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Back to Journal  « Sale! "Squatter's Rites" to Weird Tales | Trinoc*coN 2007 Con Report | The Year Our Brains Turn Around » 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. Filed under Carrboro Area, Con Reports, Convention, Journal, Peers & Peerless, Raleigh, Science Fiction, Trinoc-con, Vanity Smurf, Writing Life  
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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.  
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