Conventions

How Others See Us

~ Cheryl ~ 37 Comments

RaceFail09 continues to rumble on in the blogosphere, and if you are one of the people who haven’t been following it then Peggy at Biology in Science Fiction has a lengthy round-up of links. However, that’s not why I’m pointing you at her post. Peggy produces some of the best fan writing about science fiction around at the moment (and was on my Hugo ballot), and I’d love to get to meet her one day. But despite being white and a book reader she says she doesn’t feel comfortable about going to cons. She has the impression that con-attending fans are not only racist, but misogynist and elitist as well. And the killer point for me was:

Of course it’s only convention-goers (or people willing to pay the convention fee) who are allowed to vote on the Hugo Awards, so in that sense it’s people who attend cons who help define which novels are the “important” ones in the genre.

As with the whole of this debate, it really doesn’t matter whether people’s perceptions are correct or not, what matters is that they have those perceptions.

I have another post about the future of Worldcon coming – hopefully later this week. I’ll keep trying, but sometimes it seems very much like a losing battle.

My P-Con Schedule

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

P-Con is now less than 2 weeks away, so the panel schedules are starting to emerge. Here’s mine:

  • 12:00 Sat – Room 1 – Genre Fifth Columnists: Champions for the cause, poachers, or merely writers with a broad imagination? A discussion on the topic of “mainstream” books with genre elements.
  • 15:00 Sun – Room 2 – Genre fiction magazines: Genre fiction magazines are finding it more difficult to survive. What are the options for survival, or are they a “dead horse”?

Looks like that bumps the Toby Litt up the “to read” pile.

Neil (Clarke) – of there’s anything you want me to say about Clarkesworld, let me know.

Busy Day Catch-Up

~ Cheryl

The last couple of days appear to have gone past in a whirl and I haven’t got nearly as much done as I had hoped, but so it goes. The important thing is that I’m mostly packed in preparation for heading off to London tomorrow. Here are a couple of things I wanted to say more about but have failed dismally to do so:

I also haven’t spent as much time at Flycon as I would have liked, and of course tomorrow I’ll be on trains. If any of you have been spending time there, I would be interested to hear what you made of it.

#Flycon is underway

~ Cheryl

There is a convention happening this weekend, in cyberspace. It is called Flycon, and the whole thing is happening online with the aid of IRC chat rooms, blogs and the like. You can find a whole bunch of information about joining in at their LiveJournal community. I’ll maybe see you online some time over the weekend.

Shaun Tan in Dublin

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Heads up, Irish readers. Children’s Books Ireland has announced the program for its Summer Conference (May 16/17) and one of the guests is the fabulous Australian artist and story-teller, Shaun Tan. (This news via the good folks at Aussiecon Four where Shaun is also due to be a guest.) Other guests include local star Eoin Colfer and Patrick Ness, author of the very highly rated The Knife of Never Letting Go. The Conference costs €75 and you’ll also need to be a CBI member (€30).

It does sound interesting, but it is also the same weekend as Imaginales. Oh, decisions, decisions.

Pádraig – let me know if you want contact details for Shaun and I’ll buzz the Aussies for you.

But What Can Twitter Do?

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Apart from waste even more of your time, of course.

Well, Twitter seems to have taken over the online world pretty comprehensively over the last few months. Don’t just take my word for it, there are even CongressTwitters. British politicians have been twits for a long time, of course, but that’s another issue. Companies such as Google have their own Twitter accounts. And all sorts of media personalities have huge followings because there are few things that people seem to like more than glimpses into the lives of the rich and famous.

Following celebrities, however, is only one aspect of what Twitter can do. You don’t have to use it to be a voyeur. It can do stuff for you as well. In fact it appears to be remarkably good at doing all sorts of things.

To start with, you can get news. I was on Twitter when Neil Gaiman made his now infamous announcement of his Newbery win. I was on Twitter when Mary Robinette Kowal announced that the Nebula final ballot was online. I was in the middle of writing this post when the news of the corrections to the Nebula ballot came up, and I immediately switched to SFAW to blog about it. This is useful to me.

More importantly, however, Twitter can get news out. You can follow discussion of specific issues on TwitterFall (such as the tweeting from Potlatch that I mentioned over the weekend). You can also find out what is currently a hot topic on Twitter by looking at the cloud map on Twitscoop. There was a glorious moment last weekend when a chance remark by Neil got “Armageddon” to appear there. I have set myself a target of getting “Hugo” and “Worldcon” visible on Twitscoop this August. Given the number of followers that Neil has, I think this is very achievable.

Remember the liveblogging of the Hugos that I did last year? Well now the technology I used for that can take input from Twitter streams. That means your webcast can have roving reporters as well. In fact it would have been perfect for the World Fantasy Awards coverage because Gigi could have tweeted the winners in rather that having to txt them to me and have me re-type them.

TwitPic is enormously useful as well. With it, and the iPhone, I can be out and about anywhere and do live reportage complete with pictures. Just imagine what you can do in terms of convention coverage with that.

And last night I discovered that Twitter can also do IM. If you find yourself in a complex conversation on Twitter you can just switch over to TinyChat and talk there.

There are things that Twitter can’t do. For example, it won’t support essays like this. But I continue to be impressed at just how much it can do, and I’m really enthusiastic about the sort of online coverage we can do for conventions using it.

Next Up at Chapters

~ Cheryl

It is now March. P-Con is only a few weeks away. Dublin is going to have a lot of top-class SF&F writers visiting. Will there be an event in Chapters? Of course there will. Pádraig Ó Méalóid has been busy.

On Friday, March 27, 2009, from 5:00pm to 6:30pm, there will be a mass signing at the store featuring Oisín McGann, Juliet E McKenna, Ken MacLeod, CE Murphy and Charles Stross. You can find the Facebook event here. My plane is due in to Dublin at 14:45, so I’m reasonably confident that I will be there. However, it doesn’t sound like there will be readings so I doubt that there will be anything to video.

The Scalzi Rule at #potlatch

~ Cheryl ~ 30 Comments

If you do follow the tweeting from Potlatch you’ll see that they had a panel about something called “The Scalzi Rule”. This was news to John, who isn’t there, but is seeing some of the tweets. Apparently this rule is:

A panel audience should ask questions, not make statements

That’s a debatable point alright, and it probably depends a lot on the size of the audience. But let’s leave the Potlatch folks to discuss that. I have a rather different question. You see, this rule seems really quite tame for John. If there is going to be something called “The Scalzi Rule”, surely it should be a bit more, well, ferocious? So here’s your question for today: assuming that you didn’t know what “The Scalzi Rule” was, what would you have guessed it to be?

Update: A warm welcome to anyone directed here from Whatever, and many thanks to John for sending you here. If you fancy a look around while you are here, you may want to check out my video diary featuring Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer.

TwitterFall and #potlatch

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Here’s a good way to follow what is going on at an event that is being Twittered by multiple folks. Go here and add a search for #potlatch. Several of the people tweeting from the convention are using that tag, and Twitterfall will help you follow what they are saying. (Don’t use TwitterFall without any filtering though, you’ll need a sanity roll after a few minutes.)

P-Con Preview Revisited

~ Cheryl

There have been some very useful comments on my P-Con Preview post from people who know Dublin rather better than I do. In particular it turns out that I confused the Airlink and Aircoach services, which although very similar do not go to quite the same places. Those of you who are going to P-Con may want to keep an eye on that post. My apologies for any confusion caused.

Silver Linings R Us

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

The Vancouver Sun, bless it, is worried about the Montreal economy. Now that the city has lost its F1 Grand Prix, where will it get tourist dollars from? Oh, not to worry, the World Science Fiction Convention is coming to town.

Well, to be fair, Montreal is also getting the World Diabetes Conference, which is estimated at a significant 12,000 attendees, but it looks like we are actually the second biggest show in town this year. Let’s not let them down.

SF Contest for Kids in Canada

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Via the Carl Brandon Society I have discovered the IMAGINE Sci-fi/fantasy Contests. These are a series of contests for kids: a short story competition for grades 6-12, a poster art contest for grades 7-9, and a newly launched poster art contest for grade 5.

The contests are run by the Visions of Science Network for Learning (VoSNL) who, according to their web site, are a “not for profit organization that advances the educational achievements and career aspirations of African Canadian and other under-represented youth in the fields of science, mathematics and technology.” They sound like a great bunch of people. There’s more information about the contests here.

And you know, this is a Canadian initiative, and Worldcon is in Canada this year. Isn’t there something we could do? At the very least I’d love to see the winning posters on display at the convention. And I know Worldcon can’t afford to pay travel and accommodation, but if the parents of the winners can get their SF-mad charges to Montreal I’d like to think they’d be welcome guests.

D3 Masquerade Video – The Bear

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Given that I’m into doing video at the moment, I have finally got around to finishing the final piece that I shot in Denver last year. I’d been putting this one off because I had it in my head that YouTube would only allow up to 5 minutes, and this one raw was longer than that. However, doing the Neil & Amanda stuff I saw that the actual limit was 10 minutes, and anyway after editing this one was actually 4:59.

So now it is online, and I’d really like you to watch this because I’m very pleased with it. Stephen Clark’s bear is one of the most impressive costumes I have ever seen, and the video tells you a lot that won’t have been at all obvious if you only saw it on stage.

There are also several stills of the bear, including one of me having a bear hug, in my D3 masquerade photo album.