I just sent my scheduler in to Bellevue College last week – I’ll be teaching the Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction class again this spring as well as the Blogging 101 class. I’ll post the dates for that when I have them in hand.
With both classes, I’ve gone through my notes, getting them together. With the blogging class I’ve been using a new online tool I saw mentioned during the great “Yahoo is getting rid of Delicious!” flak, Trailmeme.
WIth Trailmeme, the central metaphor is “trails” of links, which you can annotate. So I’ve used the outline from my Blogging class to collect my Delicious links on the topic. Here is the Blogging 101 “trail”. A cool feature of Trailmeme is the ability to discuss links – please feel free to make suggestions and/or forward the link to the trail along to people who might find it useful. I know a lot of those links are ones I’ve frequently referred to and often continue to use.
One of the reasons I’ve gone to that trouble is that I’m pushing a couple of consulting services next year, and one of them is a critique of your blog or website talking about its current structure and organization, its search ranking and strategy, how you might use it more effectively, how you might be using social networks, and directions you might want to take it in, based on what a student gets out of that class. For $100, you get a 500 word write-up. If you want to go more in-depth, contact me and I’ll give you an estimate.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
For me it was a pretty productive con – I connected with a few people that I definitely wanted to meet or see, I got a chance to hang out with some favorite peeps, I got a little writing done, and I did some career/work stuff that I wanted to get done. And I got the photo of Howard Waldrop with my brother and Gene Ha’s Project Superman.
Beforehand I did some stuff – I made a list of what I wanted to get accomplished, wrote to a couple people who I wanted to make sure to spend time with, and I went through the con program to identify some of the panels/features that I really didn’t want to miss. I also blocked in plenty of time for hanging at the bar, which I consider a crucial part of any con. I didn’t plan out every waking minute, to be sure, but I did make sure I knew what I wanted to do. I volunteered for programming and set up an individual reading as well as being part of the Broad Universe Rapidfire Reading.
This is, I think, the sort of thing you need to do if you’re going to cons and justifying the expenditure as work/career related rather than fun. Otherwise you end up sitting in your hotel room thinking that you should be doing something or being somewhere but not quite sure what.
Absolutely, cons are about friendships, that’s one of the more enjoyable aspects. But some you know a lot of folks at and others you have to push yourself a bit. I tend to retreat when around people I don’t know, but I’ve found that if I push myself out of my comfort zone some, I end up having a much better time.
If I’d been more diligent, I would have done the following:
Found the con organizers and thanked them. The con was well run and trouble free, and the panels were a nice mix.
Organized some sort of Broad Universe coffee or lunch meet-up, as well as something with the Codex peeps.
Gone through the dealers room and introduced myself, making sure book dealers had the card for my collection. I know no one had my book for sale, which was a little dampening, but I don’t know the best way to prevent that. Do folks write to dealers ahead of time in order to make sure they know where to get the books?
How do y’all prep for conventions? Or do you even bother about this sort of thing?
As part of recent updates at SFWA we recently revamped the Nebula Recommended Reading list to show up in alphabetical order. It’s a stopgap measure until the website gets re-designed, and to my mind has some of the same problems as presenting by order of number of recommendations. In musing that over, I mentioned to webmaster Jeremy Tolbert that I looked forward to the new school of aardvarkpunk we were inspiring. A half hour later this story appeared in my head.
This is a Patreon story, published thanks to the generous support of my patrons on there; they get access to the Chez Rambo Discord server, additional sponsor-only snippets and stories, plus sneak peeks at new drafts, discounts on Rambo Academy for Wayward Writer classes, and a chance to win my monthly giveaway. If you’d like to support indie publishing plus get stories, sign up to support me there!
Aardvark Says Moo
“Aardvark says moo,” says the clown, handing over the balloon animal.
My overly precocious kid squints her eyes. “No they don’t.” She folds her arms. No eight year old should be that definite about anything. Whatever happened to the idea of childish sense of wonder?
“I was being whimsical,” the clown explains. “Do you understand what that word means, little girl?”
Now he’s gone and done it. I could have warned him, but no one had consulted me since moment one of this interaction. The kid went up, the clown looked at her and started twisting a pink balloon around, and then he had to start being all whimsical.
“Whimsy,” my child says, “is playfully quaint or fanciful. A talking aardvark impersonating a cow is just dumb.”
At this point, a supernatural element enters my story. You may think it’d be something subtle, maybe the sort of knife edged was-it-real-or-not stratagem that Henry James could employ, but the fact of the matter was that it was a Valkyrie, walking up to look us over.
Maybe a woman dressed like a Valkyrie, you’re thinking. A costume party might have occurred to you, maybe, which means you’re going off on a total tangent, so lemme say this. Kid’s birthday party. Bouncy castle, hot dogs, cake. The only costume was the clown’s, and it wasn’t a particularly inspired one.
The Valkyrie moreover is real. Realer than real. Like a black hole of realness that made everything around her look like faded plastic. Her armor is made of golden scales. She smells like ozone and honey and looks like an angry supermodel with no makeup. She says, “Kyle Holiday, I have foretold that you die in the line of duty tonight but I will take you to Valhalla.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s been some mistake,” the clown says. “That’s my name, but I’m not going to die.”
“No one thinks they’re going to die,” the Valkyrie says significantly.
“Hang on,” my kid says. “This is my best friend’s birthday party and no one should die at it. She’s delicate. She’ll be traumatized for years. Take it elsewhere. What’s he supposed to die of, anyway?”
The Valkyrie listens to the air for a moment. “Peanut allergy.”
“I’m allergic to peanuts,” clown Kyle says cautiously, “but that’s why I don’t eat anything at these gigs.”
The Valkyrie shrugs.
“No, I mean it,” my kid says. “No one’s dying.” She grabs a napkin from the table and holds it out to the clown. “Maybe you breathe in some peanut particles. Tie this over your nose and face. Then get out. Better a flaky clown than a dead one.”
The Valkyrie says, “Who are you, to interfere with a hero’s death?”
“One, my name is Anna Louise Mayhew,” my kid says, her chin pointed at the Valkyrie, “and two, he’s at a kid’s birthday party.”
This Valkyrie listens to the air some more. This time it takes longer, and she gets a funny look on her face halfway through.
“Well,” she says, when she finally returns her attention to us, “he dies while working. There’s not that many clearly defined hero’s deaths around any more, but he faces down countless children.”
“And delights them,” she adds as an afterthought. She reaches out and tweaks the napkin off the clown’s face. “You don’t need that. You’ll like Valhalla.” She looks at my kid. “You’re Anna Louise Mayhew, huh?”
Something about the way she says it makes me step up and say, “Anna, why don’t you walk your friend to the gate?” I fold my arms, look the Valkyrie over. She’s about twice my size, could snap me like a twig, but she seems relaxed about it all. I say, “How do you know her name?”
“I take her, later on,” the Valkyrie said. “We always future-remember the important ones.”
I’m torn between pride and horror. “What? When?”
“Relax,” the Valkyrie says. She takes a piece of cake and it’s somehow reassuring, makes her seem a little less real and more like someone in a costume. “Not till long after you’re dead. They coax her out of retirement for it. She wins and saves humanity.”
I don’t really want to know anything more than that. I say, “So you’ll forgive her saving the clown?”
“It’s kinda pathetic, taking a clown to Valhalla,” she says. “Sometimes someone screws up the paperwork. This might be one of those times.”
Anna comes back and stands looking at the Valkyrie. I can’t tell if it’s fear or admiration or something else. I imagine her as a little old lady, facing down some unguessable enemy, that same solemn expression. The Valkyrie wanders off and vanishes into sparks that travel up into the sky. No one else seems to notice.
These sorts of things happen around my kid a lot, I’ve noticed. I say, “You were kinda hard on that clown about the moo thing.”
“Well, maybe,” she says. “I don’t like whimsy, though. Aardvark goes moo, how twee is that?”
I bet that Valkyrie’s looking forward to seeing her again.
As part of recent updates at SFWA we recently revamped