Notes From WorldCon: Everything’s Up To Date in the Westin at Crown Center

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

I was avoiding saying directly which hotel I was in before and to a large extent during the con because there have been issues, but Jack and I had a very nice time in the Westin at Crown Center. We had been booked into the aging but beautiful Hotel Phillips, which is apparently undergoing extensive renovations and had to shunt a certain number of its guests to another location.

We were little dismayed to be notified of this change a bare two weeks before the convention, particularly as this put us quite a bit farther away and we weren’t sure about the logistics of getting back and forth. Even more dismaying: we were CCed (not BCCed) on an email with the information with several other congoers. I consider this to be a breach of my privacy and security, especially as there have been issues with people and boundaries in the past.

All that said, we found reasons to be excited about the new hotel. It’s connected by a covered elevated walkway to Kansas City’s Union Station, a historical architectural jewel that serves as museum space and a shopping center. I had some fond memories of a little cafe in there that I hoped to revisit (and we did!). I’d also spent a long weekend in the hotel at the other end of Crown Center around my freshman year of college (either the summer before or the summer after, I don’t recall). In the event that the convention wound up being a bust (and I had some pessimistic moments in the week or so leading up to it), there would be plenty to occupy us without leaving the area around our hotel, including a neat aquarium.

As it happened, the convention wasn’t a bust and the Kansas City Streetcar was even more convenient than advertised. Except during the times of highest crowd density, it vastly outperformed the listed frequency, and at the peak on the weekends, it still mostly hit the mark. There were three operators we saw regularly. All were personable in their own ways. One of them regularly announced that all Pokemon caught on the streetcar were to be returned at the end of the trip. A couple of them would chat about the convention. One of them saw Jack’s pins on his badge holder and gave him a KC Streetcar souvenir pin. This same one also had previously heard of me.

And the Westin… the Westin really took care of us. I am not happy at all about how Hotel Phillips treated us, but I have no complaints about the Westin. It’s a beautiful hotel. They have an indoor waterfall with elaborate landscaping around it. The lobby is spacious and full of comfortable chairs and screens that I think must have also served as acoustic baffles because it never got that echoey loudness. The people were super polite and very apologetic even about the inconveniences they had not created. We even found some lovely extras waiting in our hotel room when we arrived.

At six in the morning of the day of our departure, I went downstairs because I had this nightmare scenario in my head wherein Phillips’ ball-dropping had extended to not including the con rate in their contract with Westin and I just wanted to make sure that we wouldn’t run into a snag when it was time to go. It happens that while I was on my way down, an automated email with our invoice was sent to me anyway. But Lynette on the desk did not mind answering my questions, and when I told her how grateful we were for everything, she asked me if I was going to be around long enough for breakfast and then gave me a voucher for a free buffet for the two of us.

With the Streetcar in operation, the only downside to the distance of the hotel is that it made it harder to do things like catch a nap in the afternoon without missing significant portions of the festivities, but I have to say, if MidAmeriCon 2 were to become a regular event and we were to regularly attend it, I think we would strongly consider the option of staying in the Westin if it were proffered, and we would recommend it to everybody who was looking for a quiet place to retreat to at the end of the evening, a place where the convention and the parties can be left behind.

Yes, if MAC2 continues to throw conventions in the same venue, I think they could do a lot worse than pursuing an ongoing relationship with the Westin and promoting it to their members as the “quiet hotel”.

We might have other reasons to visit Kansas City in the future (family, renfair), and when our budget can handle a real hotel, we’ll certainly be keeping it in mind.

 

Notes From WorldCon: How Zoë Quinn Healed My Soul

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Often when I say critical things about Gamergate—or more particularly, about Gamergate’s roots and the conduct of the man who whipped up the initial harassment squad that became Gamergate’s core—I will get a gator in my mentions sidling up to say something like, “Oh, and of course you think that Zoë Quinn is a perfect darling little angel who could do no wrong.”

I don’t know what Zoë Quinn’s faults are, but I’m quite sure that she has them.

I’ve certainly never asked her for her side of the story told by her abusive ex, never bothered to see if she’s told it anywhere. It doesn’t interest me.

I’ve read his side, though, and even if I take everything presented as fact (i.e., just the events, not the editorial asides designed to whip up or channel abuse), the picture he paints of the character of Zoë Quinn as she exists in his story is just a relatively young, somewhat naïve woman who overpromised in a relationship that she wasn’t prepared for, someone who had these ideas and ideals about how things were supposed to be and who ultimately couldn’t live up to them.

The result, in his story, is a bad relationship that ended badly, and sheesh, could I feel him on that, if that were the story he’d wanted to tell.

But nothing in his post justifies his post, or the way he promoted it and the people he promoted it to. Nothing in his side of the story makes him look good, or even like a victim, only someone interested in portraying himself as one.

I was aware that Zoë might be present for at least part of WorldCon. I didn’t think it was likely I’d see her, or that it would be appropriate for a stranger or virtual stranger from the internet to get too invested in finding her, given her recent history, so I didn’t really put her on my “Would Like To Meet” list.

I was never that interested in her as an internet personality until very recently, when I wound up following a twitter handle she uses without initially realizing it was her. I think that was the turning point because it was the first time I was able to see her for herself, and not a character in a drama written by someone else. The ~*controversial figure*~ of Zoë Quinn was based on a real person, but I never assumed it had much to do with her.

The character in the original post is unflattering to say the least; the version of that character in the ongoing spin-off series created by Gamergate is a cartoonish caricature worthy of a political cartoon. The handle I followed on Twitter belonged to a person who said things that were interesting, clever, and funny, to varying degrees. We had some overlapping interests and some similar riffs on topics. I didn’t assume we’d have much in common beyond that.

But when I unexpectedly found myself at a party in a single crowded medium-sized where I knew she was likely to be, I found myself looking for her all the same. Simple human curiosity. The weird thing was I realized I had no idea what she looked like. I mean, that’s not that weird for me. I am not a strong visual thinker and I have medium to severe prosopagnosia. I check the license plate on my parents’ car before getting in because for much of my life, I was more likely to recognize it than them.

