All posts by fontfolly

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About fontfolly

I've loved reading for as long as I can remember. I write fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and nonfiction. For more than 20 years I edited and published an anthropomorphic sci-fi/space opera literary fanzine. I attend and work on the staff for several anthropormorphics, anime, and science fiction conventions. I live near Seattle with my wonderful husband, still completely amazed that he puts up with me at all.

My afternoon cuppa

life,

At work I drink the coffee provided in the kitchen in the mornings. They have a big grinder that is set to deliver a measured amount of grounds, and the coffee selected isn’t bad. There are enough of us drinking coffee that the pots usually contain reasonably fresh coffee throughout the morning.

I switch to tea in the afternoon. I don’t really remember when or why I started doing it. It was before I came to work at this place. And usually I make the tea using stuff from my private stash, rather than the variety of teabags provided in the kitchen.

One of my co-workers, who grew up in China, seriously dislikes the very notion of tea bags. Sometimes you can even get her to explain why loose leaves are better (you can actually see and smell the quality, for one). That’s not why I keep my own stash. Mine are bags, after all. Yes, some of the teas I bring in at least look more like a pinch of loose leaves inside a little cloth baggie, rather than unidentifiable clippings inside paper, but it’s still teabags.

I just have certain teas that I like, and they aren’t the kind that get stocked in an office kitchen. My very favorite is a lavender-earl grey. Alas, it hasn’t been in stock for months at the store where I used to get it. Which means I’ve been drinking a lot of my second fave: jasmine blossom green tea. Or aged earl grey. Or sweet ginger black.

I try to keep two or three varieties in stock in my desk, so that I always have a choice. But I’ve lately been having trouble finding good versions of my alternates. I probably just need to shop further afield. At least I hope that’s all it is. I hope there hasn’t been some sort of global lavender or bergamot shortage. More my luck that not enough other people like it to justify shipping the product.

That happens with a lot of things I like. When I find something I like, I want to keep enjoying it. Yet what makes products fly off the shelf (or at least one of the things that makes this happen) is being new and different. In order to make room for new and different, something has to go, at least temporarily. Of course, I’m as much a part of that problem as anyone. Before I discovered the lavender earl grey tea, one of my faves was this rspberry black tea—the bags had little dried raspberries mixed with the tea leaves, and the taste was incredible. I stopped buying it when I started drinking the lavender, and I didn’t even notice that the raspberry wasn’t on the shelf any more.

It doesn’t just happen with teas, of course. I am a sucker for the serial story. Whether it be a good television series or series of novels. I love coming back to find out what happens next to characters I have come to love (or love to hate in the case of a well-done villain). It’s probably why when I’m working on a novel, I’m also thinking about the sequel. I just can’t help it.

Though lately I think it’s gotten me into a bit of a jam. I keep having scenes that have nothing to do with the current plot—scenes that can’t happen until after the end of this novel—popping into my head when I’m trying to work on this one. I gotta figure out how to get them out of the way so I can finish the story at hand.

I’ll let you know if I find a magic solution…

Green(ish) thumb

nature, ,

When Ray and I first started dating he had a small collection of houseplants, each with a story. Ray had been working in the home health care industry for several years at that point, and a lot of his work had been taking care of people who were dying. The families of several of his patients had sometimes asked him to take a plant that the patient had been tending. Ray said that often friends of people who were that severely sick would bring in plants to give the person a bit of the outdoors, or something. So after the patient died there might be a dozen plants in the person’s room

I had once or twice previously tried to keep a houseplant or two, but they never lasted long. When Ray and I first moved in together, taking care of the plants was his chore.

We acquired a few more. I wound up with some office plants from him (it had to do with my employer moving to a new building and several of us experiencing weird hay fever type symptoms in our offices; once I had a couple of big plants, mine went away). I had to learn to keep the plants alive. So I bought a couple of books. Soon, I was keeping multiple kinds of plant food around, managing the rotation of which nutrients and how concentrated based on the time of year.

When Ray got sick, I went from merely helping him with the home plants (while being fully responsible for my office plants) to being in charge of all of them. By the time he died, when a bunch of people sent flowers and sometimes plants, I was no longer convinced that any houseplant I was taking care of was doomed.

So it was a bit of trauma for me when one of the plants I had inherited from Ray—one of the plants he’d already owned when we met—began dying. At first I told myself that maybe it was just naturally dying of old age. But then I learned that Christmas Cactuses have lived for 70 years or more in greenhouses, getting to be the size of small trees. So, I learned more about them. I re-potted it, I checked the moisture level and pH of its soil every couple of days, and basically obsessed over it for weeks.

It still died.

This weekend I finally admitted that four of the houseplants that have been dying for months are unsalvagable and replaced them. Some of my friends think I should have given up on a couple of them a while back. I frequently adhere to the rule best articulated by the character of Keith the AIDS patient in the movie Latter Days: “We never throw anything out that isn’t completely dead. Right?”

Told in flashback

writing, ,

One of my pet peeves as a reader is the story told in flashback. Admittedly, one of the reasons I dislike it is because, having been involved with several small press and fannish projects over the years, I’ve read, in an editorial capacity, a huge number of stories written by aspiring/beginning writers. And a beginner usually doesn’t understand how to use a flashback.

The most common problem with the told-in-flashback story is simply that there is no dramatic tension. In the opening scene we meet a character interacting with some other people. The dialogue is often a bit of clever banter. Something happens in the scene which causes the main character to mention something that happened to him a long time ago… and in the next scene we are in that long ago time, and we watch the stuff happen.

The reason there is no dramatic tension is because usually the plot of the flashback portion of the story seems to place the main character’s life in jeopardy—except the reader knows that the character isn’t in real danger because in the opening scene set far in the future the character is alive. These amateur told-in-flashback stories suffer from an additional problem. Most of them all fall into the same outline:

  • Opening scene in which protagonist gives the story’s ending away by saying something like, “This reminds me of the time I almost died because of an engineering mistake…”
  • Several scenes of story in which the character gets into trouble because of said mistake, nearly dies, then survives somehow.
  • Closing scene in which we return to the opening and the other characters say something along the lines of, “Wow! That’s some story. You almost died because of an engineering mistake.”

It took me years of reading those stories or complaining about those stories before I finally realized what was going on. What is the most common way people are taught to write either informative essays in school, or to make presentations in either school or business: 1. Tell them what you’re going to tell them, 2. Explain it in detail, 3. Reinforce their memory by summarizing what you just told them.

When I reviewed such stories in an editorial process, I always advised the same thing: drop the opening scene! It’s unnecessary and gives away the ending. Start when the character actually gets into trouble and tell how he gets out of it. If you want to then flash forward to a a point long afterward to make an additional plot or character development point at the end, that’s fine, but don’t just rehash what the reader has just seen.

Which is not to say that there isn’t some value to be had in the story told in flashback. Particularly if you have a story in which it takes a while for the plot to develop (and that while is necessary, not simply a matter of the author rambling), a scene that grabs the reader’s attention, making them strongly want to know how the character(s) got in that situation, without giving anything away, can be a good opening. There are a couple of things you have to keep in mind even thing: the opening has to be quick—don’t spend a lot of time getting the reader involved in the framing sequence before you flashback, don’t give away anything.

I know I repeated the “don’t give away anything” part, but it is so important.

I’m watching a new TV show right now, mostly a typical modern police procedural with the soap opera-ish ongoing character plots. My main reason for watching it is because one character in the show is played by an actor I like a great deal. Only four or five episodes in, I’m already at the point where I’m putting up with the rest of the show just to see the actor I like doing his usual excellent job.

One of the things I’m putting up with is that not only is the entire series told in flashback, but each individual episode is also told in flashback. Each episode begins with another scene from the future period of the original flashback that introduces the incident about to be shown. Then each episode closes with another flashforward that ends with some sort of “shocking” revelation about the future of one of the other characters featured prominently in the episode.

So far, the individual opening scenes have always managed to either a) give away a plot point of the enclosed story of police solving a case, b) telegraphed in often laughably obvious ways the shocker we’re going to get in the closing scene, or c) both!

One reason they keep doing this is because the opening scene is always too long. Worse than that, they aren’t really all that interesting. The protagonist talks to someone while they walk from one place to another, generally.

