"There is no 'H' in 'Alixtii'": WriterCon 2009 Con Report, Part I

[alixtii]

Thursday

I arrived in Minneapolis around 8 o'clock local time, and managed to get to Nicollet Mall around 9:30 or so, I suppose. I stopped by the hotel to drop off my bags, and they said the room was ready if I wanted to check in, but I decided not to. Apparently on Thursdays Nicollet Mall is filled with what I can only really describe as a farmer's market, and so I managed to fill the entire morning walking up and down the length of it. By the time I was re-treading steps I had already walked, all sorts of new stands had already been set up in the meantime.

I had a sticky bun from a stand for breakfast, but around 11:30 or so I was beginning to get hungry, thirsty, tired, and internet withdrawal-y, so I stopped at Panera for a quick lunch (Caesar salad and brocolli cheese soup, surprisingly filling) and then decided to check into the hotel after all, where I spent some time checking e-mail and otherwise inhabiting the internet, including making an "I have arrived" post, before taking a nap, since I'd been up since 4 that morning and had been up late the night before packing.

When I woke up, it was almost time for Elizabeth to arrive, so I filled my time alternating between surfing the web and taking quick walks from the hotel to the LRT and back. When she didn't show up and I began being worried, I used the information she had provided to check her flight, and saw that it had been about 45 minutes delayed. Sure enough, before too much longer the front desk called up to say that she was there.

Elizabeth and I chatted for a bit until I had to go down to New Sweden (that was what the room where the registration/vendors were was called) for volunteer orientation. spiralleds sent me back up to the con suite, where I received some brief instruction from shaddyr and then went back downstairs to New Sweden to help with registration (after getting registered myself, picking up my t-shirt, getting lei'd by sunnyd_lite, etc.). Around this time was when I met most of the concom members who were also flisters (well, as well as most of the ones who were not flisters, I guess), like nwhepcat and soundingsea.

Signing up to volunteer for the first two hours of registration sounded like a good idea when I did it (get it over with, right?), but while there was some nice conversation happening (especially the Who-related convo in the first hour) and everyone was pleasant, I was glad when I was finally free.

. . . Until I realized that this meant I had to rely on my own social skills in order to navigate the "Don't Worry, Be Happy" opening party. It was awkward at first--hell, it was awkward the whole time--but I ended up sitting with gblvr and wesleysgirl (who isn't at all the way I imagined her, lol) and other lovely people and drank a glass of Chardonnay purchased with the free drink ticket provided to me at registration.

It was at the speakeasy in the con suite that things began coming together--meeting people, getting into conversations. The con suite really was more boisterous than the meet/greet party, which meant there were plenty of conversations to get into--and some of them I did get into. I said hello for the first time in person to a bunch of people on my flist, like lunabee34, and she and hermionesviolin and kbusse had a nice conversation about various acafannish and non-acafannish subjects. Other conversations I remember having include complaining to lyrstzha how little television passes the Bechdel test in any meaningful sense. (Complaining about Supernatural in particular, of course, among all sorts of shows in general, and how quickly I would watch it if one or both of the Winchesters were female.)

Friday

I was scheduled to volunteer at hospitality from 7:30-8:30 on Friday, but I really wasn't surprised when the con suite was opened yet, since that would have required someone who wasn't me to be up at 7:30 after the exciting night we'd had the night before. So I just plopped myself down in the hall with my laptop--our room was the one directly across from the con suite--and surfed a bit until shaddyr stumbled out. We filled the coffee maker using the bathtub, ground the beans fresh, and did other stuff to get the suite ready for people stopping for a quick breakfast before opening ceremonies.

The day continued with hermionesviolin, itsabigrock, lunabee34, and I skipping opening ceremonies in order to get breakfast at Panera. This included the first of the weekend's many conversations about religion, as I explained Discordianism to Lunabee--a task that was much easier when we determined that she had actually read Robert Anton Wilson's Schrodinger Cat Trilogy (and The ILLUMINATUS! Trilogy too? I'm not sure).

