Reading

The problem with local cons is, because I don't stay at the hotel, I don't tend to remember to take the time in the morning before the con is open to write-up the day before. But I'll do my best to try to remember the entire weekend. (EDITED TO ADD: My memory is decent enough and this is getting long enough that I think I will break this up and report on it over the next couple of days.)

FRIDAY, October 3, 2025

What I remember most about Friday was how nervous I was. I really wanted Gaylaxicon to be a success and, of course, so many things can go wrong at a convention including, but in no way limited to, people just not showing up. I knew we had a pretty decent pre-reg, but would it be enough to make the con seem lively or would it be "empty hall syndrome"? As I noted, I did managed to break into the mundane press to let people know about the con, but who know if that works? I wish, in a way, that we either had a post con evaluation form with a question like "how did you hear about Gaylaxicon?" on it, but then we'd still be gathering and collecting all that information and I am feeling just as happy to be done for awhile.

naomikritzer and I went back and forth a bunch of times via text and email about when we were headed out and whether or not Eleanor A. needed a ride... (turned out no) and eventually, unable to hold out anymore, I left for the hotel sometime right after lunch. The first panels were at 1:00 pm. One o'clock was possibly too early for programming on a workday, but my thinking had been that the people who took Friday would be happy to have something to do as early as possible. I showed up and discovered that despite my fears, things were already sort of hopping. Of course, I might have mistaken all the high energy for the fact that Adam Stemple was in the hallway chatting with a bunch of the other panelists/attending professionals who'd arrived. Adam is generally a major source of high energy. But, that worked? One thing I will say is that, throughout the weekend, even when people were scattered there was a lot of energy in the place.

I am trying to remember what I did. The program book reminds me that I either went to "Gay YA and Children's Books: Why Representation Matters (or it Doesn't)" or "Tarot in Media," or "GMing in the Age of AI," but I only remember seeing part of the first and peeking in at all three just to make sure everyone seemed happy and had at least a little bit of an audience.

KD Edwards who was on the "Tarot in Media" panel was a consumate GoH. We had many GoHs? Like, six of them, and all of them were great, but he went beyond in terms of getting the word out to his fans. His books are the kinds that inspire a strong following and he worked his butt off and made sure that as many of his loyalest fans made it to the con. I saw him both Saturday and Sunday morning conducting a clearly organized (but not by us!) breakfast gathering. I asked him about it when we passed in the hall because I wondered if these were all local people or...? He said no, there were a whole bunch of his fans who flew out special to be here. This made me suddenly really happy that we'd made space for some of his more specialized panels. He did a special panel where he and two of his colleagues--one an ancient Rome scholar (and professor, I think,) and the other a good writing friend (neither of them local!)--did a kind of "live" world-building session for the audience. I will admit that I was a little suspect that it would be a draw? But, it turned out both of the panelists he recruited to attend also did other panels for us and, as I said, he clearly brought the fans to the yard, as it were.

Impressive.

This is the sort of thing that makes me reconsider things like a newsletter, you know? I suspect that KD has one and that's how he activated the phone tree, as it were.

But, back to Friday. I had a panel at 2:30 pm "Cyberpunk and Bodily Autonomy," with my friend Lee Brontide. It was just the two of us and we were in the smallest (and, as it turned out, most out of the way) programming room. This did not deter our audience, however. The room was by no means full, but they definitely outnumbered the panelists! I should have counted, but I feel like we had more than five? I just remember thinking that it was pretty good for this early in the convention. Because it was just me and Lee, I told the audience that there wouldn't really be a moderator since I hoped it would be more of a conversation, but, then I ended up basically moderating (or at least facilitating,) anyway. Lee is super fascinating, really knowledgable and I highly recommend (if you're interested in bits and bobs of research, etc.) doing what I just did and subscribing to their newsletter: https://buttondown.com/LeeBrontide

Newsletters again. I am telling you, I am seriously reconsidering my allergy to this sort of thing.

It sounded like the other two panels went well? I had really wanted to see the one that Nghi Vo was on about the things writers end up leaving out of their writing, but, obviously, I had to attend my own panel!