I think of people’s appearances in words. I store the words and use them to recreate a rubric for recognizing them in person. But I had no idea what Zoë Quinn looked like, even in words. All the words I found when I tried to call anything about her to mind were from the caricatures, from the stories people told. As it happened, they were no help in spotting her when she was physically present in the room.

Then someone who had bumped into her told me: she’s dressed as a unicorn. Well, not really like a unicorn, but unicorn-like. A unicorn themed aesthetic. Like a unicorn in human form who was still recognizably a unicorn, and also carrying several unicorn-themed accessories.

It was the shoes I spotted. If you’ve seen them, or heard of them, you’ll understand.

I will confess that in all my own human failings, I have wondered how much of the caricature is based on reality. Five seconds after I spotted the shoes, I was pretty sure the answer was 0.

First: she looked amazing.

I want to be clear here that the verb “to look” in the sentence “She looked amazing.” Is not being used as a mere passive linking verb describing her passive appearance. She did a look, and the look was amazing. She—Zoë Quinn—executed a look in an amazing fashion. That’s what I say when I mean she looked amazing.

Sometimes men who have been chastised for objectifying women and/or who aren’t fond of women getting affirmation from sources they cannot control try to draw a parallel between women complimenting each other on our looks (in an all-encompassing sense of aesthetics and fashion choices) and them commenting on our looks in the sense of “On a scale of 1 to 10…” It’s not the same thing. It’s not even close to the same thing, which I think is why my boyfriend Jack says things like “Congratulations on your life and your choices!” so often after complimenting someone, just to make sure they know where he’s falling.

But while you don’t have to be a woman to compliment a woman’s choices, there’s something magical that happens when women and femmes of all stripes compliment each other. It’s a wonderful thing that I really only discovered after I started going to cons and started getting over my shyness at them.

We spoke with each other for maybe a minute, mostly about looks. Our looks for the evening were very different. Hers was ethereal unicorn princess. Mine was… I’m not sure. Dangerous clown? I don’t know what vibe my looks put out, but I’m very particular about assembling them, particularly at cons. I’m not going for “Girl version of Kefka from Final Fantasy VI at a literary convention”, but I think I land somewhere near there. If I could put them into words, I probably wouldn’t need to use looks to get the point across. All I can say is that it’s been refined over the years, and I’m getting pretty good at it.

The main thing we talked about was each other’s hair. She told me how she had come to start coloring it, in quick and general terms, and how it now feels real, feels her, to do so. Making her outside match her inside, making her body represent itself, making it represent not just herself but her_self.

And we were actually on our way to the door when I spotted her, so we didn’t really dig into this, but I think I got it. And it provided an interesting contrast to the caricature that both of our overlapping groups of detractors and harassers have of us in general, the caricature that is the gendered form of “SJW”, the “Tumblrina”: always brightly colored hair, often fat and hideously ugly, brittle, angry, and alone.

This stereotype has as much to do with our actual lives as their caricature of “Social Justice” or “Radical Feminism” (they keep on saying those words; I don’t think they mean what they think they mean) has to do with anything we say or do. It’s not a shorthand they use to understand us, but to save them the trouble of needing to.

“Of course she has [colored] hair,” they say.

“Of course she’s on Patreon,” they say.

And of course I do have rainbow-colored hair and of course I do have a Patreon (Hint, hint.), as I’ve been crowdfunding my career since long before that was a word. But they don’t mean these things as bare, unadorned recitations of neutral facts. They’re invocations of the stereotype. They are reminders that we are not to be approached as human beings leading individual lives with distinct circumstances and personalities, but as a series of checkmarks next to a list of identifying features for target confirmation purposes.

Men even outside these alt-right, ultra-reactionary cliques make similar (if less pointed in their formulation) observations about women who sport pastel or neon or multicolored hair, and what it boils down to is something like this: she’s just doing it for attention, but jokes on her because it totally kills every man’s boner, but still a girl that desperate for attention will probably do anything…

If we complain about the attention, or tell a guy that we’re not doing it for them, we get a response along the lines of “Well, who are you doing it for?”

And the answer, as Zoë said, is for ourselves. Our. Selves. To be true to ourselves. It’s like wearing an outfit that suits us particularly well (and is often part and parcel of doing so), but a little more intimate, a little closer to the skin, metaphorically and in some respects literally. Hair color is a transitory and mutable characteristic, but so are clothes, and I think most people would agree that it’s possible to dress up like yourself and dress up not like yourself.

And the mutability of hair color, I think, matches the mutability of one’s self to a greater degree than more permanent body modifications or more fleeting changes, such as a change of clothes. A hair color might last days or weeks or months. It might change over time; mature, deepen. It might be touched up or altered. It might be allowed to grow out and fade.

Zoë’s hair isn’t much like my hair. I am not much like her. But we both looked at each other and were able to recognize that her hair was her and mine was me, which is to say, we were able to look at each other and admire each other, in this respect.

It was a fascinating exchange at the time, and one I wish we’d both had the time to delve into (we were leaving, as I’d said, and I suspect she had many more people to talk to, if not places to be, too), but in the course of sitting down and writing this post, working through what happened and what it meant to me, I’m finding myself working through so much more.

When I talked about the caricature of the Social Justice girl above, even the generalized one… well, that affects her more than it does me, as she’s a higher priority target for the people who make use of it as a rhetorical tool. I have been harassed by many of the same people, but mostly as a corollary to attacking someone with a higher level of unasked-for notoriety or someone with a higher degree of marginalization. My appearance and actions and beliefs (or the caricatured versions thereof) are used as an attack vector for people more important and more vulnerable than me.

But when I do come to the attention of the hate-hives, the way I get talked about… well, I’m not just a Social Justice girl, I’m a trans woman. I don’t just have brightly colored hair, I have rainbow hair. The last time I was told I was mentioned on a Gamergate forum, the comment on my appearance was “She looks exactly like you’d think she would look.”

At one point, someone made an animated gif meme using my face cropped from a profile pic and text representing the sort of thing that the person making the macro would imagine the character of me would say. It wasn’t something I’ve ever actually said. It doesn’t accurately represent my beliefs or behavior in the sort of discourse they were commenting on. But it’s not about me. It’s so not about me that people only two and three degrees of separation removed from me were sharing the image as a joke about “those Social Justice types who go to far”, honestly and earnestly believing that the person in the image was literally a caricature, not a real person.

