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 (just the) "Con Reports" Entries WisCon 2008: Best Mistake Evar! May 31, 2008 So WisCon was probably a mistake, healthwise. I was beat even before my reading Friday night, and compromised my immune system so quickly and thoroughly that I caught a bug probably from the first hands I  The Clarion 2006 partial reunion. Photo courtesy of Vince, who has a larger version (and his own blog about WisCon) here  Alex does his, um, reading? as JoSelle looks on in horror.  Is Will testing the camera? Or is the camera testing Will?  This made me sad. And I don't think I made a fool of myself too often throughout the rest of the con, though I don't think I've ever felt so self-conscious as I debated with each interaction: do I bring up the brain injury and risk looking like a sympathy whore or do I let this person walk away assuming I'm just a flaky dumbass? Tried both. Felt like a tool either way. Gonna sign me up for next year and see what WisCon's like coherent. And it'd be nice to actually go to more panels, readings, and parties than I reluctantly miss out on. *Watched Recount. Brilliant performances, except for the cringeworthy Gore and Bush impersonators. Overall, allowed me to relive that unique visceral disheartenment of 2000. So... thanks, HBO!
 Trinoc*coN 2007 Con Report September 27, 2007 I must say: being a guest is a lot easier than being an attendee. Sure, I've enjoyed previous conventions. I've learned a lot, gotten full value for my entertainment dollar. But I've usually felt little more than a witness, a consumer at these things--or worse, the guy at the party who doesn't know anybody else, and who can't help wondering... if he doesn't belong here, among people who share his interests and passions, then does he belong anywhere at all? And of course (I say this as if I'd always known it) the interaction is the best thing about a convention, even (especially?) for an introvert like me. And I'm not just talking about schmoozing with peers and peerless. Especially at this stage in my career, I have more in common with the casual attendee than with any professional. But here too, the guest badge acts as my icebreaker, my introduction to anybody and everybody (fan, pro, furry). It doesn't mean I know the guy who's throwing the party or anything, but it means somebody in one of the bedrooms might have vouched for me. And for introverts at parties, we need all the validation we can get. So... great meeting the other writers and attendees (see my panel schedule for most of the namedropping I'm expected to do), along with some of my fellow Codex members (Alethea Kontis, Edmund Schubert, and Gray Reinhardt) who I'd only known online, Gravy Boy writer Marty Blevins (who I'd met on an online comics forum), Luna and Andreas Black who I knew through mutual friends Jason Erik Lundberg and Janet Chui, and of course the active fans putting the con together in the first place.  Gray, Stephanie, Edmund, James, Ada, and Alex. (Alethea's holding the camera, obviously.) On my first panel, the conversation never let up. I talked a bit toward the top, and later watched for the pauses to interject my thoughts. When they didn't come, I shrugged and listened as the conversation went into different directions. It was very liberating. On the second panel, I got enough small laughs from the room that I figured out what I had to offer on a panel of my betters. By the fourth (and last), I realized that the most challenging--and satisfying--part of being on a panel is setting up one of the other panelists with a punchline or otherwise brilliant spike. Thankfully, I only had one or two times when I opened my mouth on a panel and had no idea where my sentence was supposed to end, though I'm sure I made an ass of myself more often than I remember. So yeah. I'd do that again. But I think this means I won't actively pursue attending too many other conventions until I've got the credentials to attend them as panelist. The icebreaker is more valuable to me than how I get there.  Alex Wilson, George R R Martin, Scott Nicholson, and Alexandra Sokoloff. The easy-to-understand reason is Clarion. Though it's semi-tradition that a student might do little to no writing in the year following the workshop, for me the thing I've dreaded is writing/talking _about_ writing. Which also makes the blog difficult, by the way. So being a guest at a con for the first time exactly a year after my Clarion graduation, talking about writing for three days straight... that was kind of all I had in me. Doing a meta-essay on the meta-discussion was unthinkable. But I think the bigger reason is how I haven't been able to wrap my head around how Jamie Bishop's absence from the con was so difficult for me. FWIW, it still doesn't make total sense, so if the remainder of this entry is confusing, it's not you; I mean: I get that I'm sad over the loss of a friend. I get that he was a regular Trinoc-coN attendee and a number of the guests and other attendees knew him primarily or exclusively through the con, enough so that our mutual friend Jason wrote a nice remembrance in the program. And I get that when someone dies it's a different kind of missing than when someone lives on the other side of the world now (Jason and Janet were about the only two people I knew/met the only other time I've been to Trinoc-coN, and they now live in Singapore, an absence felt in a different--but no less real--way). But... there's no sense of place to connect Jamie there. To my knowledge, the convention hasn't been held at this particular hotel before, so the echo of his presence seems artificially removed, like I'm visiting a replica of his apartment (which, by the way, I kind of have. We have friends who've lived at and invited us many times to Jamie's old apartment complex, and the apartment layouts are identical). And more significantly, I was never at Trinoc-coN or with any of these people who also knew him at the same time he was, so his association in my mind with the convention comes almost exclusively from our numerous conversations about it, all the way back in Carrboro. It was Jamie who encouraged me to first contact the con/ask to be a guest, successfully convincing me that (even before any significant writing sales) I might have something to offer on a panel or two. Which--on top of the other confusion--feels like a very selfish way to remember a friend. So I'm still processing that part of it. Eh. This turned out to be quite vague and introspective for a con-report. Ah well. That's what I get for putting it off for two months. I'll try to do better next year, if they'll have me. Thanks again to Alethea for being smart enough to actually pull out her camera (and for letting me post her pix). My camera was quite unhelpful in my pocket all weekend.
