For the most part, I enjoyed Albacon. Socially, I had a very good time. I’ve got lots of friends in the Albacon community and if I hadn’t been so crazy-busy on Saturday, I would have enjoyed that aspect of the weekend even more. Professionally, the event was something of a mixed bag, and validated the decision I made, at the end of 2009, to pull back from most conventions (or take on a different role, as I’m doing with Readercon) until I have more professional cred built up and am better known via other media.
I took a wrong turn on the drive over, and then I-87 into Albany was five miles of parking lot, so I got to the hotel only an hour before my first panel at 6:00 p.m., “Out of the Word Processor and Into the Bookstore.” This was the event about which I was most–well, not nervous so much, but uncertain–of all my programming. I had intended it to be a solo presentation and then other participants were added to it. I could scarcely object to sharing a panel with such esteemed professionals as Artist GoH Ron Miller, editor and SFScope.com publisher Ian Randal Strock, and author, editor and small publisher Steve Miller, who joined us at the last minute. But I was having trouble conceptualizing how to turn my presentation into a panel discussion and had decided to completely extemporize, which can backfire big time. Fortunately, the panel went fairly well and everyone had lots to contribute. We only had a couple of people in the audience, and that was disappointing. I’d have thought the topic a perfect segue from the full-day Writers’ Workshop, but maybe the hungry writers were all getting dinner. There’d been a group book signing from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
My roommate, Morven Westfield, and I went to the Green Room for a couple of slices of pizza for dinner, and then went to the Ice Cream Social at 8:00 p.m. It takes me a little while to decompress and unstiffen in social situations, and maybe I’m not alone in this because Morven kidded that the Ice Cream Social reminded her of a high school dance: everyone was huddled around the walls. “But this time, they only invited the nerds,” said Ron Drummond when he heard that, which was pretty funny! Morven and I decided to check out the hotel’s fitness room, where I got in a full session on the exercycle while Morven utilized one of the treadmills. This left me totally high for the rest of the night. If I’d had time, I’d have done another session on Saturday! But I felt great after I got in a workout (even if the hotel’s lone exercycle is the most pathetic piece of crap I’ve ever seen that still actually works. It does the job!). I was also using the stairs as much as I possibly could all weekend–our room was on the third floor (a couple of doors down from the Green Room, in fact).
After that, Morven dressed up for the Fantasy Ball, including fangs that looked great. I hadn’t brought any dressy clothes, and in fact, as I told Morven, I’m feeling a bit like a moulting canary at the moment. I’m letting my hair color fade out because I’m changing brands, and I’ve gained some weight back and want to take it off, and I just feel scruffy, half-formed, and not like drawing attention to myself. I really wanted to dance, but I also really wanted to rehearse my reading selections a bit more. In the past few days, I’d been designing three flyers, ordering party food, outlining my panel events, and packing for an “away” con for the first time in a year, and I hadn’t rehearsed my readings as much as I wanted to.
I got to have my cake and eat it. I rehearsed readings and then ran down to the end of the Fantasy Ball, where I danced myself silly, with other partiers including Morven, K.A. Laity, Debi Chowdhury (next year’s Albacon Con Chair), William Freedman, KT Pinto, and Jo Lynne Valerie in a huge sparkling witch’s hat. Stella Price (next year’s Albacon Programming Chair) and Kimi Alexandre (IIRC) deejayed a great playlist of dance music. It was an effing blast. 🙂
On Saturday at noon, my first panel was “Vampires: Sparkling or Bloody?” Moderater Jackie Kessler (who is the Guest of Honor for next year’s Albacon) had us pull chairs into a semi-circle with the audience’s chairs and structured the panel as a more free-form exchange. We had one of the largest audiences of any event I was on, and the discussion was very lively. Directly afterwards, I went down to the Albany room, where all the readings were scheduled, to emcee the Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading at 1:00 p.m. We only had a couple of listeners for that, but the RFRs are group readings so they come with their own audience. Kimi Alexandre, who runs the podcast Tale Chasing and did a workshop on “Turning Fiction into Audio,” also recorded the readings.
