Brief Notes from Chessiecon Part 3

[hrj]

As before, an asterisk indicates a panel I was on.

Sunday's Panels

Promotion/Connecting with Readers -- A panel discussion that seemed to be aimed mostly at self-published authors. Fairly basic tips and suggestions. A plea from the audience: "Please tell me the magic formula for how to promote without being obnoxious." General agreement that there is none.

*S/he and Other Inadequate Solutions: Solving Gender Neutrality -- This was a very lively panel (if I do say so myself) covering the gamut from the many ways in which natural languages handle grammatical gender, to various approaches to creating or adapting gender-neutral pronouns and other reference, to linguistic issues in fictional gender systems, to the difficulties of trying to do top-down social engineering via language.

Creating Magic "Systems" in Fantasy -- I found this panel to be a fascinating study in how attached many fantasy writers are to a mechanistic "scientific" view of magic in worldbuilding. There was a great deal of emphasis on how your magical system must adhere to the laws of thermodynamics and that it's essential to build in unshakable cost-benefit relationships in order to avoid having "just anything" be possible. There are certainly story-structure issues if magic can accomplish enormous tasks easily, but I felt that the "rules" being promulgated would lead to a very narrow range of flavors.

Misc. -- I hadn't been able to verify in advance whether any booksellers at the con would be carrying Daughter of Mystery, so I brought a bunch of copies with the intention of hand-selling them if necessary. Friday evening I checked in with Larry Smith Books, who noted that he was out of stock at the moment and would be happy to carry them on consignment for the weekend and possible take some for stock as well. I left him eight copies and by Sunday afternoon he'd sold five of them (which, for comparison, is only one less than I sold at the Golden Crown Literary Conference back in July) and wanted to keep the remaining three as well. So that was a solid success.

The flavor of the convention is perceptibly shifting as Chessiecon, although much of the shift had started years ago. It still has that feel that Darkovercon had developed in recent years of being a cluster of not-entirely-overlapping micro-conventions all held in the same space. I'm looking forward to next year to see if the combination of Seanan McGuire and Ursula Vernon as guests of honor can bring more of a unified "center of gravity" to the various layers.

Comments

[kiria-dk.livejournal.com]

Yay for more sales! More people to join the ranks of "When did she say the next one would be out?"

The Gender Neutrality panel looks like it was interesting.

[vnend.livejournal.com]

Ben commented that he liked the Gender Neutrality panel, and the Magic system panel as well (though not as much).
Sorry I couldn't make it up there this year.

Hooray for sales!

[scotica.livejournal.com]

Once people are exposed to it, they like it (and want more :-). The puzzle is how to bring it to more people's attention…

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's a great slate of guests for next year.

[mneme]

I do think that it's worth thinking about how magic works in your world -- and trying to avoid feels that would make it difficult to actually have the world you depict with the magic able to do the things you describe (and available enough to do so). That said...yeah, there's no reason it needs to follow the laws of thermo or anything like that; it's supposed to be magical. Give me The Forgotten Beasts of Eld over Secret of the Sixth Magic any day of the year.

You're not wrong that Chessiecon still has that feel of a bunch of overlapping micro-conventions (to a degree, I was encouraging this deliberately in order to build up the music to be more interactive--while also scheduling ambient music to make it less of a "this is what I'm going to do for an hour" affair). Chessiecon also has a history of running in silos (pretty much necessary while Jaelle was the sole authority coordinating multiple independent departments, as I understand was the case), which encourage the micro-convention feel.

Of course, part of the silo feel really is that the organization of the con tends to be in silos (hopefully, we'll have better schedule integration this time to help at least some with this issue); this might have been mitigated this year since one person was scheduling everything -except- for gaming, mystic and music, but even so. Having Seanan and Ursula won't help with this--except that the tracks will have to share panelists to a degree.

OTOH, some of the separation is because many con-goers don't go to specific tracks. And yeah, I could totally see that shifting around this year, as people follow Ursula from art to writing (to furry? Well, maybe) and back, or Seanan from writing to music (to maybe art?) to podcasting or improv.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I'm a little hesitant about offering feedback on the con because I'm very conscious of being a visitor (though a perennial one). But I think it would enhance (or create) a feeling of cohesion to have some sort of "official introduction of the featured guests" thing that brings them all together. Perhaps this already happens, but if so it isn't identifiable from the schedule.

I'm very aware of some of the eccentricities that fell out due to Darkovercon's history of being run top-down by Jaelle. (I was very aware of benefiting from that system over the years and keep expecting the new management to turn to me and ask, "Who the heck are you and why do you expect to be on programming?") I imagine it will sort itself out in the next few years, but I'll be curious to see what Chessiecon becomes when it's no longer "that family reunion we've always gone to after Thanksgiving" and develops a clear identity and flavor of its own.

The funny thing is that--if my sense of the historic development of the con isn't playing me false--the "silos" originated as facets of the complex cluster of interests that intersected in the original core "canon". I recall when I first started attending and there was a fairly significant chunk of the Greyhaven crowd attending (in addition to MZB), the writing-music-sca-esoteric-feminist interests overlapped very heavily. It was only with the inevitable fading away of that overlapping core that those facets became more separate and siloed. If some new multi-faceted core emerges, it may will be accompanied by some of those historic facets disappearing entirely. But perhaps now that the silo structure itself can be addressed, there will be an opportunity to look for more synergies that can fold the edges back on themselves to form a new center.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

I wasn't a Darkover regular until the late '90s, so you'd have a better idea of how this developed at Darkover than I would have. But the "overlapping microconventions" phenomenon is hardly unique to Darkover.

From my own experience with the late EveCon and CastleCon -- DC area conventions which historically had significant overlap in membership with Darkover among folks living nearby -- "official introductions" didn't stop *those* cons from being overlapping microconventions over time. The only serious cohesion of everyone happened at opening ceremonies, masquerade, and closing ceremonies. Those three got clear channels (nothing else scheduled against them) on purpose. But aside from that, siloing developed pretty much organically over time at those two cons; there wasn't any "silo structure" in place that *could be* addressed.

I personally think that having guests whose talents reach across multiple spheres of interest will be more useful in bringing the con-goers together than anything else.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Trying to figure out how to influence the flavor of a convention is always a guessing game, and I don't claim to have any special expertise. It was just some idle brainstorming on things that at least would "do no harm".

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I should also have mentioned: I rather like the lobby performances, and I think they had exactly the effect you describe -- the ability to integrate music in a more accessible fashion, rather than making it something that required an investment of separation.