CONvergence 2009 GoH Report

I’m going to break my con report across multiple days because it was a really experience dense con for me. 2014 edited to add: I have compiled it back into one post for the reblogging project.
Packing and the drive in

Getting everything we needed for GoHing at a 4 day convention into the Smart was a fun challenge. It was also really cool to drive the brand new micro-car in to the convention. It was the last time I was allowed to drive for the weekend as both Laura and I were concerned that I would be too distracted once things got going.

Arrival

Laura and I arrived on Wednesday evening and were met by Mandy Temple who gave us our room keys in the club floors of the north tower. We unloaded and grabbed some snacks at the club lounge then checked the room out–pausing periodically to look down at the Smart and squee. After unpacking we headed down to the pre-con reception.

Reception

The reception was a big informal event with snacks and drinks and fabulous cake.

I met up with my guest liaisons there, Lisa and Jenn who had signed up for the task of making sure I made it to all my programming and generally catering to my every whim as a GoH, tasks at which they excelled. I also met liaisons Anton and Megan, and Mandy’s husband Mark. I met several of the others as well but the six named here are the ones who primarily took care of Laura and I. The liaison corps is incredible and we were pretty much treated like royalty for the duration of our stay with the con, though I am perhaps a bit too midwestern to revel in it as much as I should have.

Other points of note:

This is when I got my amazing custom designed badge and signed a poster with the same Mel/Connie art as the badge for the chai drink recipe they asked me to concoct for Cof2e2 (the con’s coffee house). I called my drink the Tickled Goblin: chai, milk, chocolate, and whipped cream. I also chatted with a young fan named Jon who was quite excited to meet the author of a book he very much liked.

I was already pretty dazed by everything as I was introduced to Chris Jones (who did the amazing badge art) and Jon Olsen (who was involved in THACO) as well as several more con-com folks. I also re-met Peter Verrant and Michael Lee. After that I sat around with Laura and Pat Rothfuss and chatted with an ever-changing circle of people, many of them old friends, including Tim, Pat, Karl, Jody, Angie, Ed, and several more folks whose names are currently escaping me–have I mentioned that I’m really bad at names? After a while the reception wound down and Mandy escorted us back up to our room to make sure we were comfortable.

Post-reception

We chatted very briefly with Mandy as she dropped off a big bag of snacks and soda (they’d asked me for a list several days before) and my master schedule, which included several non-public events like the GoH group photo shoot and my interview time and location. I also handed off the items I’d brought for the charity auction: a copy of the Weird Tales that debuted my first story (the original WebMage short), a limited edition promotional paperback that ACE put out with a number of authors’ first chapters entitled “Urban Noir,” and a custom license plate (Womp Rat) from a Hyundai I’d owned back in 2001–a Hyundai’s not much bigger than 2 meters….

After that, Laura and I collapsed in a happy heap and went to sleep.

CONvergence 2009 day 2 (Th) Kelly’s Con Report

Pre-Panel

Started the morning with breakfast at the Original Pancake House with Mandy, Mark, Megan, Laura and returning GoH Brian Keene who I’d never met before–great guy. OPH can do most of their pancakes and waffles gluten free which made them a great fit for Laura. Wonderful food and good company.

Afterward we headed back and wandered around the con for a bit, catching up with numerous friends, and people-watching–which latter is one of the great joys of CONvergence. I didn’t have anything scheduled until five, and was pretty much free to roam until then, so we did.

Panel

My first panel was at five “Going from a Poor Unpublished Author to a Poor Published Author” with fellow GoH Pat Rothfuss. It was pretty much the Pat and Kelly show and a fun panel since I like Pat (having previously guested with him at the Chippewa Valley Book Festival) and we play off each other well. The focus was mostly on how you get from writing to getting paid for writing, and surrounding subtopics.

Opening Ceremony

My next event was Opening Ceremonies scheduled for seven, where I would have the arduous task of standing up and waving to the crowd when they introduced me. Yay, very hard to blow standing up and waving, right?

