wiscon 2010

I’ve been going to WisCon every year since 2005. What? You haven’t heard of WisCon? It’s the world’s leading feminist science fiction convention. And it’s right here in Madison, just a few minutes from home.

 

Mixed Feelings

Every year, I go — and every year, I have mixed feelings about it. I love the convention atmosphere. I love the art show. I love the panels. I love the sense of acceptance and openness at the convention. I love all of the creative energy.

Every year, some of that creative energy rubs off on me. I feel creatively affirmed, recharged, and ready to take on the world. I’m eager to write again and bursting with ideas.

And every year, I get terrified. I’m terminally shy. Since I go to the convention alone most of the time, it’s that much harder for me. The in-between times are painful. I always feel like I don’t belong. I’m not a published sf/f writer. I don’t consider myself a career writer. I hardly write as much as I want to — and what I do write, usually turns out as blog posts or mainstream fiction rather than speculative fiction.
 

Out of My Comfort Zone

This year’s con was different though. Oh, I still went in with mixed feelings — but this year I decided to step outside of my comfort zone. My anxiety was higher than it usually is at a con, but the payoff was higher too. To step out of my comfort zone, I did three things I’ve never done before:

1. Signed up for and was assigned to two panels
2. Decided to do the karaoke
3. Put a conversation-starter note on my name badge

Some things turned out better than others — my first panel was a huge personal failure, but my second panel was an equally huge personal success — but I think all three things made this the best con I’ve ever gone to.
 

Panel Fail

So what is stepping outside of my comfort zone? Mainly, it was signing up to be on a couple of panels. I ended up being assigned to two panels: Mothers and Daughters, and I Write But Not SF/F.

My first panel of the day was Mothers and Daughters:

In a follow–up to last year’s Fathers and Daughters panel, we discuss the impact mothers, even those dead or absent, can have on their daughters, and how daughters can change mothers. There are many books where mothers are missing from the story, but that doesn’t mean they are unimportant to the characters. Would Flora Segunda have been half as spunky without her unique background? How is Ista of Chalion changed and challenged by motherhood? How many of your favorite stories portray girls forced to become substitute mothers?

It truly was a great panel. Greer Gillman had so much to say, that she could have hogged the mic for the entire hour and nobody would have complained at all. Shira Lipkin was an amazing moderator. She hadn’t even known she was the moderator, and she didn’t have time to meet in the Green Room beforehand, but she had a very good set of questions lined up and made a fantastic effort to include me in the panel discussion.

Unfortunately, I was so anxiety-ridden and discombobulated that I felt and probably looked like a bluthering idiot. I refused to let that get me down though. Instead, I made a list of all of the things that I learned from what I’m calling my Personal Panel Fail. I think the panel was, in itself, a success. But for me personally, it was a failure. Here’s why, and what I learned from it:
 

Mistake #1: I picked this panel for the wrong reason. I had a very personal interest in the topic, and although I do have a lot to say about it, I didn’t have a lot to say about it that related to sf/f books. I should not have been behind the table for this one; I should have been in the audience instead.

Lesson #1: When you pick a panel at WisCon, no matter how much you have to say, make sure that what you have to say about the topic relates back to sf/f (unless it’s an “issues” panel, which this one was not).

Mistake #2: I kept waiting for the moderator to contact me by email, and was too afraid to step on anybody else’s toes (not to mention shy) to contact everybody myself.

Lesson #2: If you haven’t heard from the panel moderator, or for that matter, anybody else on the panel, within a week or at least a few days of your panel — contact them yourself! They may simply not be aware that they are the moderator.

Mistake #3: I didn’t prepare well for this panel. I talked about the panel with a friend, and started bouncing some really good ideas around, but I never took the time to write them down. Then Saturday morning, on the way to Madison, I was overtaken by Panel Anxiety. This is much like Test Anxiety, where you sit down to take a test and everything you studied the night before just completely gets erased from your memory banks. I wracked my brain for the ideas I’d been thinking of before, and not a single one of them would come to mind for me.

Lesson #3: Set aside time specifically to think about the panel topic and how to approach it — then Write Everything Down. Some people are capable of rattling books and authors off the tops of their heads (such as Greer Gillman, thankfully) — I however, am not one of those people. I need to write it down.