When I found out about that, it freaked me out badly. I felt violated in a way that’s how to describe. I knew the reductive stereotyping the picture represented. I had even had it applied to me. But never so widely or so viscerally.
It affected me deeply. I reacted very badly. And I never really got over it, the knowledge that the picture is out there and being circulated.

But after talking to Zoë Quinn at the party, I found myself feeling better in a way that was hard to describe. I felt my spirits had lifted. I felt like I was suddenly less worried, though about what, I couldn’t say. It’s not like I’d gone around thinking about the picture all the time, or all the other pictures like it that might exist now or in the future. I wasn’t actually actively caring about it at the time, so it’s not like I could have noticed the moment I stopped caring, except in retrospect.

I didn’t—and don’t—believe that Zoë Quinn or anyone else is a precious perfect darling angel who can do no wrong. Nor do I believe that anyone can be.

And I’m certainly not the sort of person who seeks approval from certain people because they’ve been elevated to authority figures in my mind or that of society. I can get half a dozen earnest compliments on my hair in a day when I’m not at a con, and at a con it’s often non-stop. It gives me a little boost. Of course it does. And when I can return the compliment, about the other person’s hair or anything else, there’s this little moment of connection that makes it better.

It lifted a weight I hadn’t even noticed I was carrying. As I write this post, and think about the caricatures, and the way I’ve been caricatured, I realize: I’ve put the weight down. It doesn’t bother me anymore. Not at all, or at least not noticeably, not right now… it probably will flare up and twinge a bit in the future at odd intervals, but right now I’m thinking about it, thinking about how it felt, thinking about it cropping up on Facebook where I could see it, and this used to destroy me, and it doesn’t bother me.

That brief exchange with Zoë… it healed my soul. Honestly. That sounds hyperbolic, but that’s what it felt like.

Not because Zoë Quinn has magical powers or Zoë Quinn is perfect or Zoë Quinn is some kind of an authority on my very different life, not even because I know Zoë Quinn has been there done that but because I stopped and talked to another human being who gets it, not about the harassment that is heightened but about why we did it in the first place rand why we do it anyway.

Zoë Quinn, I’m told, is into body modification. I don’t know what’s true about her and what’s story. As I’ve said: I don’t ask Zoë Quinn about her life. My thing is idiosyncratic accessories. I don’t pick them to be idiosyncratic. I pick them because they are me and I recognize that they are idiosyncratic. I like wearing distinctive sunglasses—novelty, fashion, or costume—over my actual glasses. I hang them off the o-ring on my collar when I’m not wearing them. I collect hats. Just lately I’m into wearing long cardigans that make me feel like I’m wearing a wizardly trenchcoat or cape without actually wearing one. Though for that matter, my winter coat is a long black woolen cloak.

When I was of middle school age, I tried a thing for a couple of weeks where I had a bandanna tied round my neck like a scarf. The other children asked me if I was trying to be a cowboy or a pirate or what. I wasn’t trying to be anything, except me, wearing a thing around my neck that for a time made me feel more like myself.

The hair is the same, except in all the ways that it’s not. Hair is more visible than discreet body mods and more constant than any given accessory. It’s there. Always. Or at least usually.

There is a whole genre of posts that go around Twitter and Tumblr where the punchline is basically, “I don’t dress for boys/other people, I dress for the moments when I see myself reflected in a store window.” And that’s basically me, in terms of how I stopped dressing as a shapeless mass of dark cloth and started dressing in ways that make me feel like me. I still dress for the reflections, but not just dim and accidental ones in windows. I dress for how I look reflected in a mirror. I dress for the way it gets reflected back to me from other people.

My hair is part of that. It is part of me.

And Zoë Quinn was part of me internalizing that.

I know she’s not a darling perfect angel. I know she’s not some platonic exemplar of victimhood who has suffered worse than anyone in the history of the world or the internet. I know she’s not the character in her ex’s nasty little play, nor the one presented in the MS Paint webcomic drama that is Gamergate. I can’t really claim to know her as a person after sixty to eighty seconds of interaction on my way out of a crowded party, though even without that I can safely say that she is one.

And that, brief though our meeting was, I’m glad I met her.

Notes From WorldCon: It’s A Major Award

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

When an actor receives something like a Screen Actor’s Guild award, they often say something along the lines of “It means so much more to me, because it comes from my peers.”

The most direct equivalent of this in the U.S. genre literature world would not be the Hugos, but the Nebulas. The Nebula Award is a guild award, presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and voted on by the membership of the same. The Hugos are awarded by WorldCon membership, which in practical terms is fandom in its most institutional sense; picture the busiest, most accident-prone intersection between genre creators and genre fandom (specifically, the subset of genre fandom most directly descended from fandom as it existed 74 years ago), and you’ll have the WorldCon general membership.

I say this with some amount of affection, being one of them now.

The Hugos are awarded by fandom, but it’s a subset of fandom whose most prominent voices are mostly people who not just grew up in fandom but grew up to be the sort of people who have fans. Being a literary convention, even many of the people who just show up hoping for a glimpse of one of their glittering idols do some writing. Or game design. Or drawing.

So while the Hugos are not a guild award, there’s not a sharp line separating them from “awards given by our peers”. In the modern genre literature fandom, there is an extent to which our peers are our fans and our fans are our peers, and it’s wonderful. I love it.

I did not win a Hugo. I was not on the shortlist. But I was on the longlist, the tabulated nomination data released immediately after the Hugo Awards. I knew I would be, because people told me they had nominated me. As those who follow me or people around me on Facebook and Twitter might have intuited, I was actually the top of the longlist for one category, Best Fan Writer; “top” here meaning “excluding the shortlist”. I was the next alternate selection, the first runner-up to the nominees.

This is a signal honor to me. When I decided I was going to WorldCon whether I made the ballot or not, it was because I regard the fact of being thought of in these terms itself as something of a prize. I talked about this on Twitter back when the nominees were being announced, I repeated it the morning of the Hugos: awards mean nothing without the warm regard of our fans and peers to back them up, and the warm regard of our fans and peers means everything with or without an award.

So, it’s easy for me to say that when I’m not winning awards, right?