After this, I sort of wandered aimlessly trying to suss out what our attendance looked like. At this point, I think we were hovering around 180 and this sort of depressed me (even though it's actually quite a good number for a small con!) and so I ended up following some folks up to the con suite. I dragged along my friend tallgeese  and we had a rousing discussion with one of the other GoHs, Emma Torsz (rhymes with dirge), Kelly Barnhill, Adam Stemple, naomikritzer , and three or four people whose names I am spacing on. It was a conversation that ranged through publishing woes, religious upbringing, and life, the universe, and everything. My favorite kind of con conversation, actually. I got in a little trouble because Emma suggested that she was really uncertain she wanted to attend opening ceremonies and I told her that she could, in fact, skip them if she wanted. We aren't the boss of her. But, then she got nabbed by Anton and--I mean, I probably should not have suggested she could go because the opening ceremonies are the chance for con goers to be introduced to the GoHs. But, I stood out in the hallway and sort of fumed about it because my feeling is that, while we do compensate our GoHs to attend, it's not a contract written in blood. If someone is tired and people'd out they should get to make adult choices, even if those choices aren't necessarily the right ones for the con. But apparently a compromise had been struck and so Emma skipped out as soon as her introduction was over. So, that's fine. I just feel badly because Minnesotans (and, particularly women) have been socialized to be terrible at boundary setting/self-care and so when asked, "Are you sure it's okay?" The answer is often, "It's fine," even when it's not.

Anyway, I could go on about that more, but in many ways I recognize that I was wrong to have given Emma a promise of an out.  The next thing that was up was the banquet. I ended up sitting at a table way in the back with a bunch of concom folks that I love, James B. (who I accidentally called by the wrong name, twice! UGH. I hate that!), tallgeese , our mutual friend and fellow Star Trek: Adventures player, Erik, and again some other lovely folks whose names are lost to oblivion (which is a bummer as I really rather liked James' friend!)  The banquet was hotel food and was fine and... I won the very last raffle prize, so I now have a Star Wars board game?

Speaking of, I ran off around 7 pm to play a Star Trek:Adventures game GM'd by one of our other GoHs, Jim Johnson (of Modiphius.) That was fun! I had to duck out before the time was over, however, because I had a 10 pm panel where, at least, I was able to apologize to Emma because she was on that panel with me and Kyell Gold. I just wanted to say sorry not only for getting her hopes up, but also in case I'd gotten her into any kind of trouble. That panel went well, but we probably needed a moderator who wasn't me? Ten is WAAAAY past my bedtime, so the conversation which was supposed to be about "When Magic is Queer-Coded" veered so far off topic that we talked about whether or not we dreamed in conversations and if birds had language. That can be fun to watch? But, you know, I also feel sort of beholden to stick to the subject at hand, which we decidedly did NOT and my sleep deprived brain could not summon the spoons to keep us on track. 

So, oops.

Generally, I'm not sure what I was thinking with such late night paneling. I think I was remembering the Minicons of old when there were enough people still up (and we were ALL so much younger) to make those make sense. Again, I will confess? I thought Teh Gayz partied??? The place this misconception was most noticible was the caberet. Like, I thought that room might end up standing room only, but it was barely at half capacity and that was scheduled for Saturday night at 7:30 pm. 

Oh well. Lessons learned. Either I have to actively recruit the youngs or I should just never have programming beyond RPG and board gaming and those sorts of things past the dinner hour. Which, actually, would have been fine. 

Speaking of RPGs and such, I should go back and talk a bit more about the Star Trek game. I have watched Jim Johnson play Star Trek before because Modiphius has a YouTube channel where you can watch all sorts of things about their RPGs including interviews with bcholmes . (Sidebar: we had initially wanted BC to come be a GoH, but traveling to the US was very reasonably out of the question. Jim was actually our second choice, but don't tell him.) 

Jim was a good GM, I thought. I always push a bit for more than a little bit of roleplay, which I did here, as well. Not too much, though. I knew, of course, that a lot of people game at cons to try out new systems so I try not to push TOO hard for roleplay uber allis at one-shots at cons, because I understand that there are people at the table who are solely there for the mechanics. However, I lucked out in that I came early enough to the game room that I had a chance to pick which character I wanted out of the pre-generated sheets. There was an Andorian chief of security that was the right kind of hothead for me and I think I was able to add a little flare to the game without being too disruptive.  