Panel Success

As much of a personal failure as the Mothers and Daughters panel was for me, the I Write But Not SF/F panel was a huge success. This was more of an ‘issues’ panel than a book discussion panel, so I didn’t feel like I had to rattle off a list of books to keep up with everyone else.

Are there writers who attend Wiscon but keep their heads down because what they write is non–fiction, or *gasp*, mainstream, or something else entirely? We’ll talk about how our careers are different from, and similar to, those of the speculative fiction writers who attend Wiscon. How can Wiscon help us with our writing?

Each of us on the panel shared our personal stories of how we feel like we don’t quite fit in at WisCon, and afterwards there was some great interaction with the audience. There were two things that I think made this panel a success.
 

Success #1: The panelists discussed the panel ahead of time. In fact, most of what I said at the panel came from our email discussion.
 

Success #2: We agreed to meet for lunch ahead of time to rehash our email discussion and get to know each other better. None of us knew one another before we were assigned to the panel, but by the time we got up behind the table, we felt like old friends. Whether that was just the luck of ‘good chemistry’ between us, or directly because we talked and met beforehand, I don’t know. I suspect a little bit of both.
 

John Domini was a wonderful panel moderator (and not half bad at karaoke, either!). He was very good at keeping the conversation going, both on and off the panel. I didn’t have a very good first impression of Heather (who I can’t find a web site for) — her e-mails were succinct and direct, but she was incredibly warm, funny, and friendly in person. And Elena Tabachnick, a fellow Madisonian, turned out to be my Secret Ingredient at this year’s con. Lori Devoti, another Madisonian, was signed up for our panel, but wasn’t able to attend that day. I’ve seen her at other panels before though, and am sure she would have been a great addition to the panel.
 

Karaoke

Signing up for karaoke was actually something from my bucket list. I’ve mentioned before that I love to sing. As a kid, I hated to. I hated my voice. I’m a contralto — in a pinch, I can fill in for tenors, and have at church choir. Although I’ve been told I have a lovely voice, and even compared to Karen Carpenter, between my toad-voice self-concept and social anxiety, singing alone in public has not been an option for me for many years.

Twice at recent WisCon I’ve tried to sing karaoke to get over my fear, but both times I chickened out. This year, I finally did it. I picked an early spot to get it over with as quickly as possible, and an easy song that I felt very comfortable with. Fortunately, everybody who went before me was singing karaoke just for fun. They weren’t too concerned about sounding perfect and everybody was having a great time, so that bolstered my courage.

When I got up for my song, I felt shaky, but then i looked up at the people in the audience. Nobody was paying that much attention to me! That actually worked out well for me — because if they weren’t paying attention to me then I didn’t need to be nervous.

So I let go of my anxiety long enough to belt out the rest of the song, and felt so jazzed after that that I can’t wait to get to do this again. Of course, it still might not happen until next year. But I can finally take this off of my bucket list — I have now officially sung solo in front of strangers. Minor detail that none of them were paying much attention to me and most of them were busily getting drunk; it fulfilled my requirements.
 

Hi! I’m Shy!

This was actually a personal joke of sorts between myself and Elena Tabachnick from I Write, But Not SF/F. I had joked about writing “I’m shy — Please be nice if I try to talk to you” on my name badge. So the first afternoon of WisCon when we were going to meet for lunch, I started to write this on my name badge. Unfortunately, I chickened out after “Hi! I’m shy!” It turned out to be a great conversation starter with other WisCon attendees — some of whom were just as shy as I am.
 

Secret Ingredient

I think the secret ingredient to this year’s personal success though was having a ‘safety person’ to touch base with between panels. Elena and I hit it off in our e-mails and in person, and we both agreed to be one another’s safety person. I knew there was someone to sit with if I got overwhelmed. I didn’t feel so alone. I didn’t feel even more alone when everybody else went out for meals together, since we were able to share a couple of meals together.

The other secret ingredient was feeling involved though. As anxious as I was about my panels, being part of them also made me feel more involved in WisCon than I have in previous years. As hard as it was for me to speak publicly, it was gratifying though to be approached by people who told me, “Hey, I feel the same way!” So, going beyond my comfort zone was a good thing this year. Maybe I’ll find another way to go beyond my comfort zone next year…