Well, if you’ve been following WorldCon stuff, you might know that this isn’t exactly true. There is probably some debate happening somewhere about whether the Alfie Award is a real award or just something that somebody decided to hand out based on a mixture of objective criteria and personal decision. I am not about to wade into that debate, lest I pull back the fragile veil that separates the minds of mankind from the bleak and terrible true reality from which our senses shield us.

Instead, I shall simply say that it is a real award, insofar as it was really awarded. To me. On a stage. By George R.R. Martin. I was in such a daze that I walked off in the wrong direction, then left my trophy backstage.

And I have to say that it was a thrill, obviously. I wasn’t so awestruck because it wasn’t a thrill. But it was a thrill precisely for the reasons I outlined in my blog post. If only the dozen or so people who had told me beforehand had nominated me, I would have been deeply touched to know this. If it had only been them and the dozen or so more who told me this at WorldCon, I still would have been just as touched. But the ballot data has been released and I came in with 213 people who nominated me for Best Fan Writer.

Out of every single person who thought enough of the topic of who the best fan writer in all of 2016 was, just over one in eight of them thought enough of me to throw my name in. I had just 30 fewer nods than Mike Glyer, the man who won and who had my vote, a man to whom I would have been ecstatic to lose and to whom I am quite happy to have lost the bottom place on the shortlist.

And yes, I am quite certain that Mr. Glyer both deserved the spot on the ballot more than I did, and that he deserved the win completely. I was not much of a fan writer before 2015. I don’t expect to be much of one in the future. I wandered into a fray in progress, made a few observations and quips, and I wandered out. It got me a bit of attention, in no small part because Mike Glyer took it upon himself to be such an excellent chronicler of the whole mess. I know he’s not the only one who shared my work, but I can’t for one second imagine I would have finished as high as I did without his kind assistance.

Indeed, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our nomination totals are so close. I have to imagine that the Venn diagram of people who thought he was worth a nod and people who thought I was worth one had some comfortable area of overlap.

(Which is to say: Thank you, File 770 commentariat. I’m so pleased I got to meet so many of you in person!)

Now, George R.R. Martin instituted (or perhaps I should say initiated, as the man himself is darn sure he doesn’t want it to become an institution of any kind) the Alfie Awards last year to be given out mainly to the person who came closest to getting on the ballot in categories affected by slates.

The Puppies, for all their talk about fun, neither seem to have much of it or understand it when other people do, so they seemed a bit confused about the point of the exercise. Several of them referred to the Alfies last year in terms of being “the real Hugo, given out to the pre-selected winner anointed by the clique”.

But of course, it’s nothing of the sort. It’s possible that in some cases, the person who received the Alfie would have won the Hugo Award, absent a Puppy slate, but it is not inevitable. If the person who receives the most nominations always received the most votes, we wouldn’t need a round of voting.

The truth is that the Alfies are a bit of a joke, which is exactly why they have been so important and so wonderful these past two years, because what we need is a bit of a joke. Something to take a bit of the sting out of being left off the ballot and wondering about what might have done. Something to remind us about our history. Something to celebrate.

There was a lot to celebrate on Hugo night anyway, with many well-deserved wins by well-deserving winners and a total, 100% refutation of the many shifting premises under which the Puppies perpetrated their campaigns this year. We can still mourn the ballots that might have been, the opportunities that were lost to another year of this nonsense, of course, but there’s plenty to celebrate.

N.K. Jemisin checking the internet to make sure it still said she had won a Best Novel Hugo even after she woke up is one of my favorite moments from WorldCon, and it didn’t even happen at WorldCon.

Anyway. With this year’s landscape being so different than last year’s, and the outcome different as a result, I wasn’t sure that George would do a repeat performance for the Alfies. Even knowing that I had been the unofficial “first alternate” in my category, I wasn’t at all sure there’d be one for me if he did. No one can say that Mike Glyer didn’t deserve his trophy, so it’s not like I was robbed of my chance.

But he did, and he gave out an award for all categories affected by a slate, however slightly, and that means that instead of losing to Mike Glyer, I won an Alfie. It’s an actual hood ornament, off of what I believe my father-out-law identified as probably an Oldsmobile, shaped like a rocket plane and artfully attached to its base.

So I received an award after all. Do I stand by my words? More than ever. Because now I have the proof of my supposition that awards mean nothing when there is nothing behind them. I was jumping around the room like Daffy Duck thrilled when I saw where I’d placed, and the notion of getting anything for that besides the knowledge couldn’t have been the furthest thing from my mind.

Then a man called me up on stage and handed me what is literally a piece of garbage—vintage garbage, even collectible garbage, and certainly very artful garbage, garbage artfully arranged, but garbage nonetheless—and it meant the world to me because of what it symbolized. It is a visible, tangible, and ever-present reminder that enough people thought enough of me to get me up on that stage.

Not every trophy is a part of a car bolted to re-tooled scrap metal, but they’re all made out of something and when you get right down to it all that something ultimately consists of is just stuff. The Hugo rocket is stuff. The Oscar statue is just stuff. Shiny stuff, well-made stuff, sometimes precious stuff, stuff formed into iconic shapes, but just stuff.

Having been handed one of the stuffy-est (if not exactly the stuffiest) awards around, I can say that I was right on the money. It is the good opinion and warm wishes of our peers and fans and (as juried awards exist) even sometimes our idols that imbues them with meaning. The Alfie I was given is a symbol of that which I have won for myself and that which I have been privileged to be given, and that is your respect and admiration.

I wish I had thought to say something like that on the stage. I wish I had been as insightful as I am in my best blog posts or as clever as I am in my best moments. I wish I would have thought to say, “They say an award means the most when it comes from your peers, and as I’ve just been handed one by one of the living giants of fantasy writing, I’m going to go with that.”

I wish I would have remembered to explicitly thank the people who had brought me there, in the figurative sense of giving me the impetus and the literal sense of crowdfunding my presence on the stage. I hope my parents raised me well enough that I said thank you at all on autopilot, though I have no memory of having done so.

All I really had the presence of mind to do was hug George, remind the audience that I had received twice as many nominating nods in the category as he had, and then run. I was bowled over. I was gobstruck. I was beside myself.

But the moment only meant something because it was real, and it was real because something real was behind it.

