jimhines

 
Diversicon selfie with (left to right) me, Naomi Kritzer, and Scott Lohman


It's Wednesday, so I'm back on Dreamwidth. It is really starting to amuse me that I spend so much time intending to get over here to blog and then, inevitibly, it is somehow ALWAYS a Wednesday when I do. Seriously, I had been planning on doing a daily con report from Diversicon, but I somehow did not manage it. To be fair, we were "on" a lot at the con.

Okay, so--how did it go?

I will be honest. I was really uncertain that this convention had its ducks in a row. There were duck in the pond, clearly, but I wasn't sure, at first, that anything meaningful was going to happen with said ducks. 

naomikritzer , for instance, only HAPPENED to notice that the Diversicon programming grid had us at a reading at Webber Library on Thursday earlier that week. She checked the HCL schedule and an author appearance at Webber was nowhere to be found. Well, that turned out to be because Diversicon had privately rented a room. But, regardless, I wasn't sure if I was going to a library in NE Minneapolis or not! Or, if I did go, if anyone other than Naomi would be there. We did try to ask, but only got a confirmation the day of. 

Like much of what follows, everything turned out not only to be FINE but actually kind of great (??)


Image: Naomi reading. The library meeting room was smallish, but the event was decently well attended!

I am not in this picture because I took it, but I would say that despite the fact that I feel like the whole thing went off last minute, the event was very well attended. I ended up reading from my newest book, which I am kind of struggling with. So it was nice to have some audience reaction to it and to get a chance to gauge how it read out loud in a very specific way. For instance, I regularly read my stuff out loud for flow, but I rarely read it out loud to other people to guage involvement. The bonus of being neurotypical (beslices the obvious) is that I can feel attention leaving the story when I read it out loud in a room like this and, of course, when the audience ignites. So both this and my reading at Diversicon really shaped my sense of the novel. (So thank you to everyone who was there!)

I sort of thought that we'd lucked out with the Thursday night reading. I did not necessarily think that the luck would hold all weekend. 

But it did.

I do not know what black magic Diversicon had going on, but despite the fact that behind the scenes the programming schedule seemed to be changing minute by minute right up until the doors opened, once things started, not only did they run smoothly, but the energy of the convention increased as the con went on.

Friday was the most chaotic for me because I had a lot going on at home. I didn't really see (or remember to ask or check) my Diversicon schedule, so I had to let Diversicon know that I couldn't make it to the convention until almost 4 pm. That turned out not to be true. Mason was done with his interview by 2 pm and I was able to be on my way to pick up Eleanor Arnason and off to the convention by 3 pm, which meant I made it into the con by 3:30 pm.

In another wierd bit of black magic, both Friday and Saturday, we arrived exactly at the same time as Eleanor's friend Ruth Burman. This was great for Eleanor because the one thing I couldn't provide was an EARLY ride home for her. Eleanor, who is even less of a night owl than I am, would have had to stay at the con until nearly midnight on Saturday if it wasn't for Ruth. 

My first panel was about something I wasn't sure I knew anything about. "Queens of the Apocalypse." When I was waiting for Mason to finish his interview before I headed to the con, I had a chance to ponder this. I think the panel title had gotten a bit lost in translation because Naomi has been known recently as the queen of the cozy apocalypse thanks, in part to stories like "So Much Cooking" and "The Year Without Sunshine." Since I was listed as the only panelist, I decided that what I'd do was introduce the audience to the subgenre of "Soft Apocalypses" which is a Thing and hopefully start a conversation about what the appeal of such things are, etc., etc. LUCKILY, Naomi didn't have a panel scheduled opposite this one and so she joined me in the discussion. Given that I planned it out in the car on the way to the con, it went surprisingly well. As you can see in the selfie above, one of the fun things about the convention hotel (there weren't a whole lot of them, it being way out in Plymouth and laid out extremely strangely) is that the panel rooms all had whiteboards, which we just decided to use. So, I was able to write out all of my recommendations.  People took photos of the whiteboard after the panel!  

Then, I attempted to get dinner in the hotel, which was a complete disaster. 

They had a "make your own" sandwhich which listed chicken as a substitute for hamburger, but I apparently made a mistake choosing that option. I just wanted a simple chicken sandwhich--chicken, American cheese, lettuce, and mayo. That's it. But, not only did my food never arrive until everyone was finished, when it did it had no cheese, lettuce that seemed to have salad dressing on it, and a dollop of salsa? Which was not great because thanks to GERDS I really can't eat raw onions anymore and I'm not a fan of tomatoes, I never have been. But, whatever, I was so starved at that point that I ate it. The only nice thing? The waiter could tell how irritated I was and comped my meal.

But, like that's the other weird thing about this hotel? NO LUNCH service. 

I hung around after dinner because as GoHs, it's expected that you attend both opening and closing ceremonies. Scott L, who is chairing this year, asked me to say an opening statement, which I should have expected that I'd be called upon to do, but somehow didn't. I fumbled a little bit, but then thinking about how this might be our last Diversicon, I launched into a whole schpiel about what I have loved about Diversicon since its inception.

Eleanor had gotten a ride home with Ruth at that point and so I hung around a little bit longer, but bailed early under the assumption that Saturday would be the late night. 

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Saturday got complicated by the fact that I was picking up Eleanor again and Saint Paul, in its infinite wisdom, decided to close down eastbound highway 94. I got myself coffee, but I still managed to be kind of bolluxed up by the whole construction situation. I was fifteen mintues late to pick up Eleanor, who admitted that had Patrick not sat with her, she was considering bailing. But, the highway going west was open and, shockingly, traffic free, so despite my delay we managed to get to the hotel on time. And, as noted above, right on the heels of Ruth Burman.

My first panel on Saturday was "SF Writers and D&D," which Naomi and I had proposed for a couple of reasons. First, she and I have started playing D&D again and, secondly, one of the posthumous guests of honor, Andre Norton, wrote Quagg Keep after having been invited by Gary Gyagax to play in the Greyhawk world of D&D (citation).  We started out kind of uncertain about how much we'd have to say, but about a half hour into the panel the caffeine hit my system and I went FULL CON MODE.

Some of you have seen this transformation.

That was good because it carried me though the rest of the day.  I missed Naomi's reading in favor of hanging out in the hall with Greg Johnson and Martha Hood and someone else whose name I missed, who like a lot of men who are aging in fandom has gone with Wizardcore as his look. The three of us discussed the Seattle Worldcon Hugo Awards as all of us watched it, either in-person or streaming.

Then I had a reading, followed by a panel on podcasts & podcasting. I was the only panelist listed on that panel, but Naomi and Martha joined me and so we managed to have a lot of good recommendations. 

At some point in here I ate lunch brought to me by our fabulous guest liason, Bast, and a bunch of us went out to dinner together in the classic convention style. Table for SEVEN at the Red Robin (which was made kind of fantastic by our drill sargent of a waitress!) In the middle of dinner I asked the question "What will post-capitalism really look like?" and a half dozen or so people in rotating shifts proceeded to spend much of the rest of the night as we wandered back to the hotel's lounge area attempting to unravel this question. This included sraun who had to miss much of the convention due to the fact that his wife, Irene, had taken a fall on Friday night and ended up admitted to the hospital. She's home safe now, but that was NOT how anyone wanted her to have to spend the weekend!


Image: a visual break in the wall of text!  A bumble bee on a purple flower.

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Sunday.

The strangeest thing about Diversicon was the fact that the energy of this convention continued to rise throughout the weekend. Normally, there's a bit of a peak on Saturday night and Sunday feels like winding down. Not so Diversicon!  We found out that one of the reasons for this is that Diversicon continued to gain memberships as the weekend wore on--they started with something like 38 and had nearly double that by the end. I know there are some of you out there thinking is 60-something really a lot? Diversicon is a small convention and this number was enough, in fact, to put the con into the black. There will be a Diversicon 33!  Hooray!

Sunday started out strong, panel-wise, with "Keeping on Keeping on (Diversity in SF)"  We can partly thank Elenaor Arnason, who was not able to come on Sunday, but who asked me this question as we were driving back and forth to the con. "Do we still need Diversicon? Is diversity baked into SFF now? Does it need its own convention?" This is a real question. I mean, I think the answer is an obvious "YES!" but it is notable that SFF, as a whole, has really made lifting up diverse voice a priority and it has, to many extents, worked. Obviously, there is always more work to do, but, especially with Gaylaxicon coming up, this was a question that was close to my heart. 

The panel I should have prepared more for was "Hacking, Hackers & Heists," as it devolved (evolved?) into a discusion of artifical intelligence as it exists today -- LLMs. But, I think we mostly kept on topic, despite that. 

I ate my lunch in the con suite and then caught the end of "End of the World Fiction and/or Hope Punk" which was pretty interesting, and then Naomi and I sat in to the Second Foundation/Rivendell Group Discussion of our work. Our final official panel was our Two-Person Book Club, which is something that Naomi and I do informally and we thought it would be fun to bring to an audience. Basically, we just trade hot takes on whatever it is we're currently reading. For poor Naomi, this often means listening to me talk about manga, but she's also been on a mainstream romance kick right now, so it seems like a fair trade. ;-)

Closing ceremonies was surprisingly high energy, like I noted, and I had hoped to hang around for the after con dinner, but my brain had, by that point, completely fried.

I had several absolutely lovely conversations with folks one-on-one and for a convention I was certain was going to be at best disorganized, Diversicon fully blew past my expectations and not only cleared the lowest bar but actually won the race (to over extend the metaphors and mix them up a bit.) 

It was an unexpected pleasure all around.