Category Archives: General Blogging

Hello, WisCon!

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

So, today we leave for Madison, one day earlier than planned. We won’t necessarily be at the Concourse before tomorrow… that depends on how we feel after a day of traveling, following closely on the heels of a day of panicky, last minute packing and preparations.

If you’re going to be at the Con and you want to say hi and/or hang out, here’s what you need to know:

  1. Because I have a high degree of face blindness myself, I have a habit of making myself recognizable, especially at the con. My trademark rainbow fringe is actually a style I adopted specifically for WisCon two years ago. Depending on when you see me, I might have black hair with rainbow bangs or full-on rainbow hair. I won’t necessarily be the only person with rainbow hair, but the combination of rainbow hair, a floppy black hat, and a floor-length skirt are pretty distinctive.
  2. A thing I hear from people quite often is “I wanted to say hi, but you looked tired/sad/lost in thought.” I assure you, that is just my face. I mean, I might be tired. I have a chronic fatigue condition so I’m often tired. But if I let that stop me from having a good time, I would never have one. I am not the most social person in the world, but once a year I fly hundreds of miles and spend hundreds of dollars to meet people and be social. Help me get my money’s worth!
  3. The face blindness thing is real. If you do come up to say hi, please introduce yourself and please tell me if we’ve met before. I mean whether or not we have. Like, “Hi, my name is Connie Wisconsinconson. We’ve never met, but I wanted to say hi.” The reason I ask this is because if someone comes up and says hi to me, in most contexts this means we know each other and ordinary social norms require me to pretend I recognize them while I silently try to figure out who the heck they are. At con, I’m more likely to say fudge it and explain that I don’t recognize faces, because people are more likely to understand it.
  4. Name tags make things easier, but understand that even if I see you multiple times during a day, I will probably be scoping your tag each and every time. So far WisCon is the one place where I’ve had to do this that no one has been noticeably offended by it, but just letting you know.
  5. I am jumpy when touched unexpectedly. I do enjoy hugs, with sufficient warning.

And that’s about it. I am on a boatload of panels and my boyfriend Jack is also on panels for the first time and I’d like to support him when I am able to do so, so my schedule is not going to be terribly flexible, but seriously, if you want to say hi, say hi.

UPDATE: WisCon and more.

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Okay, big whoops, caught at what was almost the last possible moment where it could still be fixed, but still caught: when I booked our flights for WisCon, I put in the wrong date. We were planning on getting there Thursday the 21st, but I selected Wednesday the 20th. As in, tomorrow.

I guess that explains why the cost was unexpectedly reasonable for ~1 month in advance… it was that much farther away from the weekend.

At this point, it was impossible to change the tickets at anything like a reasonable cost, so the “fix” means just going with it and getting into Madison a day early. Sadly, the con hotel is fully booked for Wednesday, so they could only put us on a waiting list with no promises. Plan A was to stay on the waiting list while seeing if any of the people we know who are local to Madison could give us crash space.

After reflection, though, I decided that trying to find trans-friendly accommodations (preferably with someone we know) on 24 hours notice as a hedge against the wait list not coming through wasn’t a great idea, especially as everybody we know in the Madison area is going to be busy and/or already hosting guests for the con. The real kicker is the short notice thing… travel is already stressful, and we’re going to be doing it with 24 hours less lead time than we had been counting on.

So I bit the bullet and reserved us a room for one night at the hotel around the corner, the Inn on the Park. I know where it is, I’ve seen the inside, I know the logistics of getting luggage from there to the Concourse on foot, it’s in the one part of town that we know.

An extra night in a hotel plus another day of eating out will put a bit of a dent in our budget, but I think it’ll be worth it to not have to worry about logistics and uncertainty when we land. We can just shuttle from the airport more or less like normal, probably have a quiet night in, and be at WisCon central brighter, earlier, and more fresh-faced than we’d planned.

This change is going to have a pretty huge impact on my work week, though… as you might have imagined, I’ve spent the whole afternoon since I learned of my error running around trying to get trip preparations done. Between that and the fact that we’re leaving tomorrow… I don’t know what’s going to happen with Tales of MU this week. Part of it depends on how much quality writing I’m able to do with the rest of this afternoon, after having run around like a chicken with its head cut off.

I will do my best to keep you all posted.

Getting a hold of me and such

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Okay, I have now had two variations of people leaving messages in comments with instructions not to unscreen them. The first one left me scratching my head. By the second one, I put it together: there’s a lot of new folks coming across me for the first time on this blog, and I don’t have contact info anywhere.

If you want to talk to me off blog, my email address is contactme -at- alexandraerin -dot- com. I’ll stick that in the sidebar or something in a bit.

