(no subject)

[amoama]

 So I’ve been to my first fan convention! And I loved it A LOT.

I missed the first day due to something really sad that does not belong in this happy post of flail but let’s just say nothing could have been better for keeping me utterly distracted and engaged the entire weekend. The schedule was punishing, 75 minute sessions with 30 minute breaks from 9am to 11:30pm. Deciding when to eat, when to grab coffee (because The Line omg) had to be done with brutal tactical savvy. Boy was I glad I packed my lunch for Saturday!

I went to 7 panels on Saturday.

First up was A Very Peculiar Practice: The Relationship Between Fanfic and Prowriting. I really liked a couple of the speakers: Una McCormack and Kari Sperring. One thing I learnt at Con was how fun it must be to write tie-in novels. Una was all, “Yes I get paid to write fanfic it’s awesome” and Kari gave loads of insight into doing fandom old school as well as today. The panel all claimed that they approached their fan writing the same way as they did their pro-writing in most ways which I wasn’t quite sure if I bought or whether I should just feel bad about sometimes feeling relief that I’m just writing throw-away comment fic and not year-long epic fic projects. I don’t know how much the panellists do that, they seemed to be quite worthy fan-girls.

To continue my fanfic focus I then went to It’s Not Just Pretty White Boys: Problematic Issues in Fanfic  which was a bit more of a tricksy session.  Mostly it was about race and women writing men having gay sex. I think part of the problem was that the focus of the session was very much about fans of Western media so it immediately excluded a large part of fannish consumption. There wasn’t quite enough diversity on the panel to have a good range of voices speaking to their experiences of these problems in fandom. It was terribly earnest people talking about a problem that they’ve noticed but not particularly been affected by. Also the underlying assumption of “Ew people fetishize gay sex and can’t even write it well, thank god that’s not me” which made me a little uncomfortable because it wasn’t clearly explained what they meant by “fetishizing”. On the plus side, it was good that the topic was there at all and everyone seemed like they were genuinely interested in making things better on lots of fronts.

So I took a break from fanfic and went to a writerly panel called New House, Old Ghosts: Reinventing Mythology & the Supernatural. The consensus of the authors was Yes! Steal! Homage! Go for it! Buy my book! I didn’t but I did enjoy the panel without getting too much out of it.

At 5pm I went to Women’s Worlds: Feminist Utopias which was super interesting because it quickly became apparent how hard it is to write a feminist utopia that’s based on equality and not a matriarchy and how do you still have conflict in your utopia so your story is interesting and if there’s even one person who has to suffer to hold up your utopia is it even a utopia??? *takes deep breath* None of these things were answered but I didn’t mind and there were some great story recs along the way. Although right now I can’t find where I wrote them down. L

Then, because there was an entire Harry Potter track and I felt like going to at least one thing, I went to Scarring and Branding in the Potterverse. I’ll be honest I was hoping it was going to be a bit more kinky than it ended up being but it was still interesting. It was fairly academic and my concentration almost got derailed early on by the use of the word circumcision in relation to female genital mutilation but in the end I reined myself in and things moved on nicely. There were some lovely insights into the prominence of scarring in the book, some general moping/minute silences over Remus Lupin, and some general fangirl bonding which was lovely. I made off for pizza at the end with a couple of the girls from the audience and we did fantastically at getting served in our 30 minute window! Yay the Renaissance Hotel bar! You rocked!

I arrived totally in time for Teenage Kicks: Writing for Young Adult Audiences where I was hoping to find an answer to why I love reading YA that wasn’t just, you’re a teenager at heart. Fool’s errand but hey ho!   

At 10:15pm I crawled into my last panel of the day back in the fanfic room, The Joy of Writing Sex. Obvs. The panellists were awesome in their open-minded approach to the topic, particularly pennypaperbrain and Emily (writcraft) who took a lovely, encouraging stance on all things BDSM and dark fantasy and all sorts of things. 

