North American Stochastic Fetchers Fiction Convention?
North American Stereotypical Filanderers Fiction Convention?
North American Stunning Fishmongers Fiction Convention?
Gimme A Second And It’ll Come To Me…
Last week, I jetted (in a van) down to lovely, scenic Buffalo to attend NASFIC. What’s a NASFIC? It’s an acronym for the National Spinning Furriers Fiction convention. I know, I know: I was skeptical that there was enough spinning furriers fiction to make a convention viable. But the way fiction has splintered into a million different sub-genres made it inevitable, reall –
Okay, actually, NASFIC stands for North American Science Fiction convention; it’s North America’s consolation prize when WorldCon takes place on a different continent. Fans of spinning furriers will have to wait another year for their own convention!
It Could Have Been Worse: At Least The Box Contained My Own Books
NASFIC was full of surprises. For instance: I packed the books I wanted to bring to my dealer’s table a week in advance; when I got to the room to unpack, I found I had brought the wrong box.
Surprise!
Instead of a table full of Alternate Reality News Service books and novels, all I had to sell were anthologies. I laughed. I cried. I considered myself pied. Then, I went on to sell more books than I had at all but one previous con I had attended. If I was somebody who actually learned from experience…
Think Of The Cardio!
Getting to the dealer’s room was easy queasy. Starting at the mezzanine with the registration booth and panel rooms, simply go down a floor to the lobby, walk past the check-in desk, restaurant and Starbucks, turn right, head down a long corridor, don’t go out the doors, turn left, take the elevator up a floor, go past Molly the buffalo down an elevated walkway to a building across the street, and through another corridor and you can’t miss it.
Sure, some con-goers needed a map, a compass and hiking gear to find the room. But those who didn’t take a wrong turn at Albuquerque were in for a real treat!
Just The Way I Want All My Readers To Be
Somebody in the dealer’s room asked me, “What does sibco mean?” Umm…the children in your family have started a corporation? It took me a second to realize that they were referring to the envelop in which I kept my float. “Oh,” I answered, “that’s CIBC – the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. The final character is not a letter – it’s a logo.”
We had a good laugh about that, and the person walked away from the table, confused.
What Humour Writer Doesn’t Dream Of Having Their Own Personal Laugh Track?
One of the funnest (what? Spellcheck isn’t objecting? I guess it really is a word – I’m obviously going to have to work harder to be obfuscatory…) parts of being a writer at a convention is doing a reading and sitting on panels.
Half a dozen people attended my reading, which is roughly five more people than I usually get. I read excerpts from short stories that appeared in the anthologies Dreaming the God and The Dance. One woman sitting relatively close (but not close enough to bite) laughed throughout the reading; if I had the money, I would pay her to come with me to all my future public appearances!
Thus Putting My Theory That Laughter Is Always Appropriate To The Test
The panel on Galaxy Quest was delightful, as I expected, but also perplexing. When I spoke, the audience laughed. A lot. Sometimes uproariously. The problem was that I was being analytical all over the place, not funny. When somebody in the audience shouted the word, “Penis!” over the laughter, I began to suspect something hinky was going on.
On the way out after the panel, the hinkiness was explained: the panel was streaming live to virtual attendees of the convention. The stream was projected on a big screen to the left of the stage where we sat; it included simultaneous captioning. The artificial intelligence that wrote the captions was…finicky. It finicked. Because I was wearing a mask, it finicked especially hard for me.
I was living a Saturday Night Live sketch!
Did I Listen To My Own Good Advice? Has An Aardvark Ever Won A Hugo?
Speaking of AI…
I was on a panel on how AI would affect writers. One of the other panellists was Neil Clarke, editor of Clarkesworld; Neil has been at the forefront of this issue for over a year.
While we were waiting for the panel to begin, I told Neil that if anybody asked me a question, I would just defer to him. I was going to look like a doofus either way; the audience may as well get useful information out of it…
Nana Nana Nana Nana – Pow! Biff! Wham!
I won a Batmobile! It’s only three inches long, but once I have perfected my shrink ray…
I was on a panel on undeservedly forgotten science fiction films that was designed as a competition: each of the four panellists would suggest a film and, based on how many audience members had seen it and whether or not they liked it, our suggestions would be judged.
I offered a Japanese-Polish (!) co-production called Avalon, a film about a professional Virtual Reality game player who seeks a long whispered-about secret level to the game. To be fair, I asked in advance if foreign-language films were okay, and was told that they were. If the panel is run at future cons, the moderator might want to rethink this.
As it happened, only one person in the room had seen the film: me. A member of the audience looked it up on the IMDB to ensure that I hadn’t made the film up. To my relief, I hadn’t. At first, I thought this would disqualify me: while I would get 1,000 points for obscurity, I would get 0 points for enjoyment, and anything times zero is zero. But I was asked if I liked the film, which I did, so that ended up giving me a perfect score.
Woo hoo!
I had first choice of prizes. Friends said I should have taken the screenplay for the film Zardoz, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it; things just haven’t been the same since Sean Connery’s loincloth died.
And You Thought I Made Her Up
Tsk Tsk – So Cynical!
To share how much I enjoyed NASFIC, here is a picture of Molly:
