Pi-con

This weekend I went to Pi-con, a small sf con near Springfield, MA but just over the border in Connecticut. It was a pleasant little con with three tracks of programming, a dealers’ room, and lots of pretty young things dressed in home-made steampunk outfits. I only regret that since I wasn’t a hotel guest I couldn’t get in the pool. As per usual, I was wading through some fairly crippling headaches and medications for most of the day, but I managed to keep from wobblinpag or speaking in tongues. I think.

The first panel was Gender and sf/f. I was thinking about gender from the point of view of having just edited a book of transgender sf erotica. The other presenters were thinking primarily of how women are treated in sf/fantasy, and also of the treatment of women in TV shows (not always sf/fantasy). I was a bit handicapped on the grounds that I don’t watch TV. Having figured out the dynamic, I mostly stayed out of the way. However, I did bring up the treatment of men in M/M romance written by women and had some fun watching one of the other folks try to explain how that was different from how men treat women in fiction.

The panel on horses and other animals suffered for being up against the guest of honor reading and had fewer audience members than panelists, but was still kind of fun. One of the audience members grew up in Holland after WW2 so remembers when people still used horses for agriculture and transportation on a daily basis.

The main feature of the panel on tools for writers was to illustrate how a panel is less interesting if the moderator doesn’t do enough traffic cop organization to keep one person from talking the whole time. Especially, I think, if you’re going to do most of the talking in a panel about how to write, you should have some credits to your name other than a novel you’ve been working on for six years but haven’t finished. Throwing an application that provides charts and diagrams to keep track of your characters and plot items seems a poor substitute for finishing the project already. Do writers have some innate talent that enables them to convert ideas into structured text, and can software substitute if you don’t have it?

I had an erotic reading scheduled, splitting an hour with Raven Kaldera, who I haven’t seen in ages, certainly not since he transitioned. As we were getting settled a gentleman sat down in the front of the row to demand of me who was reading and what was to be read, since he couldn’t find anything about it in the program. Since the program listed the participants (me and Raven), and at a con readings are usually from the writers’ own works, I’m not sure why he was confused. Let me describe this man for you. As a right-thinking person you believe you are, you do your best not to stereotype people when you first meet them. However, you’re not as successful at this as you like to think you are, and you fail hopelessly when faced with this man. He’s the sort of man who looks like he doesn’t have any friends and is hoping you’ll be the one he deserves, especially if he decides you meet his standards for feminine attractiveness. You start hoping that you are not attractive. I gave a short introduction and started reading from The Memorial Garden. I picked a nice juicy bit, which is to say not a het bit. Not at all. The man left. I was relieved, even though the remaining audience was small. I am pleased to note for the future that I possess the spell of banishing creepy straight men. The audience grew a bit when I was reading, and those who remained were extremely enthusiastic. Raven read from a story in the Circlet pub “Like a Sacred Desire” which is either out now or will be out soon.

I finished off the night as the moderator of the first half of the BDSM panel. Yes, indeed, the topic is so popular that they have two hours of it and divided the panelists into two batches. I did a lot of active moderation for the first half, then opened the panel up to let other people be the top. The first half was much more fun. I’ll keep that in mind.

And then it was time for a two-hour ride back to Boston.