George has been very clear that he doesn’t want the Alfies to become an institution or tradition that is necessary beyond this year. I hope he gets his wish, but I also hope the tradition doesn’t die out completely. However much personal cachet there might be in being one of the very select crowd of recipients of what I’m thinking of as the Alfred Bester Award for Adjacency to Excellence, George speaks so endearingly of Alfred Bester’s place in the history of the Hugos, of WorldCon and the Losers Party, that I’d love to see him continue to be honored in some way.

Ah, well. If there’s one thing the gap between WorldCon 73 and WorldCon 74 has taught me, it’s that not even science fiction writers can predict the future.

WORLDCON: Comedy tomorrow, Hugos tonight.

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

So, the Hugo Awards are tonight. Last year, when the brouhaha stirred up around them started unfolding, I made a blog post that explained the basic situation and the stakes… including my own stakes, which were, as I said, virtually nothing.

Suffice it to say that this year, I’m a bit more invested. My name did not make it onto the final ballot, though I am continually gratified to hear that various people put it forward for my commentary and satire last year.

Last year’s results were an unprecedented response to an unprecedented situation. Thousands of people were motivated to came out to vote and deliver a stinging rebuke to the small cliques of would-be tastemakers and kingmakers who sought to politicize a sci-fi/fantasy award and dictate what works would and would not be seen as being “worthy” of being praised, read, and enjoyed.

Even while we find ourselves in a similar situation this year, I have no predictions to offer about this year’s results, even given last year’s example. It’s similar, but it’s just not the same.

Vox Day and his dreadful elks backed away pretty swiftly and firmly from their promise to repeat their performance verbatim, instead opting to seed their slate with a number of popular picks that would have in all likelihood made it on the ballot without them. The technique of running out in front of a stampede and proclaiming himself to be leading the charge is one that Mr. Day is well-versed in, being as it is how he maintains the delusion of control over his emotionally-driven followers.

As passionate as many people are about the Hugos or about the causes the Puppies have projected onto them, it takes a lot out of a person to stay pumped up about something like that over the course of a year. The people who provide the power to the Puppies’ voting blocs are driven by emotion and rhetoric; it’s the air they breathe. They don’t have to be whipped up into a froth over something. The froth is already there, waiting to be channeled as well as it can be. Most of the rest of us have lives to live, to say nothing of other motivating drives beyond manufactured outrage and aggrieved senses of entitlement.

Then there’s the fact that there’s an honest-to-goodness presidential election looming in November. I don’t know about anybody else, but it’s taken up more of my time and attention than any award plot orchestrated by a tax fugitive running a vanity press for his grim-and-gritty Bible fanfic ever could.

But on the other hand, I’m an outsider to the traditional publishing industry and the stakes aren’t the same for me. So who knows? It’s likely others have been more invested than I have been. Just as it did last year, it’s all going to come down to the numbers. I have no predictions to make. I suspect the results will be more of a mixed bag than they were last year, but that’s a suspicion, not a prediction.

The only ballot choice I’ve discussed with anyone is Alyssa Wong for the Campbell Award, and that only because I’ve been speaking with other Wiscongoers who are enthusiastic members of her fandom about it.

At this point I could quite honestly say “Everyone I know voted for Alyssa Wong,” at least in the sense that everybody whose top Campbell vote I know did so, and if I had the logic of a kicked Puppy, I would therefore conclude that she was robbed if it were to transpire tonight that someone else wins.

This is the same logic that leads those who attend Donald Trump’s rallies to believe that the polls must be rigged or otherwise in error (how could he not be winning when he draws thousands of people who all want him to win?), and it is the same logic that leads many on the left to conclude that this (and indeed every) election is a foregone conclusion (for how could anyone vote for this person, when no one I know would do so?)

But the fact that a group of people who share my taste and sensibilities share my taste and sensibilities is a tautology, not a definitive data point.

All of which is to say that whatever happens tonight, it’s sure to be exciting. I will be rooting for Alyssa Wong, along with N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (I believe I’d heard her read from the beginning of that book two or three times by the time it came out, so you’d better believe I was invested) and a few others I have particularly strong feelings about. But whatever happens, they were nominated, they earned those nominations, and no one can ever take that away from them.

I’ve said at multiple points during both of the most recent iterations of this mess that the whole Puppy thing started because Larry Correia was not able to understand that it is in fact an honor to be nominated, that to be plucked out of the hundreds or thousands of authors starting a career each year and be named as one of a mere five final candidates for a John W. Campbell award is a signal, career-launching accolade. He didn’t get that. He didn’t care. He had a story in his mind that started with the con rolling out the red carpet for him and ended with his name being called at the award ceremony.

Neither of those things happened. Everybody finds their own way at a new-to-them con. It’s daunting. I know that. It’s tough to break the ice, tricky to form connections. I mean, basically everybody here knows who I am and thanks to the magic of crowdfunding, I am literally here because enough people wanted me here. But it’s still hard to navigate a new and unfamiliar scene, especially when it feels like everybody else knows everybody else.

A lot of that is an illusion. A lot of the people you see at a con are talking to the few people they know well enough to be really comfortable with while marveling at how easily the social thing must come to everybody else they see doing the same thing. That’s just the way it goes. You see your own travails and tribulations. You feel your own anxiety and isolation. You know what an effort you’re making. With everybody else, all you can see is the end result of the effort. You hear the laughter, see the people standing in tight groups, you wonder what they know that you don’t and you conclude it’s each other.

Like I said: it’s daunting. It doesn’t even matter what level of Kind of a Big Deal you’re at. Do you know how many times over the past few days I’ve had conversations that started with me awkwardly approaching someone I admire to tell them, basically, “I don’t know if you remember me, but…” only for them to tell me I’m too famous for that? People are excited to see me, but still don’t know me know me. That’s just how it goes.

Enough people thought well enough of Larry Correia that he was nominated for a Campbell Award the year of his first WorldCon. In all likelihood, plenty of the people there were excited enough to see him. The transitory social nature of a convention just makes it hard to convey that. No one (well, few people) want to be the one to bother someone. The bigger of a deal someone seems to be to you, the the less you’ll want to bother them. Again, just how it goes.