The could-have-been a distaster distruption was to my left, as it turned out. We had a very young, very deep into the spectrum player who was still  learning when it was okay to blurt out actions or thoughts. I will say to Jim's credit he handled this person (a high schooler) with grace and kindness. Meanwhile, it may have helped that I FULLY adopted this player, whom I will refer to by their character's name Lt. Hernandez. This wasn't a rescue to be clear. I adored this young person. Yes, Hernadez struggled with volume control (but so do I when I'm excited) and, yes, their insistence in returning to some elements of their character over and over again could have been (and may have been) more than a little annoying to folks who wanted the game to continue at a pace. But, what ended up happening is that we consciously (as in me and Hernandez) chose to decide that in the world of the space utopia of Star Trek, neurodiversity continued to exist and that, if this was a true utopia, things like ADHD would not only exist, they would be accomodated and cherished. The turning point happened when I, as player, announced that I'd like to spend the momentum to retroactively create a trait in which we had regular security check-ins with the USS Challenger. Hernandez joked that sometimes that character would be bad at responding because they were enthusiastically focused on sciencing. I noted that probably given that this seemed to be a character trait, probably even on the ship there was a Hernendez Protocol so that someone periodically checked-in with Hernandez to make sure she had eaten a food and drunk water. This then became a funny, fully accepted running joke with the crew. And Hernandez leaned into that aspect of role-playing much to their obvious pleasure.

I found the whole thing with Hernandez delightful. 

I'm sure there were players at the table who would disagree with me. But, you know, when you're at a con, you get the players at the table. It's not cool to shun or ignore someone unless what their doing is a disruption more akin to the kind of harassment (sexual or bullying or like) where the GM should then really just tell them to leave the table, full stop.

And, you know, us problematic players need to stick together. I'm atypically problematic because I will push to do as much personal interaction as possible which people tend to see as a positive, but like my Andorian had a pastime of poetry and so at one point, in the shuttle craft, I had him randomly recite a poem I'd desperately scribbed into my notes. And I did so without comment. So, later, when a group of us decided to finish off this episode (which is what ST:A likes to call its sessions) one of the returning players was, like, was that in character or just.. you writing spontaneous poetry? I was like, "Oh, I was just so into character that I didn't remember to explain what the hell I was doing!" So, it totally came off like me randomly blurting out poetry, possibly just as a player??? Hilarious. 

Anyway, the scenario was what it was and it's a preview of one of Modiphius's mission briefs so I won't say too much about the actual events since it would be a spoiler. 

This got long, so I'll end it here.

 Of course now that things are underway, it only now occurs to me that I could have easily had a Gaylaxicon icon and then those of you who wanted to skim or skip would have been forewarned. 

I wavered on whether or not I wanted to go to the GoH dinner last night, especially when I found out that tallgeese was not coming because he didn't feel well. The things that propelled me out the door were 1) Mason had planned to make a fancy curry dish for himself and Shawn.I tend to be the default cook when I'm home and I didn't want to come between that; and 2) I'd just been through one of these in Capclave and... frankly? Without the right people it can be fairly deadly.

We met out at Heather's in Minneapolis, a place I have never been before. They had a lovely, long table for us out on the patio. Turns out that Emma Törzs (rhymes with dirge--so, like terrge,) used to work with the Heather of Heather's, so that's kind of cool. I ended up, by accident, sitting in between KD Edwards and Emma, with Jim Johnson at the end of the table on the other side of KD (Keith.)  I should have, as soon as she arrived, switched places with Emma because I was pretty good at keeping the left side of the table entertained and Emma ended up somewhat stuck in conversation with someone who was, shall we say, enthusiastic in a hyperfixated way about a singular subject about which is was unclear that Emma was similarly enthusiastic. I asked her, later, if I should have done more to rescue her, but she said it was enjoyable enough though she did appreciate Bast and my efforts when we were able to pry her back into the larger conversation. To be fair to this person? I do the same thing sometimes?  We're all nerds here, So no shade. 

After a very lovely dinner, where I got to watch KD Edward's shoulders visibly relax when I explained that Minnesota is a blue state and that Minneapolis/St. Paul is so blue it might as well be navy (he's living in North Carolina), we all trundled over to Dreamhaven for the reading. 

I sort of thought that my herding cats portion of the evening was over, but Anton tapped me to do introductions so I jumped up to do that. I probably should have done more "here's a quick bio" of everyone and I managed to stumble over Emma's last name (terrrge! Like dirge!) which sucked, and I think, too, I should have had everyone go in the reverse order that we started with. Ending with Nghi Vo, instead of, like I ended up prompting, starting with her and ending with Jim Johnson. Especially since, unbeknowst to me, despite the fact that Jim is an author of several books, he decided instead to read the introduction to his newest Star Trek: Adventures book--which was... again, let's just say less high energy than spirit cannibals, which is what Nghi started with. 