The plan was to head over about ten minutes before the event began and meet my liaisons for an escort down to the front row. At a quarter to seven we were standing on the bridge-side balcony overlooking the pool. At the time I noted that we needed to get moving in about four minutes, since we didn’t have far to go. Five minutes later, my liaison Jenn, magically appeared to let us know it was time to escort us over to the main stage. Let me note that I hadn’t seen either of my liaisons in over an hour, nor noticed anyone else from the liaison corps. Yet, in the very instant that I was in danger of being a minute late, Jenn appeared. I will happily recommend any of the CONvergence liaisons for Secret Service duty should they want.

So, then we get into the back of the main stage and find out that the previous event is running a little long. I took that as a sign that I had a moment to duck off to the men’s room and did so. When I came back I discovered that from the back Jenn and Laura are very nearly twins (see my pictures below). I managed (only just) not to wrap my arms around the wrong redhead and we waited two more minutes before heading down to our seating.

Okay, you remember that I noted that all I had to do was stand up and wave at the right moment? Well, I blew it by standing up way too early and then being stuck there for some time when the very on top of it techies hit me with a spotlight through my whole intro. Everyone else, perhaps learning from my mistakes, got it right, standing briefly at the end of their intros. Sigh.

BTW, I normally skip opening ceremonies at conventions for a variety of reasons, but these were fabulous–fast, funny, and soon over. Several of the other GoH with much more experience at this whole routine told me that these were the best they’d ever seen.

Dinner

After the ceremonies we headed out for dinner. We being me, Laura, fellow GoHs Pat Rothfuss and Dwayne McDuffie, Dwayne’s fiancee Charlotte Fullerton (who writes for a number of television shows), Anton, Megan, and fellow Wyrdsmith Sean Murphy (who is also my brother-in-law). Over the next 2-1/2 hours we had a wide-ranging discussion about art, politics, religion, and all those things you talk about with smart opinionated people. 2014 Editing to add that this dinner stands out in my memory five years later as one of the great dinner conversations of my life, and I am so happy that I got the chance to meet and really talk with Dwayne McDuffie before death stole him from all of us way too early. Every time I think about that loss I cry.

And then to bed.

Since Friday was going to be my longest day of the convention Laura and I headed to bed pretty much right after dinner.

CONvergence 2009 day 3 (Fri) Kelly’s Con Report

Breakfast

We had breakfast at the OPH again, this time with Dwayne, Charlotte, Anton, and Anton’s friend Tom. Laura had banana pancakes, and I had basted eggs and country bacon, yum. More cool conversation. Dwayne, like Laura is a physicist, and Charlotte told an amazingly cool story about meeting Jim Henson when she was a kid and how he helped her start down the path to becoming a TV writer.

Programming!

I was highly scheduled on Friday with no passing time between my first three events, which meant I was a little late to my reading. If not for the efficiency of my liaison Jenn, I’d have been a lot late, and probably never have found the photo shoot.

12:30 PM: Beta Reading: Relying on the Honesty of Friends (Panelist(s): Kelly McCullough, Elise Matthesen, M. K. Melin, Kathy Sullivan

This was a fun panel with a lot of useful advice on how to give and receive critique.

1:00 PM: GoH group photo shoot.

We got a tour of the back passages of the hotel on our way to this event, which was in a section of ballroom seemingly cut off from everything but the catering entrance. We were all pretty punchy for the session and got some great silly shots including one with Joel Hodgson punching me in the jaw and another recreating the shooting of Jack Ruby–did I mention we were really punchy? The final, official, version has Dwayne and I and a couple of others holding Joel horizontally in the air in front of the rest of the group. Dwayne’s taking most of the weight with me getting much of the rest. There was also a really great group shot with us and all of the liaisons. Afterward we signed copies of our badges and a number of tee-shirts as prizes for various awards and charity purposes. As a side note, we also signed a set of the group shots on Saturday for similar purposes.

2:00 PM: Kelly McCullough GOH Reading

I was about 8 minutes late to my own reading, and then it took a couple more minutes to get started as the con was giving Inkheart tees away to people who showed up in an unannounced prize. I read from SpellCrash, the forthcoming final book in the WebMage series and it seemed to go over well. I was still mighty punchy though, so I did more humorous and editorial asides than I might have otherwise. Also, being late meant I was forced to end with my protagonists falling through space, instead of at the rest point I’d hoped to get to a couple of pages later. After the reading, one of the people from the MNPoly room party stopped by to invite us to stop by and see the life-size mural they’d done of my Furies as part of their Greek gods theme–punchy as I was this didn’t fully register but I did jot down the room number and promise to drop by.

3:30 PM: Inserting Humor Into Your Writing
(Panelist(s): Kelly McCullough, Brian Keene, M. K. Melin, S.D. Hintz, Jerrod Balzer, Patrick Rothfuss

I think there were actually even more of us there because of one or two late additions, and the room was packed. The panel went all right due to handing over the moderation to Pat, who isn’t afraid to be a hard-ass moderator, but it was a little unfocused as usually happens with large panels.

Before the panel, my liaisons stopped by to make sure I got fed, and somewhere in here is when I started leaning on them for stuff that I just didn’t have the time to do. I asked Jenn to fetch me some caffeine, and either she or Lisa kept showing up with diet coke when I needed it thereafter and Megan offered to run grab me some egg rolls from the con-suite which sounded lovely, so she sprinted off to fetch them. Have I mentioned how very taken care of I felt at this con? Thank you all!

Afterward another of the MNPoly folks stopped by to let me know about the mural. She also noted that she was cross-playing as Raven from my books. At this point the idea of a mural and someone dressing as one my characters seemed cool, but still didn’t really sink in due to the intensity of my schedule thus far.

That’s also when the folks from the House of Toast stopped by and got me to come up with a toast recipe–which I wrote on the paper plate they handed me and then signed, promising to try to stop by their party later.

5:00 PM: Why Writers Should Archive
(Panelist(s): Kelly McCullough, Meredith Gillies, Elise Matthesen, Lynne Thomas

Another fun one. Lynne, who archives my stuff, graciously consented to be the moderator. In addition to being a fine moderator, she is both articulate and funny. So are Meredith, who I had never met before, and Elise. That’s really all you need for a good panel, but this one also had the fact that all of us are passionate on the topic going for it. Oh, and props. Meredith had brought some copies of items from her collection (she runs the giant bat cave under the U of Mn) and I had hauled along a box of manuscripts that I needed to pass off to Lynne.

Intermission

In which I slipped my handlers’ leash and went to dinner with friends from out of state. Okay, that’s not completely true. I asked my liaisons nicely what I needed to do if I was going to go off grid for a bit and let them know where I was going and that I would be back after dinner. Laura and I then went to dinner at the Good Earth with our friends Tom Foster (who was Laura’s office mate in grad-school) and Pamela Gay (who is a big name astronomy podcaster among the many science outreach hats she wears).

Furies…OMFFSM!

So, after dinner we stopped back at the room, dropped some stuff off and then headed for the parties. We did stop in at House of Toast briefly in here, but they were really packed and we ended up getting distracted by something shiny and wandering off before we got any toast 🙁 We also stopped at COF2E2 and I had a Tickled Goblin which was actually quite yummy.

Then we went to MNPoly and there were my Furies and Jess in Raven garb, and I pretty much stripped all the remaining gears on my mental transmission. The red carpet treatment and all the attention I was getting had already made this both a fabulous and surreal weekend and led to midwestern me losing a steadily increasing number of gear teeth–going further and further into a sort of state of shock–but the mural and crossplay just completely blew my mind. I was really stunned and humbled and it wasn’t until we came back a bit later with Lynne and Michael Thomas, and Michael made some comment about how cool it was that I had someone cosplaying my main character and life-size fan art that it actually sank in. WOW, just WOW.

