called "What I Wish I'd Known When I'd Started" (Writing is implied.)  I have to say kudos to whoever set up their hybrid panel room, because the camera was positioned close enough that I could see everyone--including read their names on the table tents!--and I could hear everything in the room, even the un-mic'ed audience members (even though the moderator very carefully repeated questions from the audience.) I did miss the beginning of this panel because I was figuring out where and when and how, but someone also took abridged notes (like, while it was happening, a kind of live-stream) in the Discord Channel, so I could easily catch up. Naomi and I have been talking a lot about normalizing mid-career slumps and, apparently in the part I missed, she talked about her own. Two of the other panelists were self-published and so the topics hopped all over the place between trad, self-, and hybrid publishing. It was a good panel. Because the tech was so slick, I really felt like I was there.

The next panel I attended was Zoom-only and that one was "The Trans History of WisCON," which I wanted to see because my friend bcholmes was on that. Speaking of nostalgia, the other reason I wanted to go is because I was on a very early trans panel about trans representation in SF/F because my Archangel Protocol books feature a character who is a trans woman (one of the four archangels, actually.) But, this panel has become rather infamous (or famous?) because Charlie Jane Anders, myself, BC, and Elizabeth Bear were on it--and Charlie Jane now talks about it as though it was her and Bear and "some other people." (<--a direct quote from a panel she was on later in the con.) But, I remember it well for a number of reasons, but mostly because of a really profoundly pointed (in a good way) comment from the audience from jiawen in response to Bear's "Well, if you're lacking the right kind of representation, you should write what you want to read!" And jiawen rightly pointed out that not everyone wants to be a writer, but readers still want to see themselves reflected in their fiction. That stayed with me for years and years and years, and I strove to live up to that directive in everything I wrote.

My memories aside, the "Trans History of WisCON" panel was very good, although they had one woman who skirted right up to the edge of being a little bit behind the times, but she was self-aware of her lack of understanding, and that made a huge difference, you know? The rest of the panel was supper fascinating and full of a lot of things I was not obviously privy to throughout WisCON's history. BC suggested that 2000 was the first year she'd attended and that seems unreal to me, because I can hardly remember WisCON without imagining both BC and jiawen there. 

At some point in here, jiawen and I jumped on to jitsi to do our version of barcon, where we hang out and gossip about the con and talk about life, the universe, and everything. It's become a tradition for us at Virtual WisCON and it's surprising how much those kind of things really help a person feel like they're there, at the con, and not just spectating from a vast distance.

Also, later on Saturday evening, I also attended "Tell Us About Your Virtual RPG" for obvious reasons. As anyone who reads my blog regularly knows, I'm in an RPG that has been virtual from the start, some four years ago, with a bunch of folks here on DW.  As I told jiawen later, the panel was interesting (in the non-Minnesotan sense) but not mind-blowing. I find that Zoom panels are often very 101? Like today, I attended a Zoom-only panel called, "Writers Groups and Gaming Groups" because my friend Kristy was on that (and it's something that jiawen proposed based on things that she and I have talked about) and I asked a question about problematic members and what to do with them. And this isn't meant as shade on the panelists, but they all just talked about the easiest solution (which also assumes that all members are expendable, and unteachable which isn't actually always true) which is "just kick them out." Also, as someone who has been the facilitator of a number of writers' groups over the decades that I've been writing, there is no "JUST" in kicking someone out. It's actually always a hard and painful process, especially if your group is full of peers (which mine always are. I don't set myself up in an "instructor" roll, even when I'm the one organizing a group.) If I had been on the panel, I would have liked some frank discussion about how in writers groups (less so in gaming groups,) there are members who have elevated status in the group because they have more publications and that complicates "just kick them out." I mean, in gaming, this is akin to "what if your GM is the problematic one?" 

At any rate, I felt like the Virtual RPG panel also operated on this level, which was kind of Virtual RPGs 101. Which didn't make it a bad panel, I just didn't feel like I'd learned much or heard anything fully new attending it. Although, the Virtual RPG panel did have an interesting discussion about how to deal with maps, mini figs, and the like, virtually, but it got more technical than I was interested in since I'm (so far) never the GM in these games. 

On Sunday, today, the only thing I did was attend the Gaming Groups/Writers Groups panel, which, as I note above, did not knock my socks off, but neither was it a complete waste of time. I'm trying to decide right now if I will go to the streamed GoH speeches. Rivers Solomon and Martha Wells have not been, so far as I could determine on any of the streamed or Zoom-only panels (nope, I just missed "Healing from Cispremacy"/Rivers and "Intersectional Robots"/Wells), so I may want to go to at least say that I've seen them/heard them talk. There is one gaming-related Zoom-only panel tomorrow, Monday, that I might check out, but probably this it for me?  

I realize that milage varies substantially with Virtual Cons, but I have always loved them. I wish they would continue more robustly than I suspect they will?  I really love not having to leave my house to attend. I can afford SO MANY more cons this way, just in general, and when done right I don't really miss the in-person experience. Like, Discord (which, to be fair, I am deeply comfortable with) can feel like those random hallway conversations and they almost always have channels labelled "bar" or "lobby con" so you can "hang out" there and get something akin to the in-person experience. I say this as an extrovert, who likes people?  So, I don't know. Like, I say, obviously, this is very subjective. I'm a big proponent.