BUT! The event was super well attended. Dreamhaven ran out of chairs and, really, room. (That bookstore is what you find when you look up cramped and byzantine in the dictionary.) I don't have even an unofficial count, but if I had to guess I'd say over 30. We ended up even getting an on the spot sponsor-level membership for the convention out of the deal. It was by almost all measures a success.

So yay!

Now, before I head outside to do a little more painting on the fence, I need to time one of my stories. There's a woman in-town, Cole, who runs SciFi Reading Hour at the Bryant-Lake Bowl and she's looking for an emergency replacement for their November 2nd show. I don't know that she's considering me for that slot, but she did ask me to time one of my stories when read aloud. So, I need to do that for her in case it will work out.

Then, it's off to the convention this afternoon.

 Last night was a comedy of errors. 

I had really wanted to go to the badge party for Gaylaxicon because I had made a whole bunch of stickers for program participants to have their schedules on the back of their badges. I figured that since I made them, I could help put them on. But, I could not figure out what the plan was supposed to be. The information I got was "we will me back at Don's place after the hotel walk-through, oh, and here's a link to the concom Zoom meeting at 6 pm." Upon reading this, my brain went through these steps. Imagine this as one of those decision trees.

Okay, they aren't likely to have the Zoom meeting at the hotel, will they?  (Yes/No. I choose the No path). So then, probably the plan is to have the people meet in-person that can and Zoom in the rest.  (Yes/No. I choose the Yes path) So best guess is that the tour will be done by 6 pm and so meeting everyone at Don's house will work out.

I still dont' know the right answer to some of these questions, but at some point I definitely went down the wrong tree, as it were.

Because I showed up at Don's at 6 pm and found no one there.  Hopping on to Discord showed that Andrew didn't know where to meet people at the hotel and so then it dawned on me that, oh, okay, maybe the tour is at 6 pm despite the fact that's when the Zoom meeting is?  But, since Andrew was also confused, I decided to download Zoom onto my phone so that I could jump on to the meeting at 6 pm. That seemed like a smart bet since the Zoom meeting was DEFINITELY scheduled for 6 pm.  Only, when I finally got online, I discovered only two other people there, neither of them were Don and neither of them knew anything about where people were supposed to be or even WHEN we were supposed to be there. 

Then, I thought, I'm being dumb. I'll just text Don directly. He confirmed that the tour was happening at six. Now, here's where I could have solved this by driving to the hotel and trying to meet everyone there. Instead, I thought, "Well, by the time I get there, the tour will be over and they'll be headed back here." So, I let Don know that I was going to hangout at a Starbucks and, if he could be so kind, I'd wait for a text on when to come over. 

Then the true comedy hit.

Randomly and quite suddenly, my phone decided it didn't want to accept any data, including messages. 

At least I managed to hear from tallgeese  who noted that I could come hang out at his place until the text came through. At this point, since I got his message, I was unaware that my phone had decided to temporarily bork itself. So we hung out and chatted about life, the universe, and everything. That was quite lovely. I finally got to meet his two dogs in person, having seen them a bunch on Zoom during our Star Trek: Adventures games. No text came, however. I was, for reasons known only to my phone, able to go to Discord and noticed that someone was franically posting on all channels that "the Zoom meeting has started!" so, I hung out a tiny bit longer, and made my way back to Don's... only to still find no one at home. So, who knows where they were Zooming from? 

At this point, I gave up.

I left the badge stickers underneath a FedEx package outside Don's door. Then, I left him a message on Discord explaining what I'd done, and headed home. It was 8 pm by the time I got home. 

What a night!

I am only a little concerned that the stickers are going to remain AWOL. But, worst case scenario (and one I am planning on) I will bring a second set to the convention early and stick them on badges myself. 

In other news, there are a couple of previous items I wanted to update you all on. Remember how I speculated that people might be filming the exhibits at the National Africian-American History & Cultural Museum (Smithsonian) in order to preserve them? Well, my friend John spotted this: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/citizen-historians-document-smithsonian-exhibits-under-white-house-scrutiny  It turns out, I was right! 

Likewise, remember when I was talking about how stressful it was to leave a voice mail "tip" for The Racket? Well, they ran a story about us, which I found out about thanks to magenta : https://racketmn.com/gaylaxicon-wits-returns-oktoberfests-this-weeks-best-events  !!!!  They got some of the information wrong? Dungeons, Dragons & Drinks isn't running our D&D one-shots (though they will be one of our community tablers), Tower Games is doing our games. But, hey, The Racket listed us as one of this week's best events, so I'LL TAKE IT. I have zero idea if this will actually result in people signing up, but, you know, I feel like I gave this whole publicity thing a real try and 'nothing ventured, nothing gained.' 

I honestly kind of enjoyed the stress of the voice mail? I've been thinking about offering my services to other geek venues. (Personally, I think they should hire me to be their geek on the street!)  THIS would be a fun job for me. Instead, today I applied to work as an impound lot customer service attendant. Fun times. 

Today, too, at 2 pm, I'm going to be getting a call about volunteering to be a hospice worker. I will have to be honest that I'm currently looking for work and so might not be able to be as available as I normally would be. And, I know they're going to ask me why I want to do this work, and I don't have a very good answer for them. No one really likes the job of sitting with people at a time like that, but (and this is the part I have to work out how to articulate) the world is spiralling into chaos thanks to the current presidental administration and I don't know what I can DO to stop it. However, one thing I can do is sit with someone, talk about the weather, hold a hand, read a book, or otherwise offer comfort. Fascism wants us to devalue certain lives and this is one way for me to say NO.

Can I say that in an interview? I don't know, but it's the truth.

 In my continual shilling for Gaylaxicon 2025, I actually wrote myself a script and called in a tip to Racket for Nghi Vo's early release at Dreamhaven. That was nerve-wracking, and, of course, I forgot to mention that it's free and open to the public, so I called them back and did a second take. (I'm sure half their tip line is people stopping halfway through and saying, "Fuck. Let me do that again.") I'm now trying to come up with a way to sell mundanes on the idea of science fiction conventions generally, and ours, specifically. WISH ME LUCK.

I did, at least, manage to get us a featured story in Twin Cities Gay Scene: https://www.twincitiesgayscene.com/editorial/scene-stories- which is basically my press release with a few changes.

Will the mundanes want to come? I have no idea. But, you can't say I didn't try.

The other thing I've been doing is looking for a job. It's very likely that the latest School District referrendum seeking revenue will pass here in St. Paul in November which will substantially raise our property taxes AGAIN. It's hard to say no to schools that need funding, you know? But, if we don't want to become unhoused ourselves, I need to start contributing more than my paltry royalty checks and fairly sad (but DEEPLY APPRECIATED) Patreon money. So, I've been applying to various secretarial and library clerk positions--most of them parttime, but that will help us be able to afford our property taxes (which, in our case, because we escrow this stuff, increases our mortgage.)  Wish me luck. I have very little hope because so many of my secretarial skills have proficiency in programs that... no longer exist. I'm a whiz at Word Perfect, y'all!  And, Paradox databases! I'm perfect for your job here in 2025--a century I swear I still exist in!

I don't know how vampires do this. I mean, I guess the presumption is that all vampires invested a penny in 1776, suffered no market crashes, and are all rich now and living off some kind of endowment.  I pity the vampire who started out life without a penny, was terrible at market speculation, and/or lost what little they did invest in the stockmarket crash of 1929 or the 90s or... recently. I once actually considered writing a novel about this called Account Dracula, in which the story follows the financial advisor to the vampires. It was one of those that was a cool idea but had no plot to hang the idea on. If I were Eleanor Arnason, I would have made the plot some kind of financial mystery, you know, like forensic accounting or something. But I *am* the vampire who does not understand the stock market, budgeting, or how to make any money whatsoever (see above.)

Yeah, so that's mostly me. In a little while, I'm taking Mason to go get his annual flu shot. As a family we signed up for Docket, which is supposed to help people track their vaccines. Of course, Wisconsin my home state is not on the list of participating areas so it looks like I never got ANY of my childhood vaccinations. I should ask my parents if there is any written documents about my vaccines from the late-1960s. After that, the plan is to pick up Shawn early from work so that we can go to St. Mark's annual rummage sale... and, with any luck, maybe hit a few early estate sales, too.

What about you all? Any weekend plans?