The first panel was itsabigrock and hermionesviolin's (along with viciouswishes and other people I had never heard of before) panel, "Discuss! A Fannish Roundtable." The conversation was more than a little rambly, but it certainly lived up to its name and was generally fun and interesting. I'm not sure what it was that had prompted itsabigrock to say the line I'm using as a subject title for this post in front of the entire room just then, but this is when the line was uttered.

For lunch, Lunabee, Elizabeth, and I were joined by escritoireazul and others for lunch at some restaurant with tree in the title. I was slated to work the hospitality suite from 12:30 to 1:30, though, so I just had a cup of soup after which I ran off to volunteer.

After lunch was "Is Fandom Gonna Have to Choke a Bitch? Language and Gender in Fanfiction," moderated by mosca of Femslash Annual fame and including a nice discussion of genderswap by kbusse. There was a lot of focus on keeping things in-character and consistent with canon, to the point where it was beginning to sound sort of bingo card-y, so I asked about replicating the sexism and heterosexism in canon. The answer I got, alongside some "purity of the work" resistance to ethicizing aesthetics, was mostly that if we're thinking about the issue then everything's peaches and kisses, which--no.

I brought up Dollhouse as a counterexample, and I don't remember what happened next, except that I think I was interpreted as defending Joss, which wasn't really my intent. My thought process was more to question "If X, then Y," not to deny the premise of X (that criticizing Joss is kosher), but to propose an alternative, Z, to the conclusion Y. There needs to be a quasi-objective criterion for assessing the presence of social evil in a text independent of the intentions of the creator. When I had finished my second follow-up I felt really uncomfortable with myself at monopolizing the conversation, with all the gender implications that held at the primarily-female con, but no one else seemed to think it was inappropriate.

It really drove home to me, however, just how inferior panel discussions, like life, are compared to meta discussions on LJ or Dreamwidth: they're a zero-sum game. Every comment someone (like me) makes is time when someone else (possibly a queer female) can't talk, whereas in a meta discussion everyone can go on and on until everyone exhausts themselves. And one is reduced to addressing only one or two points, whereas threaded comments allows one to address any and all points that strike one as interesting. It just opens up the conversation in a way a panel can't. (Of course panels have their advantages, too; the audience is, for one, much more captive than is the case in an on-line conversation.)

And in the discussion that followed (I'm not sure with whom, although I think kindkit was there), I realized the way in which my reasoning is faulty. If I'm working on a fic and there's a moment that I'm unsure of, then I'm right in thinking that a) any feminist cred you guys might think I might have is not a get out jail free card (and there were comments made that it was hard for me not to read as saying just that)--past performance is not an indicator of future results, and b) the fact that I though about it is not sufficient to ensure I don't make the wrong choice. However, if one employs the quasi-objective criterion I mentioned above, there is a crucual difference between what I am doing and what Joss is: my audience doesn't need me to teach them about the evils of sexism. Indeed, the idea that would be my job ends up being pretty insulting to every woman in fandom. So the concern then ceases being about missing a teaching opportunity or causing real harm, and becomes about me not wanting to look stupid or be criticized. That's not coming from a feminist place.

(Actually, I do wonder who Joss thinks of Dollhouse being addressed to. I suspect his answer would be radically different than Fox's.)

Anyway, I've seen a few writeups on the 'net since the con which spoke approvingly of my question(s), so that's assuaged my guilt somewhat.

Next was the gen con. I've read a lot of people saying that they spent a lot of time defining gen, but I didn't see it that way at all. They sort of put forth fuzzy definitions (the panel seemed to agree on the "not primarily focused on" definition, which, yes, is the one I use), skipping over the many problematic cases, and then went on to talk about gen in the abstract for the next hour and a half. What's true is that a) there wasn't much if any nuts-and-bolts craft of writing discussion about how to write gen, and b) it was clear from the discussion that the definitions people in the audience were using were shifting the entire time. Gen is great because it's plotty! But of course not all gen is. Because it's like an episode! Except when it's not. And so on. Thus the post I made immediately after the panel, where I muse that given the so very different things people seem to want to get out of gen, maybe it would be more effective to talk about that? But such is the nature of genre, as I've pointed out in this journal so many numerous times I won't belabor the point again.