As soon as the RFR was over, I headed up the street to Price Chopper, where I had pre-ordered party platters online (pastries and cheeses) and bought chips, soda, cookies, crackers, dips and other such refreshments. By the time I got all that back to the hotel, and packed the party platters on a bed of ice in the bathtub to keep them chilled, it was 3:30 p.m., and I was scheduled for a 60-minute solo reading at 4:00 p.m.
I shouldn’t even try to do readings at cons. I just get too invested in them. The trouble is…I love reading aloud. I’ve loved it all my life, and that’s why I’ve learned to do it well. I have extensive training as a speaker, I have a couple of years of graduate-level acting training, I record and even videotape myself reading to refine my technique–I take it very seriously. But it’s not an ego thing. For me, this is a way of sharing the experience of prose or poetry with other people in a very direct and intimate way. It doesn’t have to be my own writing. I enjoyed reading the Theodore Sturgeon story and doing the Shakespeare plays at this year’s Readercon as much as anything I’d ever done at a convention. Panels, workshops and presentations are hard work. Readings, or any kind of performance, I find far more deeply satisfying. And yes, I genuinely enjoy listening to other people read, as well.
But more often than not, no one comes to my readings. When I do have an audience (usually just one or two people), they seem to really enjoy hearing me. But I don’t get enough listeners to build up any “buzz.” I’m going to have to podcast my readings to accumulate critical mass, that’s all there is to it! And I intend to, but it is time consuming to do, and once I start podcasting, I need to keep going.
The readings at Albacon were further handicapped by being scheduled in a function room that was set apart from the rest of the convention. Most events were in a series of rooms on the second floor, north of the front desk. The Albany room was on the first floor to the south of the front desk. I heard that many attendees were asking how to find the Albany room–it didn’t appear on the diagram of function rooms in the Souvenir Book. I had to ask the folks at Registration where it was, myself. So maybe people simply couldn’t find the room.
Whatever, I told myself ahead of time that the convention was small and I’d probably have no audience at my reading (despite the flyers for it I’d put in the freebie racks and in Albany). I was right. Only Morven came to my reading. Kimi was recording other readings and events, but she evidently did not plan to record mine, because she never came in to set up her recorder. After all my rehearsing, I didn’t read at all.
I thought I could be philosophical about it (and I should have been), but I couldn’t. I was really disappointed, and I told myself that I shouldn’t take it personally, but my mood plummeted after that. I stayed in Albany to listen to Jackie Kessler read for the next hour. Kimi came in and recorded her reading. After that I went up to our room to start organizing for the By Light Unseen Media party. I was scheduled for a panel at 7:00 p.m. and right after that, I had thought I’d be scurrying around to set up food and decorations in the Con Suite, because the party was supposed to run from 8:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. Trouble is…now all that had been changed–several times!
I’d initially planned the party because the Committee offered groups an opportunity to sponsor the Con Suite for their parties, and I thought that was a great idea. By Light Unseen Media even got a thank you in the Souvenir Book for sponsoring the Con Suite! But the Committee members organizing the Steamy Romance Reading on Saturday night (which I was participating in) suggested that the BLUM party be extended and combined with that, and moved into one of the function rooms. That was fine–that gave me more time, more space, more people and I didn’t have to rush around packing up the party so I could get to the Steamy Romance Reading. But then, the Saturday night Masquerade was cancelled for lack of enough participants (which was a shame because one of the GoHs was costumer Lisa Ashton); and this impacted the filking that was scheduled with and around it; and then the Steamy Romance Reading was moved up to an hour earlier; and meanwhile, I had a bathtub full of party platters and I wasn’t sure what the heck was happening.
I went down to the 7:00 p.m. panel, and it didn’t happen because there was no audience. This was probably because most people were having dinner, and I got absorbed in conversation with my co-panelist and other folks. As it turned out, the party went very well. I had lots of help setting up the food and decorations. I had made a slimmed-down playlist from the Anticipation party music and set it playing on my netbook, with speakers. People came, had food, bought books, hung out and talked, and everyone seemed to be having a good time, including me. At 10:00 p.m. we moved everything into the room next door and commenced the Steamy Romance Reading, so more of the food got eaten. I still had tons of food left over. I’d estimated for about twice the number of attendees that the convention actually had, and I had copious amounts even for that number. I think I was channeling my mom.