Later, (~10:30) as I was standing on the bridge-side balcony people-watching and trying to process the whole experience, Brian Keene came along with a couple of bottles of really smooth bourbon and sent one of his liaison’s off to find a cup for me–Laura can’t drink it because of possible gluten issues (2014 ETA: new research has shown bourbon is fine for celiacs, so YAY SCIENCE!). His timing couldn’t have been better, because A) I was still kind of shocky, and B) I had agreed to do a bit for villification tennis at 11:00 that included me taking a stage kick to the groin and I hadn’t done stage-combat or any kind of show in years, which meant that, C) a little loosening up was called for. The bourbon definitely loosened me up.

11:00 PM Vilification Tennis Main Stage

Having never been to a Vilification Tennis match before I didn’t really know what to expect beyond having a vague idea that two sides would be hurling (often unprintable) insults at each other. This despite the fact that VT and I had overlapped at the Ren Fest by a year or two.

The intro delivered by Tim Wick who is the VT referee was both very funny and quite offensive. That’s the point, and it was strongly suggested that if you could be offended now was the time to leave. After the initial part of the intro Tim wandered up to the front of the audience and introduced and picked on me, well us really, Tim, myself, and our old friend Karl who wasn’t there. Tim and I have known each other since we were 6 and have been friends since we were 9 and Tim killed my very first D&D character, so there was a fairly rich vein to tap in terms of growing up geek together. Not, as Tim pointed out, that either of us has moved out of geekdom.

Apparently being a middle-aged balding science fiction author who is married to a physicist doesn’t make me one of the cool kids. Who knew?

My bit in VT was a sort of half-time interlude in the shape of a family-feudesque gameshow, played for laughs not points. We got quite a few. I also got a mock “kick in the junk,” a knee actually, but kick was the phrasing in the question. Apparently I haven’t forgotten how to make it look real, since I got a number of very concerned sounding “are you okays?” from the other players. Oh, and I also got rug burn on my knees–from a different bit about which I can only say: “Khaaaaan!”

Then it was over and very late and time for me to go to bed.

CONvergence 2009 day 4 (Sat) Kelly’s Con Report

Getting going

As some of you may recall I ended Friday in a case of complete gearstrippage due to all the cool stuff that had happened. Thus I began Saturday in a sort of advanced state of shock exacerbated by knowing what my first panel was going to be. More on which, later.

I had an earlyish panel, so we didn’t have time to got for breakfast and I just asked my liaison if she could grab a couple of sausage and egg biscuity things from Burger King for me and some yogurt for Laura and bring them by the room. I found asking for this remarkably hard to do, despite the fact that that’s one of the reasons they assign us liaisons.

I’m not that into me

So, my first panel on Saturday was one that I had very mixed feelings about beforehand:

11:00 AM: The Works of Kelly McCullough (Panelist(s): Kelly McCullough, Eric Heideman (mod), David Lenander (mod)

The reason for this is that I’m just not that into me. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a very healthy ego and I love to be the center of attention–I am a former actor after all. But at the same time, one of the joys of writing for me has turned out to be the time I spend alone sunk into make-believe worlds. Over the 18 years I’ve been writing, my extrovert/introvert balance has shifted from 90/10 to something more like 50/50. Beyond that, I feel like I haven’t really got a large enough published body of work to make for much of a discussion.

Maybe in five years if all the books now under submission are published*(next paragraph) there will be something to be said about my body of work. But now…I was more than a little worried about this panel. Needlessly, it turns out. David and Eric were fabulous at making me feel comfortable and making comments and asking questions that really made for a good discussion. Further, I had a great, interested, audience that included quite a few people who had beta read for me at one point or another and who could talk about my work in ways that never would have occurred to me. That said, this panel took a lot out of me, both in terms of worry beforehand and hard mental work during.

*which would bring me to 25 across 9 series when the proposal books are added in 2014 ETA currently at 1o across 2 series with two more scheduled, one in a new area of genre entirely and as many as four more that may be out over the next year independently—still not that into me, but at least there’d be something to talk about.