Elizabeth was on the phone with Ari when I got back to the phone, and I couldn't find anyone else, so I went to the Skyway for a quick McDonald's dinner. When I went to the cocktail party afterwards, I realized that had been a mistake--there was so much food.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. There was quite a bit of time to kill in the room as we prepared for the cocktail party. Now I didn't even know there was a cocktail party, or that it was a quasi-formal event for some of the guests, so I hadn't packed anything special for it. (I probably wouldn't have spent the extra money for it not knowing anything about it in advance, but luckily it was included in my scholarship.) I considered wearing one of itsabigrock's dresses, but the main appeal was I thought it might earn me a feminist cred cookie to impress the fangirls (something I was sort of desperate to do at various points in the con), and my higher brain recognized this as not a proper feminist motivation. So I went with a polo shirt I had packed (I was told in no uncertain terms I was not allowed to wear my Justice League t-shirt to the party) and a pair of white shorts. (I was wearing white shorts for most of the con, but I swear it was a different pair each day.)

And then . . . there was dancing.

This party retained some of the awkwardness of the previous night's, with the added fact that the music loud enough to make conversation awkward even when there was opportunity for it. So I danced. And danced. And danced. What else was there to do?

Elizabeth and Lunabee and executrix were all also big dancers--indeed, there was a point when everybody on the dance floor was on my flist. (Admittedly, there was about a half dozen people on the dance floor at that point.) We danced to all sorts of different music with the images of the Final Fantasy movie playing on the screen--I must have seen the same planet blow up like five different times--except when we were dancing to fanvids.

Dancing to fanvids? Is incredibly awesome. Just for the record.

Sometime during all of this I got to meet spikendru in person, who a) beta-ed my novella, and b) I knew before I knew any of the rest of you fannish people on my flist--back before I was even on FF.net, I was on the City of Angel discussion boards, discussing season 5. (The joy of always using the same screen name!)

Towards midnight, sunnyd_lite gave me another free drink ticket as a reward for dancing all night, so I used it to get myself another glass of Chardonnay. Then I danced some more--the bar closed at midnight, but the dance party went on until 1am.

Then I changed into my pyjamas and headed to the con suite, where a Firefly drinking game was being held. We watched "Heart of Gold" (I only caught the very end), "Jaynestown," and (my favorite) "Our Mrs. Reynolds." My drink was a dacquiri of some type (did I spell that right?). Then I drank half of itsabigrock's screwdriver and the two of us made our way to bed.

Comments

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

I have read both RAW (heee acronyms) series. And the second you mentioned that book I was all, "Oh. Right. I remember now."

I hear you on the joy of using the same screen name always. All these people with the shifting identities; it gets so confusing. :)

It was really wonderful to meet you in person. And we are a dancing flist. LOL

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

We are a dancing flist, indeed!

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

There is some sort of typo that seems to be saying you think your job is to insult every woman in fandom. I doubt that is what you intended.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Fixed--I hope--thank you. Yeah, that did alter my meaning somewhat; it pushed the better part of a rather meta-y into the html where it was hidden from sight.

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Well it gave me an amusing moment trying to work out just how one would go about insulting every woman in fandom. Once you have stepped beyond the simplistic 'every woman in fandom sucks' it would not be a trivial task.

past performance is not an indicator of future results

I think most people run their judgements on the assumption that it is. Logically, you may screw up, but realistically you are less likely to.