I called it a night after that because I wanted to get up the next morning for 9am, What Makes a Fandom? Which turned out to be a little bit too much, What Makes a Mega-Fandom? Which I was less interested in. I was hoping for more chat about what it is that is so organic that it can create such fannish feeling and community around something, or just more about the communities themselves, big or small. The one fannish (as opposed to authorish) representative on the panel (who I’m pretty sure was raven but I was too shy to go check) did a great job of trying to get that stuff across and also made me love her immediately because of her references to Welcome to Night Vale and then The Middleman.

Then I went back to bed because, well, I’d been hardcore about attending ALL the panels up till then, to get my money’s worth etc, but I also did pay for a very lovely bed in a very lovely hotel room that I only had till 12pm so I did some snoozing until 11:30 when I went to Putting the Fem in Slash: Queer Visibility in Fanfic PANEL OF MY HEART HOW YOU SO BEAUTIFUL. This panel was made of win from start to finish to glittering rainbow femslash heaven. It was full to bursting with awesome people who just wanted the loving of the ladies. The room was full of unabashed fangirl silliness. There was mourning of the Morgana/Gwen situation and acknowledgement of the Morgana/Morguese ridiculousness, there was dream pairings of Joan Watson and Kalinda. There was discussion about the difficulties of writing long femslash stories (less manchildren, more grown up characters perhaps? So less UST? IDK but it was a suggestion), difficulties of female representation – Who is  there to slash with? Are the characters appealing? There was honesty about what kind of pairings people liked and why. And what kind of relationships they wanted them to be having. IT WAS ALL FUCKING GLORIOUS. And the panel was fantastic: I was fangirling. :D

After that I went to the most geeky and terrifying session ever called Infosec 101: Pseudonymity, security and risk on the internet given by Ian Peters which managed to be reassuring and batshit terrifying at the same time. It was way, way above my IT level for a start and it made me want to run to my laptop and uninstall everything ever, and maybe never use the internet again and live in a box on an island somewhere too cold for technology to work. I made lots of notes with lots of acronyms that I’ll now have to google if I ever use google again. If there were any wannabe members of Anonymous in the room though they probably got a lot out of it.

I finished up with a panel about experiences of writing and publishing your debut novel, My First Time which was good in a kind of aspirational, something to think about for the future way. Everyone was very honest and open and the panel was quite varied in the types of strategies they had so I learnt a lot and it gave me a lot to think about.

After that, even though there were a few more panels I decided to call it quits and head home. I was so zoned out I made it all the way to the bus stop before I realised I’d left my bag with the hotel concierge.

Overall I had a really good time. I got to wallow in people talking about fandom which was awesome and I came away really inspired about fandom, geekiness, speculative fiction, and writing. So YAY NINE WORLDS. Thank you for being a great first con experience. I like to think I'll be back and maybe even feel more comfortable about talking to people!

 

Comments

[luzula]

Cons are so awesome! The only con I've been to (Bitching Party) was more of a fan-only place, with no professional authors or anything (or at least no one was there in their capacity as professional author). I really love that con.

[amoama]

Ah wow Bitching Party looks like a lot of fun. The fan side of the con was definitely the best bit but it was fun to have so much choice. Hundreds of people will have had an entirely different con to mine. I think I might be well on my way to getting a bit hooked!

[riverlight]

Oh, this is fun! Like luzula the only con I've been to (MJ this year) was definitely fans-only, no speakers, so this is an interesting contrast. So glad you had a good time!

[amoama]

Thanks bb! I would definitely like to go to a completely fan-focused con one day. I'm in the groove now!

[such_heights]

Eeeee, thank you for your kind words about the femslash panel, so glad you enjoyed it! :D

[amoama]

My pleasure, writing about what a great time I had just extends the pleasure! You guys did such a great job on that panel, perfect balance of squee and thinky thoughts! <3

[usuallyhats]

Hi, followed your link from raven's post! In case you never find your list from the Feminist Utopias panel, here's the things I wrote down:

The Girl-Thing Who Went Out For Sushi - Pat Cadigan
The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas - Ursula Le Guin
Always Coming Home - Ursula Le Guin
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand - Samuel Delany
The Wild Girls - Ursula Le Guin

[amoama]

OMG THANK YOU! Ugh I was never going to remember the Pat Cadigan one. Thanks so much for stopping by and sharing!

[usuallyhats]

You're welcome! Glad I could help. :D