People who stick it out with con culture get over it, or at least get used to it. I figured this out pretty early on in my con-going career, but even knowing it was true, it took me a few years to actually internalize it and genuinely feel like I’m a real part of my “home con” of WisCon. There are still times where I don’t. I can’t stop it from happening. All I can do is not let it bother me enough to take away from my enjoyment overall. All I can do is get over it.

Some people don’t ever get over it. Most of them just stop going to cons. Some blessedly small number of them, though, decide to start movements to make sure that nobody else has any fun, either.

So whatever happens tonight, we are all winners in the Puppies’ sad culture war for showing up anyway. We defeat the Puppies by reading what we want to read, by praising whatever works we admire, and writing whatever stories we want to see in the world.

The purpose of the Hugo Awards is to celebrate and honor the best in speculative fiction, isn’t it? Whatever happens, let’s darn well celebrate and let’s darn well honor. If my picks don’t win, I will not tell the authors involved that they were robbed, that something was taken from them. If they feel that way, I certainly won’t presume to argue, but what they will hear from me is that I was (and am) rooting for them, that I thought enough of them to vote for them, that I thought (and think) enough of their work to consider it worthy of a Hugo.

That’s what an award is, isn’t it? It’s tangible, it’s concrete, it has some rubric behind it to give it a gloss of objectivity, but ultimately it is, as the saying goes, “a token of esteem”. It is a symbol of the regard that others have for your work. And while few would deny that the award is nice in and of itself, it means nothing without the regard behind it, while the regard of one’s audience and peers, without an award, still means rather a lot.

I’ve been telling people this all weekend, when they tell me that I should have been on the ballot for Sad Puppies Review Books or John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author, or my general commentary, or whatever. I wouldn’t kick an actual trophy out of metaphorical award-bed for eating honor-crackers, but I don’t care about the award so much as I care that people appreciate what I do. A trophy is just a concentrated reminder of that.

The Puppies don’t understand any of this. By all indications, they will never understand it. Last year, some of the brightest minds in the Puppy-adjacent Gamergate spent a lot of time analyzing fifth and sixth-hand accounts of what happened before and after the Hugo ceremony, trying to figure out where the real awards were that the “SJW cabal” must have given out after publicly handing out no award in so many categories. Top contenders for “the real Hugos” included commemorative coasters handing out as a participant gift and George R.R. Martin’s personal in-joke “trophy”, the Alfies. Joking about this on Twitter a few minutes ago, I said that they’ve never considered that the real Hugo might be the friends we made along the way.

In all seriousness, though, the real award is the warm regard and respect of our peers and fans. I mean that in multiple senses and on multiple levels. Even the actual Hugos, an actual honest-to-goodness Hugo Award, must be that or it will mean nothing.

Lest we forget: Larry Correia started the Sad Puppies to get himself a trophy that would have been meaningless if he had succeeded. As much as they’ve mythologized their origins and lionized their motivations, the original Sad Puppies campaign was an attempt to logroll the ballot to give one author with an overly developed sense of entitlement the award he felt he’d been robbed of.

There has been a lot of talk about “destroying the Hugos”. The Sad Puppies threaten to destroy them, they say that the imagined cabal of “SJWs” they think is responsible for the sweeping and widespread opposition to their campaign are the ones destroying them, etc. But the Hugos were never in as much danger as they would have been the first Sad Puppy year, if Larry had somehow managed to succeed, if he had actually stuffed the ballot box and rigged the vote completely enough to guarantee his victory. That would have been a far bigger blow than a year or two of No Awards, or a few mixed bags.

Awards symbolize honor and respect. They symbolize an author’s accomplishments. They are not themselves a substitute for any of those things, though, and in the absence of an award, we may still have and still celebrate those things. Like the Whos down in Whoville, we can sing all the same.

So let’s sing. Let’s do something positive. At its core, the concept of a fandom convention is fellowship. Hands strung together across the void. Hands clasped in darkness. Hands clapping in celebration. The root prefix con- means together. We congregate. We convene. We come together.

So let’s come together.

Whatever happens tonight, if you’re here or even if you’re not, why not find an author or artist whose work you appreciate and admire, and tell them that? It might not mean as much as a shiny silver rocket, it might not mean as much as a vintage hood ornament from George R.R. Martin, but it’s sure to mean something to someone.

 

A Mid MidAmeriCon Con Update ( WorldCon )

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Well, everything certainly is up to date in Kansas City. Despite our early trepidation about being lodged so far from the convention, the KC Streetcar is fast and efficient and the estimated wait times and travel times seem to be based on the worst reasonable traffic assumptions. WorldCon 74 is better run than our worst fears based on administrivial SNAFUs in the run-up, although I have to say that even at its best, we still find ourselves missing WisCon, and our absent friends.

Jack and I have been working on our routine for plugging Ligature Works in a way that plays to both of our strengths (neither of us are the most naturally forward people) and have given many authors and poets the good news. I’ve also had the interesting experience of telling people who know me as a poet that I’m also a humorist, those who know me as a humorist that I’m also a serialist, and so on, while telling all of them that I’m also an editor/publisher.

This con thing is definitely a marathon and not a sprint. The first two days, many people are still in transit or just arriving. We’ve been retiring relatively early in the day so far (around 6 Wednesday, just before 10 last night) in order to pace ourselves for the main event. So I feel like we have missed out on some of the real social culture of the convention, but I’m looking forward to rectifying that.

I’ve already had the pleasure of participating in a massive File 770 bar meetup, which allowed me to put faces (or at least name tags) to the names of some of my biggest boosters over the course of last year’s Puppy-related posts. Several people have approached me to tell me how much they enjoyed Sad Puppies Review Books or John Scalzi Is Not A Very Popular Author and I Myself Am Quite Popular, my takedown of Vox Day’s commercialized grudgewank he poorly disguised as a definitive guide to fighting “SJWs”.

My weirdly intimidating aura seems to be in full effect, though. Yesterday, Jack could barely get out of the building for all the people who suddenly wanted to talk to him or have him pass things along when he ran back to the hotel to grab something I forgot. I really wish I had a better way to signal that it’s cool to just come up and say howdy directly. I’m not the most sociable person but cons are a good context for practicing the arts of diplomancy.