I remember when I was betaing Camp Camelot for you, there was a bit where I stopped and wondered if it was a tad sexist. But then I reasoned, no, it was written by you and you know a lot more about it than me so it would probably be all right. But then if it hadn't been written by you the possibility of sexism would never have entered my head - it was only at the forefront because I associate you with the topic in my mind. I hope I was right and nobody has objected to that passage since.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Well, I think it would make more sense for others to take past performance as an indicator of future success than the one doing the performing, if that makes sense? If someone has three gold medals, it makes sense they're going to place; but if the athlete assumes she'll place by virtue of the gold medals instead of working at it, she'll probably fail. Especially since the model I use is that avoiding sexism is something which requires constant vigilance, especially for persons of privilege--and one of the reasons I use that model is because it fits with my experience.

(For example, in my most recent SCC fic, the m/f/f threesome with the male POV character, my beta anonymous_sibyl noticed the way that the het male fantasy-ishness of the fic was depriving it of certain moments of characterization, and helped me to find ways to make the het male fantasy work while still having all three characters be fully realized persons with autonomy and individuality and motivation.)

Now I'm sort of curious what it was in that fic you noticed! (Thinking about that fic brings up even more thoughts about the relationship between the sexism of a character and its relation to that of an author--Merlin's foibles are supposed to be a reflection of mine own, and in a self-aware sort of way--but I can't quite articulate them all. But a lot of it comes down to whether one can reasonably expect one's intended audience to recognize sexism for what it is or not.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Well, I think it would make more sense for others to take past performance as an indicator of future success than the one doing the performing, if that makes sense? If someone has three gold medals, it makes sense they're going to place; but if the athlete assumes she'll place by virtue of the gold medals instead of working at it, she'll probably fail. Especially since the model I use is that avoiding sexism is something which requires constant vigilance, especially for persons of privilege--and one of the reasons I use that model is because it fits with my experience.
That makes sense. The athlete probably isn't a direct analogy because self-confidence can be a help to an athlete whereas in examining your own privilege it is presumably an active disadvantage.

Now I'm sort of curious what it was in that fic you noticed!

Oh , it was mostly just the whole notion of putting sexual pressure on the girls to strip off, which is possibly more of a pressure for women than men. If it had been written by anyone other than you I wouldn't even have thought of it as being possibly sexist, I'd just have dismissed it with a shrug as Your Kink is Not My Kink But That's OK.

But a lot of it comes down to whether one can reasonably expect one's intended audience to recognize sexism for what it is or not.

Maybe you could try to approach it the same way I deal with historical detail - I try to put in enough detail that anyone with no knowledge at all can understand it, and then have extra layers of entertainment and meaning for those who know their hawks from their hernshaws.

[soundingsea.livejournal.com]

I was not allowed to wear my Justice League t-shirt to the party

Wait... why not? :)

Complaining about Supernatural in particular, of course, among all sorts of shows in general, and how quickly I would watch it if one or both of the Winchesters were female.

musesfool writes some delicious girl!Sam AU Wincest. Scratches that itch for me nicely. :)

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

It wasn't fancy enough? IDK.

Oh believe me, I've read all the Winsister fic I can find--and I think everyone agrees musesfool's is the best. Never seen an episode of the show, though, nor do I feel any desire to.

[harmonyfb.livejournal.com]

In the future, please feel free to wear whatever you'd like to the cocktail party. We have no dress code. (Well, ok - other than those enshrined as local public indency laws.) :)

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Oh, I knew very much that we were merely talking about the prejudices of my roommate. OTOH, the prejudices of my roommate had to be respected--I'm vulnerable when I'm unconscious.

[wisdomeagle]

Elizabeth was on the phone with Ari when I got back to the [room]

And at many, many other times during the con. Even though we didn't talk during any of the actual con programming, I kinda feel like I was there.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I just mentioned it (and will probably mention the on Sunday) because it was relevant to what I was doing.

It was great having that connection!

[harmonyfb.livejournal.com]

Every comment someone (like me) makes is time when someone else (possibly a queer female) can't talk, whereas in a meta discussion everyone can go on and on until everyone exhausts themselves.

Perhaps in the future we can discuss the relative merits and benefits of online versus meatspace communication (in a panel. At the con. And, possibly, on a threaded discussion in the Writercon LJ. Oooo, meta.)