Which is why it was great that my next panel was:

12:30 PM: Meet the Wyrdsmiths (Description: Kelly McCullough, Lyda Morehouse, Naomi Kritzer, Sean M. Murphy, Doug Hulick

where I could sit back and let my fellow Wyrdsmiths carry most of the load. I’ve done four or five of these panels now, and they’re always an enormous amount of fun, in part because I know going in that the panel will go well. There are any number of ways a panel can fail: bad group dynamics, bad moderator, lone wolf panel hijacker, insufficient material, no audience interest…. With the Wyrdsmiths I know that 1-4 aren’t going to be an issue and that thus far the audience has been amused by “The Wyrdsmiths Variety Hour.” Even more than that though is that I know going in that I will be on a panel with friends who share my passion for writing.

In which I “volunteer” to moderate

After the Wyrdsmiths panel I had my third back–to-back programming item of the day.

2:00 PM: Genre Blender (Panelist(s): Kelly McCullough, Jeannie Holmes, Matthew Davis, S.D. Hintz, Dana Baird, Jerrod Balzer

When I arrived at this panel I was intercepted by my liaisons bearing diet coke and asking what I wanted them to bring me for lunch. Lunch? That’s a great idea. What are you having? Pizza? w00t! Me too. Can you tell I was getting used to having minions?

Since I hadn’t really had much previous interaction with the other folks on this panel I asked the “who wants to be the moderator?” question, which is essentially an invitation for everyone else to say “You!” which they did. I was okay with that for a number of reasons. 1) I’m pretty good in the moderator’s chair. 2) I would often rather moderate than hand the gavel to an unknown quantity. 3) The moderator doesn’t have to talk as much as everybody else if the panel is of any reasonable size.

So how did the panel go? Funny you should ask. I have almost no memory of this panel beyond the opening. I know that it went fairly well despite being somewhat low energy, beyond that…. No idea. Several days of being on had put me in a sort of fugue state where audience response was of more interest to my processing centers than precise tracking of what the hell I was saying or other higher cognition functions.

Then my pizza arrived! It turns out that the blurring was from lack of food as much as anything, and eating helped me recover enough for:

3:30 PM: Kelly McCullough Signing

I headed for the table where I was supposed be signing, pizza in hand (actually I ate at the table in the passing time between events).

our narrator (me) pauses and blinks because…there were people waiting in line to have their books signed, twenty minutes ahead of time.

Now that may not seems unusual to the people reading this, but this is the first time I’ve ever had a signing go like that. Usually I get to a bookstore about ten minutes early, get set up, and maybe one person arrives just at the opening. Then people trickle through, or if I’m reading, there are people waiting when things start, having arrived at most ten minutes early, and most of the rest show up in the first five minutes. I don’t know how many books I signed because I was too busy signing and chatting with my readers to keep track (another first), but Laura and my liaisons tell me that I had 20+ people, which is more than double my next largest pure signing event and bigger even than most of my reading/signings. Again, stunned and humbled.

Time for a liedown

This is the point at which Laura, in consultation with Jenn and Lisa decided it was time for me to go have some down time, which was a really good idea. Then, since we had five conflicting invites to dinner, mostly from people we get to see rarely, we had Jenn and Lisa scare us up some take-out and went back to our room, inviting our various dinner invitors to come back and hang out with us. 2-1/2 hours of not being on as GoH was just what the doctor ordered. I loved the whole CONvergence experience and would sign up to be a returning GoH in a heartbeat, but it was really nice to spend some time just chilling with old friends. Plus, there were fireworks. Our room had a great view of at least two sets.

After that we headed out to the parties, MNPoly (since several of the gang hadn’t yet seen the Furies) and Skepchicks, because that’s where a number of our friends were hanging out. Not too long after that Laura turned into a pumpkin and I had to take her back to the room, where I almost immediately conked. As it turns out, our timing was perfect, as a medical emergency resulted in a half hour lockdown of the entire wing of parties we had just left, which would have resulted in me falling asleep in a corner of the skepchicks room.

BTW: This programming event never happened. I swear.

11:30 PM: Guest of Honor Cage Match (Panelist(s): Patrick Rothfuss, Kelly McCullough, Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff, Brian Keene, Joel Hodgson, Mary Jo Pehl, Dwayne McDuffie