Context XIV Con Report October 11, 2001 (Selected republication of old entries from the pre-Movable Type journal...) My trip to Context XIV in Columbus last Saturday was an excellent abbreviation of my greater writing life: frustration. Like the overwhelming daily, monthly, and quarterly goals I set for myself, I somehow overestimated how much I could do in 24 hours. On top of the actual convention, I had three groups of friends I tried to spend time with while I was in the area. And I felt I shorted the time with each group, as well as my time at the convention. So let's get to it. I was getting over a head-cold by Saturday. I was still congested, but feeling much better. I figure if it kept me from speaking, then so much the better--I would just be able to listen more. I left just after eight o'clock in the morning and got there around 10:30 by underestimating construction, which meant I missed most of the "Farewell Golden Age" panel which sounded good in pre-con planning. So I looked at the art show for a bit, where I saw some familiar images. Not surprising that Millenicon and Context have a lot of overlap as far as attendees and guests. The seller's area was about as unimpressive as it gets. Small, but a lot of libertarian stuff. I know MarCon, which I hear is a big Heinlein-fest, is also based in Columbus, so maybe there's some carry-over there as well. (Yeah, look at me. My second con and already I'm an expert on the Midwest SF community.)
Continue reading "Context XIV Con Report" Filed Under: Con Reports, Journal Millenicon '01: My First Con Report (pt 2 of 2) March 27, 2001 (Selected republication of old entries from the pre-Movable Type journal...) Toby and I got back to the hotel and threw our bags in the room. We had a bed and and a pull-out sofa-bed, which, we quickly discovered, was so broken that I probably would've fallen right through it if I hadn't looked before sitting on it. The springs and canvas were busted and torn all over. I called to have a cot or a replacement sofa so we wouldn't have to deal with it when we returned.
So then Toby and I went to the CFG (Cincinatti Fan Group?) suite, where Mike Resnick kept forgetting my name, but was nice enough to ask and introduce me to most new people who arrived throughout the next few hours. Everyone was nice enough, and some members of the group kept offering brownies and showing off photographs. The stories Resnick told were familiar to me (again, having read his essays), but it was a great experience hearing them first-hand, by an author as down-to-earth and (dare-I-say-it) human as the rest of us. The evening was basically a nice, relaxing evening talking with a very intelligent group of people.
Continue reading "Millenicon '01: My First Con Report (pt 2 of 2)" Filed Under: Con Reports, Journal, Vanity Smurf Millenicon '01: My First Con Report (pt 1 of 2) March 26, 2001 (Selected republication of old entries from the pre-Movable Type journal...) I took a day off work on Friday and drove down to Ashland University in Ashland, OH in the morning, seeing a bunch of old friends and professors and collecting some addresses for my upcoming wedding guest list. At lunch with my friend and groomsman Adam, our waitress left half-way and was replaced by another, who apologized when she left the bill. "I'm sorry we had to switch on you," she said. "Your first waitress had to go home sick." Adam and I looked at each other. That's comforting. "Yeah," the waitress went on, "she has some sort of 46-week virus." "You mean hours?" "Nope 46-weeks. Can you believe it? Her doctor told her it'd be 46 weeks before it ran its course. Damn shame." Hmm.
My fiance met me in Ashland and together we drove to Dayton, OH where another friend of ours is a med student at Wright State. We spend the night there and in the morning I headed out alone to my first convention ever in King's Island, OH (just North of Cincinatti).
Continue reading "Millenicon '01: My First Con Report (pt 1 of 2)" Filed Under: Con Reports, Journal, Vanity Smurf |
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Alex Wilson writes fiction and comics in Carrboro, NC. His work has appeared/will appear in Asimov's Science Fiction, The Rambler, Weird Tales, The Florida Review, Futurismic, Shimmer, ChiZine, FutureQuake, Pif, and Dragon. Locus Magazine has called him a "promising new writer," and Publishers Weekly also has nice things to say. Alex runs the audiobook project/podcast Telltale Weekly and the writer wiki Guidevines. He publishes the minicomic/zine Inconsequential Art. He is a 2006 Clarion graduate. Blog Archives 2008 - Clever Label TBA 2007 - BadYearNoCookie 2006 - Clarion! 1st Pro Sale! 2005 - Peers and Peerless 2004 - Telltale Launch 2003 - Dog bites, acting out 2002 - In my mind, I'm going... 2001 - Marriage, Macs, 1st Cons 2000 - Setback, Milestones 1999 - Engaged, Graduated 1998 - Creative Independence    Powered by MT 3.35 MySpace Profile Technorati Profile |
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