Just to give some background on things I’ve been asked:

  • As most of my work is self-published, I don’t really have any industry entanglements or connections. There are people in the industry I am friendly with, and people in the industry with whom I deeply disagree about one or more fundamental things.
  • The Venn diagram of those two groups of people has a lot of overlap.
  • Because we’re grown-ups.
  • I have never been to (or been a member of) WorldCon.
  • The only con I attend with any regularity is WisCon, in Madison.
  • Despite some hilarious rumors that circulated last year, nobody actually pays me to go there.
  • I will be there this year.
  • Barring extravagant and totally unforeseeable changes in circumstances, it will be the only con I attend this year, and likely next.
  • You aren’t missing out on much. As public speakers go, I make a heck of a decent writer.
  • I will do interviews, but I have a distinct preference for text-based communication as opposed to phone, because see above.

If you’ve discovered me through my satirical writing on the puppygator nonsense and you want to see more of what I’m about, I would suggest starting with any of these three places:

It is not precisely my work, of course, but earlier this year I was also allowed to re-post a poem that had a lot of early Rhysling buzz but had fallen into obscurity: the seminal work “Title” by Author. My ongoing correspondence with this elusive poet has yielded dividends in the form of two another repost, “The Epistle of Thistles“, and the never-before-published “Apply For And Receive A Low, Low APR“. The great poet has promised me another poem for every one of mine that appears in an external venue. I currently have two upcoming poems, so we can count on at least two more treasures from Author’s hoard before the year is out.

 

My WisCon Schedule

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Getting caught up on stuff now that I have a bit more energy. I am on five panels at WisCon this year. This is the first time I’ve done that since… the first time I was on five panels and immediately vowed never again. But that was also the year I mixed up my pills and took my sleeping pills on Sunday morning. I’m told I killed on my Sunday panels, but I don’t remember much about them.

I kick things off right off the bat on Friday at 4:00 with How Much Do I Worry About My Own Canon? My short take on this is: the past is pilot. I can’t think of a single great work of serial fiction in any media that didn’t benefit from ignoring/re-imagining/re-working something that was established early on rather than allowing themselves to be painted into a corner.

Saturday I have back to back panels at 1:00 and 2:30, on Feminism, Ethics, and BDSM and Dysphoria Is Not Magic… someone had the bright idea to make me the moderator of the second one.

Sunday at 10:00 a.m. I’m on a panel about Call-Out Culture that is a follow-up to a panel at last year’s WisCon that I don’t believe I was on, but someone suggested I join this one.

And then at 11:30 at night, I’m on a panel called What Kind of a World Do We Trans People Want? I know this is going to be a late one and people might be crashing and/or partying, but my boyfriend Jack is also on this panel, so if you want to see us together, there’s that.

My mother read to me

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

“Why do you write?” is a question that most authors who find themselves famous enough will eventually face in an interview. I don’t anticipate that happening, but as luck would have it, it’s Mother’s Day, and that means I can give my answer anyway.

Most authors whose answer to this question get quoted enough for you to have read them have something clever to say. Isaac Asimov, for instance, said he wrote for the same reason he breathed: because if he stopped, he would die. This was not only pithy, but also had the virtue of being true in the inverse case, so far as anyone has noticed.

I don’t have a clever answer.

If you were to ask me why I write, I would ask you to clarify what you meant by “why”. It’s a slippery word, and I don’t trust it. We squeeze out of these three letters and one syllable more uses than a Hobbit can cram into “Good morning.” Do you mean for what purpose do I write? Or do you mean what is my motivation for writing? Or do you mean what is the reason that I write the things that I do and not other things? Or do you mean what proximate cause impels me to write in the moment?

In the very unlikely event that you were still interested in my answer, and the further unlikely event that you clarified that what you meant was the ultimate root cause of my condition of being a writer, I would tell you this:

My mother read to me.

When I was very young, she read to me and my siblings The Chronicles of Narnia (in the proper narrative order, thank you very much), and The Hobbit, and the Wrinkle in Time series, and other things, including the works of Mark Twain.

I was very young when all this started, young enough that I was not aware I had an age. I said “siblings” up there mostly out of force of habit as I’ve had decades to get used to being one out of four. It was just my older brother and myself at the beginning. As the younger one, I had the privilege of going along for the ride. There were frequent stops to define words and explain things that were unfamiliar to us.

I’m grateful for this experience for many reasons. It meant that I could greet a large number of the books I encountered throughout my schooling as old friends. Having heard A Wind in the Door meant that when I was diagnosed with a mitochondrial disorder before I was midway through elementary school, I had a frame of reference for what would otherwise have been incomprehensible and thus terrifying. It means I get an additional layer of nostalgia when I put on an audiobook of one of my childhood favorites.

And I am dead certain that it is the ultimate reason I am a writer today.

Oh, there were steps along the way. I doubt I would have become a writer if I hadn’t gotten into D&D and other roleplaying games, which I wouldn’t have gotten into without comic books. My interest in writing also spun out of my interest in computer game development, which came out of video games. There was a certain amount of tagging along after my older brother in those things, naturally.

