The Phantom of Readercon returns home…

My hat went to Readercon this weekend and had a great time, basking in attention and compliments. (My hat has gotten very popular lately and it’s something of a mystery!) I think that I went to Readercon, too, but I can’t quite remember! But I was only semi-attending, anyway, because I was commuting from home and I spent so much time prepping for my program events. I was pretty much invisible during the convention–I don’t think anyone knew I was on the Committee because I had a program participant badge, and no one actually knows who I am as a program participant because, well, no one really knows who I am. But they love my hat! 🙂

Readercon itself went very well this year. We sold out and had the highest attendance ever, some of the programming items were SRO, problems in any area were the barest minimum one could reasonably expect, and we heard lots of positive feedback and very few discouraging words. A good time was had by all, and that’s always gratifying. I went down early on Thursday to help out with set-up, and things were going so smoothly, I had nothing to do! It was lucky that I was there to sign for the Souvenir Book delivery, though, because that was a little earlier than promised. It came in thirteen boxes and looked good, or at least, I thought that it did. There were a couple of Committee meetings in the afternoon before the convention started and after that, I mainly chilled out and helped with a few things as needed.

On Thursday night, I attended readings. I enjoyed Jim Freund’s kick-off of the Theodore Sturgeon Tribute reading series with his reading of “A Saucer of Loneliness” at 8:00 p.m. After that, I heard my friend Elaine Isaak’s reading of her affecting zombie short story, which will be published in a New Hampshire-themed anthology in a few months. The last reader of the evening was F. Brett Cox, who read an excerpt from his unfinished novel about characters who had experienced a UFO contact years earlier. His selection included a rapid-fire summary of UFO history starting several centuries ago and was full of allusions and references that I recognized, and Mr. Cox’s overview of them was very well done. It’s always fun when you can identify allusions in fiction, but this was especially entertaining for its craft. After the readers concluded, I went home to bake two large pans of chocolate/chocolate chip brownies and rehearse Shakespeare and my own reading materials.

My normal working schedule now has me going to bed around 5:00 a.m. and getting up at 12:30 p.m. To get to Readercon, I was getting up at 8:00 a.m. and this, I think, is the main thing that tripped me up all weekend. I’m just getting too old to blithely go without sleep for three days at a time like I used to (being “nocturnal” generally means “sleepless” unless you’re an independently wealthy hermit 🙁 ).

My first programming item was on Friday from noon until 3:00 p.m., when I participated in the A Midsummer Night’s Dream reading with lots of really talented people. (I’d name them all, but there was some swapping around and fill-ins and I’d hate to leave anyone out.) It was tremendous fun and we had a surprisingly large and enthusiastic audience who enjoyed it with us. Afterwards, I attended “The Best of the Small Press” panel, with Washington Post book writer Michael Dirda, Gavin J. Grant of Small Beer Press, Sean Wallace of Prime Books and Robert Freeman Wexler, moderated by Rick Wilbur. For obvious reasons, I’m fascinated by anything related to small press publishing–this panel didn’t so much give an overview as discuss a number of general topics related to the theme.

At 4:00 p.m., I was a designated “participant” for Cecilia Tan‘s presentation, “How Electrons Have Changed Writing and Reading.” I wasn’t needed as a contributor for that so I just listened to the discussion, all of which covered information I’m very familiar with about ebooks, ereaders and recent changes in the industry. After that, I wanted to rehearse my own readings some more, so I found a place to do that for about two hours.

I was scheduled for a Kaffeeklatsch at 8:00 p.m. I’d baked the brownies for that, and I had Hershey’s Kisses in By Light Unseen Media’s colors (silver, blue and purple) and some flyers and things for the table. Alas, only one person, my author friend Morven Westfield, came to my Kaffeeklatsch. I knew it was a long shot and many of the Kaffeeklatsches were not well attended. We shared the room with author Jeff Hecht’s equally bereft Kaffeeklatsch, and the three of us had a very lively and enjoyable conversation for an hour. At 9:00 p.m. GoH Nalo Hopkinson came in for her Kaffeeklatsch, and I gave them some of the brownies and Kisses. I was a little bummed out, because it would have been fun to talk about publishing and vampires and whatever with some interested people, but that’s the way it goes!

By the time the Meet the Pros(e) Party started, quite late, I was very tired and didn’t have any party energy. I stayed to hear the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award winner for 2010 (Mark Clifton), chatted about screenplay writing, and went home to get a lot of chores done and fall into bed.

On Saturday I was up bright and early to donate the remaining brownies to the Tiptree Bake Sale and go to the Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading at 10:00 a.m. This included several new readers I’d never heard before as well as some of my friends in Broad Universe, and was very well attended. Immediately afterwards, at 11:00 a.m., I did my own reading, a chapter from my newly released novel The Longer the Fall. I think I had the largest audience that I have ever had for a reading, but I ran out of time and had to cut myself off, which I didn’t expect after all my rehearsing! I’d clocked that chapter a dozen times at about 22-23 minutes, but when I’m playing to an audience, I always slow down and it does create problems.