If you think you need to tell a story in flashback, keep the future scene as short as you can. Make it intriguing, but don’t fall into the trap of trying to cleverly drop hints about what’s going to happen. For a story in flashback to work, the only thing that needs to be in the reader’s mind is a single variant on this question: how did this come to be?

Anything else gives things away, which makes the entire story a waste of the reader’s time.

It is a sin to waste the reader’s time.

It is April, and sometimes I am a fool…

life, , ,

…but I am not posting an April Fools’ Day joke.

I have done a few. In college as member of the editorial board of two different campus papers, I helped produce a few April Fool’s Day editions. On my old LiveJournal I am still rather proud of the post I wrote explaining why I had decided to become a Gay Republican and start actively working to oppress myself.

If I were to do an April Fool’s Day post, I would adhere to the following rules:

  • I plan it out in advance, giving myself time to edit it a time or two before it is posted.
  • The topic is not something that will make people worry (nothing about fake injuries or illness, not pretending to be angry at my friends, anything like that)
  • The butt of the joke needs to be me

I have, over the years since I started blogging, only come up with a few that met those conditions. Even though I tried to pick things that I didn’t think would upset someone, I managed to do so two of those times—the opening sentence of the Gay Republican joke made one friend think that Michael and I were breaking up, and one of my fellow bibliophile friends fell for the one where I Michael and I decided to throw away all 6000+ books in our house.

The point of a joke is to make people laugh. If they aren’t laughing, it isn’t funny.

I am fond of a good news April Fool’s Pranks. Among my favorites:

NPR: Portable Zip Codes

NPR: Exploding maple trees

Garden News: Dinosaur vine

And I can’t find a link to this one: one of the local radio stations did a story claiming one of the island out in Puget Sound had come loose from its moorings and was floating wildly around the Sound. They kept giving updates throughout the afternoon as the island was sighted in different places, along with attempts to try to capture it and tow it back.

Which came first, the bunny or the egg?

life, , ,

Which came first, the bunny or the egg? It is a question which has baffled philosophers1 since the dawn of time4.

The real question is: which came first, the quaint custom surrounding a particular commemoration or the highly unlikely5 explanation of its origin which insists said tradition is far more ancient than it could reasonably be? Which may seem a silly question, because obviously the post-dated fantastical explanation of a custom or tradition wouldn’t have any need to be concocted until after the custom or tradition had come into existence, right9?

I don’t have a good answer, other than to say there is no such thing as too many excuses to indulge in chocolate22.

Notes:
1. Or at least preschoolers2.

2. And smart-ass bloggers3.

3. Who, maturity-wise, often lag far behind the average preschool child.

4. Or, at least since the 19th Century, which is when the first contemporaneous reports of giving children decorated eggs at Easter are found, as well as the invention of the first “Easter Card” when one publisher first offered for sale stationary pre-printed with a drawing of a bunny and an Easter greeting.

5. Don’t get me started on just how ludicrous the various Ishtar/Mithra/Ēostre6 explanations are.

6. Bede’s Latin was superb and he is generally considered a good historical source, don’t get me wrong, but he wrote De temporum ratione with at least two political agendas in mind: a) the unification of the various ethnic groups of Britain into one nation7, and b) his animosity to the British method of calculating the date of Easter8.

7. Which was far from a foregone conclusion in the year 725 AD when Bede wrote that treatise.

8. A controversy which has divided the church for much of its history. Just last night our waitress, who was raised in the Eastern Orthodox Church, was commenting on the fact that her relatives back home aren’t celebrating Easter until May 5, as the resolution adopted at the Summit of Alepo, Syria by the World Council of Churches in 1997 has still not been put into effect.

9. Trying to inject logic into a discussion like this is clearly a fool’s errand10.

10. Mind you, as foolish as it may be, it can also be a lot of fun. Not unlike the debate about whether Jesus was a Zombie or a Lich which my husband interrupted my writing to give me a play-by-play of11.

11. At the time, the Lich partisans were deeply engaged in a discussion of what object functioned as his phylactery1216

12. The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons form of a horcrux13.

13. The Harry Potter-verse version of a muo-ping14.

14. The Buffy the Vampire Slayer-verse version of a soul jar15

15. A container or object which holds all or part of a person’s soul (or life, or heart) outside of their body, thus makes that person immortal and/or invulnerable so long as the Soul Jar remains intact.