The rumors that I’m Chuck Tingle also still seem to be in full effect, as people keep going on fishing expeditions with Jack. I really don’t get it, beyond he writes funny things and I write funny things. There’s quite a difference in styles. I think it’s like how people assume every parody song is by Weird Al? I don’t know. People are far less willing to talk about it to me directly, so I can’t really ask what they’re thinking. I just read about it in comment sections and message boards, and hear about it from my partner and friends who have been questioned.

Anyway, whether it’s direct or indirect, I have enjoyed hearing from so many people that they enjoyed my satirical works. It is really nice to know people have been thinking of me and talking about my work. I also appreciate being told I was on people’s nomination lists, and while I appreciate the sentiment, I do wish people would stop telling me I was robbed. I think I was probably a longshot in my first year of getting any buzz to begin with, and the idea that the Hugo is anyone’s to be stolen away in the first place is the kind of mindset that gives us Puppies. The Hugo belongs to the winners. It is an honor conferred, not the systematic result of a process one author can initiate for themselves.

And whether or not you make the shortlist, it is still an honor to be nominated. If Larry Correia had understood what an honor it was to be picked out of thousands to be one of the finalists for the Campbell Award, we wouldn’t have had Sad Puppies to begin with. Though if we didn’t have Sad Puppies, I wouldn’t have had my breakout year as a satirist.

(All that being said, if someone taps me on the shoulder or drops me a line to usher me to the Losers’ Party, I will be absolutely over the moon. But if not this year, I’m sure I’ll get there someday. No one is owed a Hugo, but I am a born loser.)

Ligature Works: A Note for WorldCon

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Well! I’m at WorldCon finally, after both travels and travails. On the first day of the con, we realized a logistical snag: I had new business cards made up early in the summer, before our new literary sf/f venture Ligature Works was more than a vague idea for the future. So we don’t have any kind of hand-out to give people re: that. In lieu of that, I’ll leave this post at the top of my main blog (which is referenced on the business cards).

So: Ligature Works is seeking original, never-before-published works of science fiction, fantasy, and otherwise speculative poetry and prose. We pay a flat rate of $25 for anything we publish. It’s a nominal fee, we realize. We are just starting out, but it’s important that we don’t ask other artists to create for nothing. Since we do not offer pro rates, we don’t require pro terms: our period of exclusivity lasts only until the end of the month following publication. So with our first issue set for the last day in September, the rights revert back on November 1, following the end of October.

Our submissions window for the first issue runs through all of August. There will be one for the next issue either last quarter of 2016 or first quarter of 2017, depending on how our post-mortem on our first issue goes. We’ll also need to talk with each other about whether we want a long window or a short window with a long reading period, or just take rolling submissions. So I can’t tell you when they’ll re-open or for how long, just that they will. This is all an experiment so far.

Detailed submission guidelines along with as good an idea of what we’re looking for as we can convey without a previous canon to reference may be found at http://www.ligatureworks.com/submissions. I know they’re long; Jack has promised to help me bullet point them for the next issue, but they are detailed for a reason. We seek to take the guesswork or element of “…am I doing this right?” away from new and easily startled authors by providing reasonably precise instructions.

We have not used the more fiddly bits as a scalpel to trim away the slush, but things having to do with the element of anonymity within your submission are ironclad. Apart from helping ensure we can screen against our own implicit biases, the world of speculative poetry is not a large one, so it’s good to be able to consider a poem without knowledge of the poet. If something in your experience is relevant to the work, feel free to tell us about it, as described in the submission guide.

One final caveat: The window is more than half over now and we have received enough works that gave us the immediate editorial grabby hands. It is very likely that we’ll close the month with more pieces than we have the budget to buy, especially as our first issue is entirely self-funded. If anyone wants to help fund more pieces, you can throw some money at me via PayPal. Just put in a note that it’s for Ligature Works. We’ll work out something more formal for future issues.

Gender-Free Story Round-Up!

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Being the conclusion to the gender-free writing challenge I issued back in June.

Part I: Lessons Learned

First, a bit about lessons learned.

Not everybody who sent a story in mentioned explicitly how they would like to be credited, and some of the published entries bear credits while others don’t. Accordingly, I’m going to let the bylines the authors created speak for themselves.

When I do something like this in the future, I’ll make more of a point about standardizing entry formats so we can capture that kind of information. I’ll also try to make the constraints more clear. The original post called for “a story of any length with at least two characters and no references to their gender.”

What I meant was (and this was clarified later) that no character who appeared or was referenced should be gendered in the text, but I saw some people boosting the post explaining that the requirement was “a story where at least two of the characters don’t have gender”. I didn’t get any stories that had a boy and a girl and two gender-nonspecific people in the background, thank goodness, but there was at least one submission where an arguably pretty clearly gendered character is referenced at multiple points. I’ve left that in the link round-up, because of the initial ambiguity.

I did remove entries I considered to be overtly hurtful to a group of people. I wrestled with myself over this (it’s one of the reasons the judging is coming as far into August as it is), because I didn’t mention any such criteria when I laid out the challenge. But one of the points of this challenge is to encourage greater gender (and to an extent, sexuality) diversity in writing, to help make non-binary and genderqueer writers and readers feel more welcome in the growing online literary world, and you can’t welcome one group by stepping on another, especially when the groups overlap.

The last lesson has to do with the deadline. About half a dozen people asked me if I would extend the deadline another month, and I did, but far fewer people took advantage of that extension than asked for it. The entries were pretty strongly front-loaded to the beginning of the period. Next time, there’s going to be a larger window (and quite a different set-up in general), but there’s definitely a thing to be learned here about deadlines and their usefulness.

Part II: The Round-Up

Thank you to everybody who participated!

Part III: A Winner And Such

It needs to be said that “On Finding Yourself In Bars” is one of my top picks of the bunch, but it’s also written by my partner, Jack Ralls, who helped organize all this, which is why we agreed it would not be up for consideration.

So who wins?

I’m going to give first place ($25) to “Pie Day“. Second place ($15) goes to “7 Questions for the Angels“. Third place goes to So, “How Was School Today“.

I enjoyed these stories quite a bit, but one of the things I enjoyed the most about them is how real to life they were (even the one with a couch-surfing God). They deal with the personal, the spiritual, and the everyday, and they do so in a way that shows how incidental gender can be and how arbitrary our assignments and assumptions of it often are.