At 12:00 p.m. I read my assigned story in the Theodore Sturgeon tribute, “Like Yesterday.” I went right after Samuel R. Delany, and I knew exactly what that meant: I slipped into the jam-packed, SRO room for the end of his reading, then watched everyone but about two audience members and the Sturgeons follow Mr. Delany out. 🙁 But I had a few listeners, including the wonderful person who, after a minute of agonizing, chose to stay and hear me read over going to a panel with John Crowley, which is absolutely the most flattering thing that’s ever happened to me at a con! My reading went very well and I signed a release for the recording, so it may be available as a podcast or download at some point. I was honored to meet Noël Sturgeon, Theodore’s daughter (he had seven children), and her son, who looks eerily like Christian Slater. The thirteen-volume collection of Sturgeon’s work is an impressive achievement. I spoke briefly about why a vampire monomaniac would admire Sturgeon–for his outside-the-box treatment of the vampire theme, Some of Your Blood–and how I can still quote chunks of the very first Sturgeon story I ever read, at age 12, “Bianca’s Hands.”

And after that…I crashed. I had a veggie wrap from the lunch concession and then sat in a chair by the windows near the elevators, pecking away at a journal entry on my netbook and watching the rain storm that (I learned later) flooded Storrow Drive in Boston with four feet of water. The only reason I was conscious (technically) was because I couldn’t lie down! I sat a while in the Green Room looking like a coma patient: eyes open, nobody home! I revived enough to go to K.A. Laity’s eclectic reading at 3:30 p.m. She began by playing a bit on a Finnish musical instrument called, I think, a kantele, then read the first half of a long zombie/Western crossover story that was so entertaining, we made her stay and read the whole thing. (It was the last event in that room for the afternoon so we were darned if we were going to be left hanging!)

I had a very nice dinner in the pub with Morven and K.A. Laity, but Morven had to leave after dinner. At 8:00 p.m. the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition was scheduled, and this is not my cuppa. I was happy to be invited to join Shira Lipkin and some of her very talented friends in an impromptu group reading of Twelfth Night until 10:00 p.m. I really enjoyed that! When we broke off, I went up to the Con Suite to check out the gourmet desserts being offered by Boskone and Philcon, and they were indeed fancy. (I used the stairs instead of the elevators as much as possible, and this was the first time the stairs were crowded, as Kirk Poland had also just let out.) Then, while I could still drive, I headed home to do some personal work and fall into bed.

On Sunday, I was up early and off to be a “participant” in the Interstitial Arts Foundation Town Meeting at 10:00 a.m. I just listened to the discussion here since there were plenty of active participants and it was well-attended. Right after that I was a “participant” for Barbara Krasnoff’s presentation, “How to Write for a Living When You Can’t Live Off Your Fiction.” This event, which Barbara did last year as a Kaffeeklatsch, was SRO and could easily have filled one of the larger state rooms. I did make some contributions to this discussion (possibly because I was actually awake, at least briefly!). When that concluded, I went to the Con Suite to nosh leftover breakfast goodies from the Viable Paradise breakfast spread and various snacks, which was a big mistake on my part.

I think I was a little nervous about my last programming event at 1:00 p.m., my only real panel: “Racial Diversity and Cover Art” with GoH Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. Jemison and Alaya Dawn Johnson, moderated by Tor Books editor Liz Gorinsky. I was on the panel because I’ve published a book, Krymsin Nocturnes, by an African American author, Joseph Armstead, with black characters, and the black hero of the book is on the cover, and I have quite an interesting story about that. I told that story, and the rest of the discussion involved other stories about cover art controversies and related issues, such as the categorization and shelving of books by Writers of Color. It seemed to go well, and after the panel, an audience member came up and bought the copy of Krymsin Nocturnes I’d held up to illustrate my story! But I still felt just a bit…uncomfortably self-conscious for the rest of the afternoon, I’m not sure why. Fatigue probably had something to do with it.

At 3:30 p.m. I went to the “debriefing” that ends the con, which was very lightly attended–no one had any complaints! For the next few hours we had some Committee meetings and post-con clean-up and business, and finally I headed home with a car full of leftover food from the Green Room and Con Suite. So ended a very successful Readercon.

I’m honestly not sure what people thought of the Souvenir Book. I heard precisely two comments about it on Thursday, both of them basically, “looks good.” That was it: I didn’t get one single further piece of feedback, positive or negative, about the Souvenir Book, not even when I asked point-blank. It doesn’t look like I’ll be doing it next year, anyway. I actually don’t think people read the Souvenir Book, at least not at the con–there’s so much else to do, and it’s all people have time for to read enough of the Program Guide to figure out what program items they want to see. But if you were at Readercon, please do read the fiction pieces by Nalo Hopkinson and Charles Stross in the Souvenir Book, at the very least, because both of them are really entertaining. 🙂