Wiscon, midday Sunday

[ravenna_c_tan]

Back in the room now for a bit of downtime and more tea.

I've been living on hot tea today because allergies, blargh.

The con com is also going around sticking up signs everywhere saying "Stomach Flu Going Around Wiscon! Wash Your Hands!" I honestly think the hysteria created by the signs will probably result in more psychosomatic illnesses than the reminder to wash hands will prevent. It's a con after all. People are run down and tired and exposed to a lot of germs from people not from their native area.

I had the soup and salad bar for lunch in the hotel restaurant to combat the bug, because soup is like that. And tea, lots of tea, with lunch, in the green room, brought to the panel, and now I'm brewing a pot of it in the in-room coffee maker. tea tea tea. My sinuses feel perpetually dry and gunked up. Maybe I shouldn't have alcohol tonight. (All I had last night was about ¾ of a bottle of Guinness.)

So I forgot to write about last night's Earring Haiku Party. Elise Matheson makes a ton of earrings. You pick out a pair of earrings from the table, you show them to her and she gives you a title. You write a haiku using the title and earrings as your inspiration, and then you give her the haiku, and you keep the earrings. Here's mine:

LANDING BEACON

perfect rocketship
you orbit but you never
touch metal to soil



The blogging panel this morning was really fun, even though we were all "wah... not morning people..." Thing is, there were panels starting at 8:30 AM, so being at 10AM we had it relatively easy! I would have seriously had to beg off any 8:30 AM panel. As I told someone on programming recently: "Putting me on a panel at 9am is the same as putting a normal person on a panel at 6am." 10am isn't must better, but it's Central Time which saves me.

The general feeling at the blogging panel was that blogging did not, in fact, leach away creative energy from writing the "real" stuff (novels, etc.) and did help various members of the panel to get their energy up for writing in general every day. I realized something during the panel, though, which was that I have not kept a "writers journal" since ... well, at least since LiveJournal, but possibly longer than that.

I used to always keep a running journal in a word processor file, but I'd say about the time I left graduate school (i.e. around the time I became a really full time freelance writer), I switched from writing down story ideas and false starts on things and character notes and thoughts about writing in a single "journal." First of all, now when I get a story idea I start a new word processor document right away and usually it gets turned into a finished story within a short period of time. If it doesn't, and it becomes a false start, it just sits in the hard drive where I could still look at it again later. It's easier to look at the directory of files of seedlings like that than it is to go back and re-read old journals. I don’t' really write about my "writing process" anymore, except in blog entries sometimes, but not so much bc I'm figuring it out. I've figured it out by now. Character notes and stuff go right in the same word processor document as the original story draft and such. So there is no need for a "journal."

I do still hand write some things. There is a journal by the bed for inspirations that come in the middle of the night or for dreams, but I haven't actually written in it in a while. Maybe once a year on average. There are two universes I have in my head that I still make notes in their respective blank books, but it's because I know they are far from formed enough for their books to be written.

The panel was moderated by abostick59. We debated a bit the pros and cons of being on LiveJournal, having our blogs on a hosting site like Blogger, Blogspot, or Word Press, or hosting our own blogs from our own servers. You can approximate the convenience and ease of networking on LiveJournal by using Bloglines and Open ID to some extent, but it's not really quite there yet. vylar_kaftan has her own blog site run from home, but her LJ is a mirror of it. And she gets way more comments via LJ than she would just on her own site, which is positive feedback to keep doing it. mkhobson talked about having an "LJ" style journal name for years before finally renaming to something people could recognize and find more easily.

Which reminds me. If you met me here at Wiscon, and you friended me and want to be friended back? Please drop me a note since if your name is something like "dragongirl557" I won't necessarily remember who you are...

Lots more posts about feminism, anti-oppression, and science fiction at the blog of the one panelist I haven't mentioned yet, Naamen Tilahun, Words from the Center, Words from the Edge. And more about the con, too. (*looks for namechecks...*)

I also went to the panel on THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK! Moderated by Mary Robinette Kowal, and populated by Jeannie (aka F. J. ) Bergman and Steven Schwartz. Mary opened the panel describing the difference between ebooks and print books as being like the time when the camera came along. People thought painting would be done with because now with the camera people could have an accurate and complete representation of an image without having to paint it, but painting did not die or disappear. What happened was people came to understand and appreciate the things that were unique about painting and that couldn't be done in another medium. Ebooks may increase our appreciation for what the printed book can do uniquely and what qualities we value most highly in it. One member of the audience had a Kindle, one a Sony Ereader, and we put them in a cage fight! got to ogle both devices a bit. Among the points that came up--decrying the lack of a common format like MP3, the multiplicity of formats and platforms making it hard to get the books one wants and hard to determine how to enter the marketplace as a consumer, the limitations of the current technologies which don't do landscape formatted books very well (though new ones are coming), and so on.

And I prepped for the panel I'm moderating in 45 minutes, on "Pansexuality and Polyamory: The New Face of Romance in Fiction?"

The description reads: "Torchwood, The Anita Blake Series, The Merry Gentry Series, The Monroe Children of the Moon Series—notions of sexuality are broadening and alternatives to traditional pairings are emerging. How does the romance narrative manage to change to fit these new trends?"

Among the questions I have prepared for the panelists:

have you noticed that none of the examples given are actually romances?

do ideas like polyamory or pansexuality screw with the romance tenet of "true love"?

does a fantastical setting encourage alternative sexuality in a way that real world stuff doesn't? if so, why isn't there more of it than there is?

how to you compare the depiction of alt-sex/alt-relationships in sf/f media with reality TV like MTV's shows (Tila Tequila) or what can be seen on Jerry Springer and such like that? How does it compare with the treatment on CSI?

Can we expect people to get a better understanding through fiction than through other forms?

do you worry about "cultural appropriation" or the equivalent of it for sexual subcultures, in which it is "done wrong," just to titillate, or in a negative depiction, rather than the visibility or existence being validated as a way of striking a blow for freedom?

Is making the polyamory an imperative in the Anita Blake books cheating somehow? Anita swears she *wants* to just be with one guy, but she *can't* because of all these metaphysical crises and stuff. Is that OK?

I'm going to head down to the green room now to meet up with the panelists and hopefully stay awake.