16. The leading candidates being the Cross itself, the chalice that caught his blood, or the enchanted bread17 he fed his disciples at the Last Supper. All of which are, of course, incorrect20.

17. Which had spawned a mini debate about whether that meant that each of the 12 disciples as a Soul Container, or was the bread enchanted somehow to be indigestible21.

18. In which case, is the real reason Judas hung himself19 to try to thwart Jesus’ revivification?

19. Assuming you believe he did hang himself. Or was it murder?

20. Because obviously the place he hid his soul was the Keys that he gave to Peter. Why else has the elaborate system of selecting who gets to hold those keys evolved into the bizarre ritual of the Conclave of Cardinals that gather to select a new Pope?

21. Which leads to gross implications that I do not want to contemplate!

22. Make mine dark, please!

Oppression Olympics

news, , , , , ,

As a gay person, I am aware of (and have experienced) a certain amount of discrimination. In many situations I have been in a category that could be described as “second class citizen.”

As a white male, I am aware of the privilege that society confers on some people just because of outward appearances and how easy it is for us to not even notice it is happening. I have no doubt that I have found doors open to me that weren’t to others because I happen to be pale and male.

It is very easy, while discussing any issue involving rights, discrimination, and related topics to fall into an unproductive cycle of arguing with each other about who does and doesn’t benefit from various areas of privilege and which among them is “truly able” to understand the oppression of others. This form of circular firing squad is sometimes referred to as the “Oppression Olympics.” Arguing over who is the most oppressed, or just trying to explain that one is properly aware of the oppression of others, wastes an incredible amount of time and energy.

Because two cases involving one aspect of non-heterosexual rights were before the Supreme Court this week, and because people determined to deny certain rights to those non-heterosexuals have staged marches and rallies in the nation’s capital in response to those cases, every news outlet has been covering the cases, the rallies, and so on. Every organization involved in the battle for or against non-heterosexual rights is posting videos, news releases, and so on. Everyone of us who follows this thing are linking to those stories, videos, and other postings—including me.

I understand it can get a bit tiring for people who are not invested in the story du jour. I do.

So a bunch of people were linking to a particular tumblr post this week whose purpose was to make sure the debate about equality doesn’t just devolve to marriage equality. This is a noble goal that I support, but one of the points made on the post epitomizes a major flaw in this ongoing internal debate:

examine what marriage as an institution has historically looked like. marriage isn’t even good for most white folks if they don’t fit into a heteronormative, able-bodied supremacist, upper-ruling-class, nuclear family frame

This is a nod to the argument that some people make that marriage is bad because it’s only useful to people who what to mimic or pass as straights, or only useful to people who are not racial minorities, et cetera.

There is more than one argument going on in this, some of them contradictory. Let’s tackle a couple of them:

One of the implicit points in this boils down to: “your proposal [marriage equality] does not solve this host of other problems, so we should not pursue it.” This is the equivalent of the FDA saying, “Your new antibiotic doesn’t cure cancer, Parkinson’s disease, or celiac disease—it only treats infections by some bacteria that have grown resistant to other antibiotics—therefore we cannot approve your drug.” Marriage equality removes only one barrier to a host of legal rights in our system, and it’s true that there are a lot of rights that aren’t effected, and it’s true that there are a lot of people who still can’t get at those rights or have no interest in those rights, but that doesn’t mean that that particular barrier should remain in place.

The more obvious part of the argument, “what marriage as an institution has historically looked like” is even more ridiculous. This argument is virtually the same false argument the anti-gay people make: cherry-picking some aspects of the historical and religious meanings of marriage, and insisting that any discussion of civil marriage is exactly the same thing. The anti-gay people argue that allowing same-sex partners to access the legal rights associated with civil marriage will somehow magically destroy the sacred power of the religious meaning of marriage. These non-anti-gay folks argue that allowing same-sex partners to access the legal rights associated with civil marriage will somehow magically force all the nasty bad aspects of the historical meaning of marriage onto people who don’t want it. Neither is true. Because we are not talking about going back in time, and we are not talking about any religion’s sacred vision of marriage. We’re talking about civil marriage, which is the legal recognition of a decision citizens make as to who counts as their legal next-of-kin, and a collection of legal rights and responsibilities that go along with that designation.