I think he probably retained more of those early story  times than I did, having been older at the time, but I daresay they were more of a foundational experience for me, having been younger at the time. Because of my mother, I grew up speaking fantasy as a first tongue. I walked in what ifs almost from my first steps. My world has been a multiverse for as long as I have known it.

Today, I thank my mother not just for giving me life, but giving me lives, and a shining multitude of worlds to spin them in. It is because of you, Mom, that I look deeper, go further, and ask what if?

Happy Mother’s Day.

 

Mythic Delirium Press Presents CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 5 – And You Can Help

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Mythic Delirium Press is doing a Kickstarter to fund the next edition of their amazing genre-blending Clockwork Phoenix anthology series. You can help them to produce it and pay their contributors while reserving your copy and/or buying another Mythic Delirium title.

Perks at the higher levels include signed, limited edition chapbooks by a number of authors, including the wicked and wise Catherynne M. Valente, writer of most of my favorite words in most of my favorite orders. Her books that I’ve mentioned include Palimpsest, Deathless, and The Orphan’s Tales Book 1 and Book 2. She has also contributed a poem to Angels of the Meanwhile, being a friend and something of a mentor and inspiration to Lizbet, as Lizbet has been to me.

Whether you’re a fan of Cat in particular or just awesome fiction, and whether you’re interested in scoring some great ebooks on the cheap or picking up a rare keepsake of a favored author, this project is well worth your support. The chapbook perks don’t come cheap, but they include the previous perk levels plus the tangible, readable collector’s item.

Blog Rerun: Time Enough At Last

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

This is a blog post I wrote on my DW/LJ blog, a little more than a year ago:

“Time Enough At Last”, starring Burgess Meredith as a book-loving bank teller who misses the apocalypse, is one of the most famous episodes of the Twilight Zone. It’s one of the ones—along with the one about the thing on the plane—that even people who’ve never seen an entire episode are likely to know about, and it didn’t even star William Shatner or get re-made for the movie.

But it’s one that some people find puzzling in a way that leaves them either vaguely uncomfortable or with a sense that the story is ultimately lacking in the sort of philosophical underpinnings that make the Twilight Zone more than just a schlock anthology.

Submitted for your approval: Meredith’s Thurber-esque character of Henry Bemis is exactly the sort of put-upon protagonist that in another episode might find himself vindicated or rewarded by the twist of fate. The idea that his “bad habit” of hiding away during his lunch hour to read both saved his life and freed him from all obligation to a society that had no use for a dreamer is sufficient premise for an episode of TZ all in and of itself.

The twist where he breaks his glasses (oh, by the way: spoiler warning) and can no longer read his beloved books is the sort of fate that would normally be reserved for someone who actually conspired to bring about the end of the world just to get away from everyone.

It’s the kind of cosmic punishment we expect to be doled out by the Twilight Zone, but that raises the question: what’s Henry Bemis being punished for?

Stuck for a moral, a lot of reviewers pick up on Bemis’s own words on the subject: “That’s not fair,” he tells us. “That’s not fair at all.”

Life is not fair. The universe is not fair. But that’s a little bit pat, and I think it also misses the mark. I think to get the actual message, we have to set aside the bit about the unfairness of life as a given and focus on the rest of his words as the central theme about how life is unfair in this case.

“That’s not fair,” he says. “That’s not fair at all. There was time now… there was all the time I needed. That’s not fair.”

It’s not “not fair” that he broke his glasses. It’s not fair that he broke his glasses now, now that there was time. This is not a trivial distinction. The sentiment is referred to in the title of the episode, after all.

And that’s the lesson: time makes a mockery of us all.

We know that nothing in this life can last forever—least of all this life—but we put things off for later. When? Later… y’know, when there will be more time for it. But the future by definition never holds more time for us, only less.

How much less?

We don’t know.

We never know.

And the thing of it is, even if we learn the lesson and take it to heart, we can’t avoid time’s trap. There are times when you have to make the gamble that the future will hold time enough, because even though you don’t know if it will or not, you know that the present doesn’t. No matter how many days you seize there will be plans that have to be put off and dreams that have to be deferred and processes that take time, no matter how slow and painful they may be.

All we really can do is weigh the time that we have, not knowing how much we have but knowing that it can’t be infinite, and make the best decisions we can about how to spend it.

When I wrote this, I was thinking about all the things in my life that I had put off or put on hold over what was basically the preceding decade, but especially the five years leading up to my move. That kind of thing is a hard habit to break. I’m posting this again because I felt the need to re-read it today, as a sort of motivational booster shot.

I was surprised to see that I wrote it in April of last year. In my head, I’d written this post in response to Dorian’s death in September, since was the time when I most acutely felt how much time had passed me by while I was basically marking time. But here I was, making that same observation almost half a year before.

Like I said: it’s a hard habit to break.