The Steamy Romance Reading was a lot of fun, and at last I finally got to read something. But by that time, I was so wiped out, I could hardly stay awake, and I was still affected by my earlier disappointment and the flurry of changes around my party plans. I’d rehearsed my selection, but I did not read well. So, on top of everything else, I was disappointed in myself. I did enjoy listening to the other readers, though! We got tote bags full of swag from Authors After Dark–I haven’t gotten so much loot since World Fantasy 2007! I had lots of help packing up the food and decorations and loading them into my car.
On Sunday, Morven and I checked out of our room in time for my last panel at 11:00 a.m., “Small Press: the Good, the Bad and the Surprising.” That went quite well and we had a respectable audience. I donated some of the more perishable party food to the Con Suite, although I did bring home a whole platter of cheese which is mostly in the freezer. I attended the 1:00 p.m. panel on SFF-related music, “Music of the Spheres,” which rambled a bit. I almost asked to be added to this one, because I did a panel on science-fiction film score music at Arisia and Anticipation in 2009, but I decided I had enough programming already. The panelists–Ron Drummond, Chuck Rothman and J.A. Fludd–were very knowledgeable, but they had the same problem I had at Anticipation: music clips on a laptop whose speakers couldn’t be heard through the room.
At 2:00 p.m., I went to the panel on “The Science of Science-Fiction,” but two of the panelists failed to show up, so we all tip-toed next door into the second half of Ron Miller’s slide show of his astronomical concept paintings. These can best be described in one word: “breathtaking.” “Amazing” and “gasp-worthy” covers it pretty well, too.
At 3:00 p.m. I went to the (technically) post-con “Albacon 2011 planning meeting.” The Committee asked for feedback on various convention departments, and the responses were positive, for the most part. Albacon is moving off the Columbus Day weekend dates next year, and will be held September 30-Oct 2, and pre-registration is already open.
By the time the “planning meeting” wrapped up, I was seriously crashing, and I knew I was going to have trouble staying awake on the four-hour drive home, as it was. So, I didn’t do a lot of farewells, I just hit the road, and I hope no one felt slighted by that! I did, in fact, have to pinch myself, hard, a lot, to stay alert. I got home safely but not without incident: a cop pulled me over in North Adams! For nothing! He’d thought my car didn’t have an inspection sticker, but he was mistaken. He apologized, but meanwhile I’d scraped my tires against the curb pulling over and had to get out and make sure they were okay before I resumed traveling (because that’s what I needed, a flat tire on that 30-degree incline with the hairpin turn coming out of North Adams!), and I missed some of the ebook I was listening to.
One or two additional comments: first, Albacon completely outdid itself with the Green Room food on Saturday. It really looked amazing. I say “looked amazing” because–I didn’t get any! That’s not the con’s fault. I was just too busy! At lunchtime, the Green Room had a complete sandwich and salad spread with bread, sliced meat and cheese. But I was in a panel at noon, the BU RFR at 1:00 and then off to shop for the party, and I really don’t like to eat before I’m doing an event. At dinner time, the Green Room had an incredible catered dinner buffet with several hot entrees, salads, veggie items, rolls…and desserts. OMG, the desserts! They didn’t want people to start getting food until the whole buffet was in place, and that wasn’t until 6:45. I didn’t want to eat in a rush, and I didn’t want to eat right before I was on a panel. But the hotel staff was bringing the desserts up on trays, and even though I was down in a function room, it seemed like every time I turned around, a tray of decadent desserts (cheesecake, some kind of chocolate cake and chocolate mousse) was going by. And I couldn’t have any! It was tortuous!!! Partly because of that, I ate way more of my own party food than was good for me. 🙁 Anyway, the Green Room food on Saturday was pretty impressive.
Second, the Albacon hotel. The Committee was semi-apologizing for the hotel (“It’s not a five-star hotel…”) at the “planning meeting.” But I like the hotel. It’s relatively cheap. It has free wi-fi, which is my sine qua non for a hostelry, anyway. All the rooms have a mini-fridge and a microwave. All the staff that I interacted with were friendly and helpful. The beds are very comfy and there are no bedbugs (Morven and I checked, heh). I have no complaints!
So that is my Albacon 2010 Con Report. I expect to go next year, but I’ll have to see how things go with BLUM and my personal life. So much has changed in the last 12 months, and there might be a lot more happening between now and October 2011.
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