The entire “it’s not even good for” argument is based upon this historical aspect, rather than on the actual practice or laws of marriage today. To return to my FDA analogy, claiming that marriage is only of interest to “able-bodied supremacist, upper-ruling-class” people is the same as someone saying, “I oppose the use and development of antibiotics because the medieval practice of bleeding proves that all medicine is harmful.” The folks who spout this argument about marriage are the anti-vaxxers of the civil rights movement.

Another argument implied in there is the notion that too much energy is going to the marriage equality fight when there are other, more important problems we could be solving. The “more important” argument has been used forever to thwart civil rights progress. It has probably been the most common argument thrown in the face of feminists for decades. There will always be something someone thinks is more important, but that’s not sufficient reason to halt all pursuit of this. Besides, many of those more important, more complicated issues will be slightly easier to tackle after achieving victory here. After each incremental improvement, society at large has to get used to the new normal. Once used to one change without the collapse of society, it is easier to see the ridiculousness of other forms of discrimination. It’s like each improvement lowers all the other hurdles a fraction of an inch.

I’ve ranted plenty about the frustrations of an incremental approach. But I also recognize that every now and then, when enough of the little improvements have accumulated, a kind of tipping point is reached, and society is ready to take a much bigger leap. I’d love to have the leaps happen more rapidly. That isn’t going to happen if we don’t take the baby steps when we can get them.

There are reasons that the first couple in line to get a marriage certificate when Washington, D.C. recognized marriage equality was a pair of working class African-american women. They were not trying to transform into white heterosexual elitists. They want the legal protections (hospital visitation rights, medical decisions on behalf of partner, housing lease transfer, all the rights with joint parenting, sick leave for care of partner, bereavement leave, wrongful death benefits, et cetera) that come with marriage. Yes, it’s about choosing who to share your life with, but it’s also about the law respecting that decision.

Occasionally someone does the math to calculate what it would cost a gay couple to have drawn up and properly registered the legal documents—power of attorney, durable power of attorney (which is not the same thing), property deed with right of survivorship, wills, and so on—to grant the fraction of those rights that the law allows for someone other than the spouse. The last one I saw was $15,000. And that is for only some of the rights that come with marriage! Compare that to the $64 Michael and I paid for our marriage license, and it becomes crystal clear that marriage equality is not an upper-ruling class supremacy issue. In fact, it is the opposite. Not fighting for marriage equality is pro upper-ruling class supremacy.

So while, yes, there are people in the lgbt community who aren’t in favor of marriage equality, they are no less wrong to do so than the screaming Bible-thumpers.

But enough of this serious talk! I’d much rather listen to Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart break the marriage equality debate down, wouldn’t you?

Music, part two

music

There’s enough heavy, serious stuff going on in the world that I wanted to keep track of, that I have been listening to less music than usual, lately. So I thought rather than ranting more about marriage equality or any other news of the world, that I should share some music.

This is part of a project to create mixtapes covering forty years of music (1972-2012). The final project will not just include remixes of songs from the varies eras, but other sound clips. Whether you are interested in a big project like that or not, this remix of Paul Simon’s “Call Me Al” is fun:

I was looking for another song, entirely, but happened across this interesting cello number that I couldn’t stop listening to:

And this one is fun:

This is just fun (even if they won’t let me embed it):

https://soundcloud.com/bombay-bicycle-club/bombay-bicycle-club-shuffle

And finally, no music post this week could be complete without Black Simon & Garfunkel:

If only it were only a joke

news, ,

We can pick apart the illogical arguments forever (and if feels like we have been!), but in reality, the opponents are as reasonable as this:

Skewed polls and secret money

news, society, , , , , , , , ,

A few days after election night, when the leader of one of the local anti-gay groups conceded that voters had approved marriage equality, he groused about how the pro-gay groups had outspent them three-to-one. Just a week earlier he had been insisting that the polls which were all predicting passage of the referendum were skewed. “People are reluctant to say what they really feel to a pollster, because the pro-sodomy side has tricked the media into calling support of traditional marriage as bigotry. But when those voters are in the privacy of the voting booth, they will vote their true feelings.”