We’ll be getting in touch with the authors of those pieces over the next day or so about the payout arrangements. If you’re one of them, feel free to email us back with your PayPal address, if that method is amenable to you.

Part IV: Looking To The Future

I want to do this again, but bigger and on a more formal scale, and possibly with more categories for different ways of playing with gender conventions. Basically, an annual awards deal, covering a year at a time, every year, in order to not shut out pro publications. This is going to take a lot of planning and coordinating (we’ll definitely need more help), but we have time to work it out. The first period of eligibility will be 2017, which means the award won’t be awarded until 2018. I will especially be looking for non-binary, genderqueer, and agender people to help judge. More details to come early in 2017!

STATUS: Wednesday, August 10th

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

The Daily Report

August has proven to be a bad month for plans. Yesterday one item at the top of my list was to confirm my hotel reservation for WorldCon, after there were some shenanigans back in July with one of the convention hotels being still under construction and some other administrative screw-ups by the con itself. In the process, I found an email from Friday that got ignored as spam, saying that due to ongoing renovations at our hotel (not the one under construction!), we were being relocated to another one twice as far away. I think the reason it got filtered as spam was that there were several dozen other recipients CCed on it with whom I had never corresponded.

Yes. The hotel open CCed everybody affected, broadcasting our email addresses, situation, and the hotel we’re now staying at to a random assortment of strangers. It’s not too likely to result in anything bad, but that’s not really the point. It’s very distressing, and frustrating because it’s entirely the fault of the hotel/the person who sent the email, but there isn’t a remedy. The arrow cannot be called back to the bow.

Cue me dealing with the fallout of this, figuring out the logistics of two physically disabled people getting around downtown Kansas City, making fallback plans, talking to the staff at the hotels, and dealing with the shot of travel-related anxiety created by uncertainty and change.

After finding out as much as we can about the area (and realizing that I’d stayed in another hotel very close to it before, as a teenager), we did decide that the new hotel can work and we’re actually looking forward to staying in it. But it basically destroyed my work day.

I’m impressed with the staffer at the new hotel; less impressed with the one at the hotel that bounced us. It’s not so much the renovation thing. I do think it’s odd that they didn’t know they wouldn’t have enough rooms until less than two weeks before, but maybe something took longer than quoted and they were keeping their fingers crossed it would be done under the wire. I can roll with that kind of thing.

It’s the handling of it. It’s the mishandling of private, personal information. It’s the fact that the initial email on the subject contained multiple points misinformation that I’m not going to get into, but which the staffer at the new hotel had to immediately and very apologetically correct. She got left on the hook cleaning up a situation that was made messier than it needed to be.

Anyway. That was my day yesterday. Figuring out the logistics of downtown Kansas City and talking to hotel people about hotel things.

Considering the impact of WorldCon, I had already planned on putting Tales of MU on vacation for the two updates closest to it (the Friday I’m there and the Tuesday after I get back). The vagaries of the summer have already got it down to once a week for the end of July and August so far.

Given all this, I’m officially calling it a reduced schedule for August: once a week, irregular. I hate to do this so soon after establishing a regular update pattern (and it will mean less money, because of the Patreon model), but it’s better than burning out.

Financial Status

Not much to say here. September will be leaner than expected because of the reduction in Tales of MU output, though the continued growth of other revenue streams could help mitigate that.

State of the Me

Did not sleep well last night; combination of heat and anxiety.

Plans For Today

Going to be finalizing the judging of the stories for the first gender challenge, with an eye towards announcing the winners and posting the round-up today or tomorrow. Today is the plan, but lack of sleep may catch up with me towards the end of the day.

STATUS: Monday, August 8th

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

The Daily Report

Last week was successful and productive by some measures, less so by others. I stumbled out of the gate a bit at the start of the month. I did write a lot. I posted some of the fruits of that writing yesterday, the first part of a novelette I’m calling King of America, about a completely fictitious and entirely original real estate tycoon who decides to run for President of the United States. It hasn’t attracted much attention yet, but I think the work as a whole could genuinely grow to be the most important thing I’ve ever written.

I’m a bit behind generally on some of my larger goals. I had so much energy for April through much of June, repeatedly hitting the “heat wall” in July and August is a bit dispiriting. My overall goal for my 37th year on the planet is to kick my career into gear and build my audience and income with a whole year of being awesome, but I’m finding myself needing to scale back my ambition for the first two months, and I’m planning on next year taking a semi-hiatus in July and August, after a victory lap in June.

Financial Status

Doing okay. Fruits of improved income and better budgeting is that there’s no frantic, frustrating conversation about how we’re getting groceries this week.

The State of the Me

Yesterday we had an outing to Baltimore that involved a lot more walking in the heat than I had assumed/planned for, so I am coming into this week a little drained.

But a funny thing happened late last week: I remembered that my office in fact has a ceiling fan positioned more or less directly over where I sit. Prior to this, I had been marveling at how I’d managed the previous summers in this room, as this is the first year it has its own A/C unit. I know I did spend some amount of the time working away from my desk, but not all of it. The A/C beats the fan, obviously, which is why I never really missed it enough to remember it existed… but having both of them going == bliss.

Plans For Today

I’m going to be doing some slush-reading and sorting for Ligature Works, and a lot of writing.

End of week note.

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

I wrenched my dominant arm something fierce today. Forearm is all twingy, hand is sore, and my shoulder (my bad one, which has the poor judgment to be attached to my best arm) is a little worse for wear. It’s painful and difficult to type, which makes me feel like I shouldn’t be doing it. My ability to write one-handed on a touch-screen is pretty good, but only with my right hand. Go figure.

I’ve been alternating between trying to take it easy and soothe my hurts, and cautiously working. At this point I think I’m just exacerbating it. I have posted on Patreon an update to my members-only serial story Making Out Like Bandits, written earlier in the week but never posted. Non-patrons can read the beginning for free. If you pledge, you gain immediate access to the rest of the story.

Despite being a very up and down week physically and not exactly hitting all of my career goals, it’s been surprisingly successful in most respects. I have not posted much, but I did top at over 9000 words of usable fiction.