They did vote their true feelings. Fortunately for those of us who believe in equality, they had also been telling their true feelings to the pollsters. Surprise, surprise!

Sadly, I believe it was a complete surprise to the opposers. It shouldn’t have been. They had other evidence, and it was right there in that hypocritical comment he made about spending. It was hypocritical because it had only been four years before, during the Proposition 8 campaign in California that the anti-gay side had been doing the outspending. And for years before that, each ballot measure that came up in any state related to marriage equality or civil unions, it was the anti-gay side that always seemed to have the money advantage.

This time around, in Washington, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota, the forces of hate came up short both in the ballot box and fundraising. And it wasn’t simply a matter that suddenly our side was better at raising money. No, the big story is that they have, in just the last few years, experienced a serious drop in donations.

It isn’t just the amount of money. What’s more significant is the number of donors. The national organizations have been very secretive about their funding. They have refused, again and again, to reveal their donor lists, even when they appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost, they have tried to keep that secret. Eventually, some details are beginning to emerge:

Each year, according to [the National Organization for Marriage]’s tax filings, two or three donors give NOM between $1 million and $3.5 million apiece; another two or three give between $100,000 and $750,000; and 10 or so others give between $5,000 and $95,000. In 2009 the top five donors made up three fourths of NOM’s budget; in 2010 the top two donors gave two thirds of the year’s total donations; and in 2011 the top two donors gave three fourths of NOM’s total income. But those funders’ identities are a mystery. Their names are redacted on NOM’s federal tax returns.

My emphasis added. Whoever those mysterious top two donors are, their donations have became a larger and larger proportion of the pot, as the thousands who gave less than $5000 dollars a year have dwindled to hundreds.

Statistics tell us the the most vehement opposition comes from the oldest voters, so a percentage of that drop off represents to reality of demographics. As elderly opposers die off, without a compensating proportion of supporters coming up in younger generations, some of that is just inevitable. But the drop off in support to the anti-gay cause in the last three or four years is far in excess of what could be accounted for by mere demographics.

People are changing their minds.

There will always be a hardcore group opposed to equal rights for gay, lesbian, bi, and trans people. Just a couple weeks ago at the big conservative conference a guy stood up and argued in favor of slavery because he believed it was a self-evident truth that whites were superior to blacks. He wasn’t an invited speaker, and to their credit, panelists and audience members challenged him on it, but during the ensuing back and forth he also made a comment to the effect the women shouldn’t have the right to speak up in public, either. So, just like that unrepentant racist and misogynist, there will always be homophobes among us.

But as more of the moderates and non-hateful conservatives come around, that view will be limited to the lunatic fringe where it belongs.

In the months since the vote in Washington, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota went our way, the opposers’ spokespeople have gone from saying that they were outspent 3-to-1 (which turned out to be a small exaggeration in our state) to claiming they were outspent 4-to-1, then 5-to-1… the last quote I read was “more than 7-to-1.” I believe their exaggerations get worse due to desperation. They hope that skewing their claim of victimhood will prompt more people to donate more money, which they think can turn the tide.

What they don’t understand is that the only skewed “polls” were their own. They fell into the common trap of thinking that because most of the people they know and like agree with them, that it absolutely must be the case the most people, period, do so. They think that since they still manage to raise a lot of money that there is still a lot of support, ignoring the fact that it’s a smaller and smaller number of people sending in the money. Because they are convinced of the truth of their cause, they believe that the only reasons polls and voting can be going against them is some kind of chicanery. They think that calling us pedophiles, comparing our relationships to bestiality or incest is “civil discourse,” but if we call them bigots we’re being bullies.

Most of all, many of them believe all the lies and distortions that they tell about us. Lies that other people can no longer believe once they get to know us:

Skipping the convention

fandom, , , , ,

This will be the first time in 26 years that I have not attended NorWesCon (the Northwest Science Fiction Convention). Technically, the first one1 I actually attended was not NorWesCon, but was called Alternacon (the notorious NorWesCon IX2 having had so many disasters3 that the hotel canceled the next year’s contract, forcing the con into a smaller hotel, and a limited membership.

I’ve been to every one since. a couple of them I only attended for a day or a part of a day6.

Seventeen years ago at a NorWesCon I met Michael7. We didn’t see each other again until the next NorWesCon. It was a couple months after that that we started hanging out, and nine months after that before we went on our first official date. The next NorWesCon after that was the first we shared a room, and we’ve been to all of them since.

So while I think of the anniversary of our first date as our official anniversary8, he always considered NorWesCon as our anniversary9.

All of which leads to why I’m feeling a bit odd and sentimental about skipping NorWesCon this year. There are a few reasons—most of them just personal timing things, though also we haven’t really enjoyed ourselves as much as we used to the last couple of years. Certainly we both had a lot more fun at EverfreeNW last year.

Maybe we just need to take a year off.

I was shocked to realized today that the convention is this next weekend. Just a few days away10.

This also means that this is the first time in many, many years that we will be home for Easter. I should probably make some plans for that.

Of course, it is the first time that this particular anniversary has not happened while we were at a convention. Maybe we should just celebrate by ourselves…

Notes:

1. I had been wanting to attend the con for a few years before that, having several friends who regularly attended. It sometimes feels as if I vicariously attended a few earlier than my first.

2. When NorWesCon IX rolled around I was attending college nearby, but I couldn’t afford to chip in on a hotel room and so forth. The con happened during Spring Break, so I was back at my Mom’s (after spending a few days with friends caravanning down; it was a strange week). When we arrived at Mom’s place, she barely let us get unloaded before she and my step-dad were loading us in the car and dragged us to a nearby Community College. They wouldn’t say why, just that it was a surprise. The Guest of Honor at NorWesCon that year was Anne McAffrey, and she had flown into Portland to visit friends before going up to Seatac for the convention. And she was doing a reading and book signing that night. So I got to see the Guest of Honor that year, in addition to hearing about all the experiences of my friends who attended the con.

3. In addition to the stories from my friends attending, and people I’ve since met who attended or were staff for that convention, I also got to hear about the con from a classmate who, at the time he was telling me about it, didn’t realize I was one of those “freaks.” He was a fundamentalist, and his wife worked in the management office at the hotel. She was also a fundamentalist, as were many of the employees there, because the Assistant Manager was a member of a very large nearby church, and had heavily recruited among the congregation for his hiring. When the Assistant Manager saw some of the costumes and pagan imagery on t-shirts and such early in the con, he had become convinced that the attendees were all Satanists (not to mention all those godless atheist science types, et cetera), and had instructed the employees who he trusted to go out of their way to document any bad incident that happened, because he was determined that those sinful freaks would never come back to their hotel.

The organizers of the convention were unaware of this. They were too busy dealing with about a thousand more attendees than their wildest dreams had expected, and they were woefully understaffed to deal with them. The physical layout of the hotel (it’s really a complex of several buildings interconnected with enclosed walkways, rather than one building), made patrolling difficult for con security4.

A bunch of bad things happened, such as damage to the rooms, people sleeping in the hallways, drunk people making a lot of noise very late at night, et cetera.

4. There are always some people attending any type of convention5 who do stupid and/or very inappropriate things. Sometimes it’s just being thoughtless. Sometimes it’s because they’re drinking. Sometimes it’s just because they are in their late teens and this is the first time they’ve been that far from parental supervision.

5. I can tell you stories from a high school journalism conference that will make your toes curl. And equally disturbing ones from a Bible conference I once attended.

6. While I was going through my divorce, a friend who had been through a few more serious breakups than I had advised that sometimes it best to let your ex “have custody” of fandom for a while, so that mutual acquaintances don’t feel awkward, if nothing else. So for at least two years I only made those brief appearances, rather than attending for the entire convention.

7. We have different recollections of where we met. I remember meeting him at a room party on the Saturday afternoon. He remembers meeting me at a specific panel on Friday morning. I remember participating in the panel, I just didn’t recall him being one of the other people there.

8. I can never remember the date of our commitment ceremony. For one thing, it was extremely informal. If you insist, I can go dig around in the filing cabinet and find our paperwork.

9. Of course, now that we’re officially married, rather than domestic partnered, I suppose our official anniversary should be December 9. Or maybe we should just celebrate all three.

10. Which means that a whole bunch of our friends will all be gone this weekend.