Picture – Electric Tower, Buffalo downtown. Steel frame art deco building built by the local utility company in the early era of electrification.
NASFIC – Day Two
No walking around exploring the City. Just no time. Went to a convenience store and stocked up on bottled water, that’s about it. Not much in the way of attending Panels. I sat in on a reading. Attended a panel on Anthologies, and another on Small Press. Mainly, activities were preparing for panels, re-reading, psyching up. There were a lot of them – I had six programming items, five panels and a reading, and I was moderating three panels. It took a lot of my focus.
* 11:00 am – Public Domain with Leigh Grossman and Vaughne Hansen. This went really well. We filled half the room on a friday morning, which was incredible to me. I moderated, we through a lot of information at the audience, people asked questions, everyone was engaged. Got along really well. I felt we were scattershot, but everyone seemed thrilled and happy to have learned stuff.
* 3:00 pm – Current SF on TV – Chuck Rothman, again Cameron Calkins, Fingers and Maria. I thought this would be my toughest one – there’s just so much SF on TV, it’s impossible to keep up. But it went well. We all just kept on talking.
* 5:00 pm – Impact of AI on SF Writing and Art – my second AI panel, this one I’m moderating. Neil Clarke again Ira Nayman, and Alex Shvartzman. The big one – we got the Grand Ballroom to work in. I moderated again. Went extremely well. Wide ranging discussion, at points we verged on conspiracy theory, but the reality is that the corps that are pushing this have an extralegal strategy. The message – keep watching, talking pushing back.
*6:00 pm – Doing my reading. I’m going to read an unpublished Zombie story, Tethered. Ouch! Three people attended. One of them was knitting the whole way through. Still, it’s a damned good story about a ghost haunting his how reanimated corpse and finally becoming a better (but still dead) human being.
* 7:00 pm – Writing Humour in SF – with Alex Shvartzman again, Christine Cohen, Michael Ventrella David Dvorkin and Vera Nazarian. This one was where I got lazy, I figured there were so many other panelists, I could just let it ride. I had a lot of research, but relatively few pages of notes. Some of the moderators, including myself, would try and circulate moderation notes or questions. But this one we all went in blind. Bad news, the material ran out in half an hour, and I didn’t have more prepared. We did a lot of questions from the audience, random comments on humour and eventually succeeded in running out the clock. I think I came across as funny, friendly, insightful with things to say. I think this was the most challenging and stressful.
* 9:00 pm – Unnatural History of Giant Monsters – Christine Cohen, again, Stephen Wilk again, Frank Wu and John Allen Price as a last minute edition. This was actually pretty packed, and it was the best panel by far. I moderated, but kept a light touch – I had a few prepared questions and topics, but let people go off in their own directions. There’s no substitute for genuine excitement and enthusiasm, and while everyone’s opinions were different, and there were lots of tangents, everyone was passionate. Christine’s take was literally poetic, John Allen’s was prosaic, I argued a conceptual evolution from King Kong and WWII newsreels. Stephen argued powerpoint and historical. I got a huge laugh talking about wearing a lizard man suit for a short film once. We were all over the map, but the energy was great and everyone had a chance. We got a huge ovation, and frankly, we could have gone for a half hour or an hour longer. Afterwards, we shook hands, but we could have hugged each other.
Overall, I was consistently charming, intelligent, witty, tons of funny lines, friendly and engaging with fellow panelists, gracious as a moderator, and just brilliant. Or at least that’s my self perception. I hope it’s accurate. I’d hate to discover that I really came across as a pretentious, narrowminded jerk. But people seemed to respond well and were friendly and positive, so… I think more former than latter.
Had lunch with JF Garrand during the day, got hit with overpowering drowsy, took a nap. Chris Nigro came by in the evening, we hung out to 11:30, and then I checked out the Party Suites… but running low, so I called it night. Not as social or socially connecting as I’d hoped, but people told me I “gave good panel.”
Bed relatively early. Around midnight/one-am. I’m not the type to party hard, I guess. I suspect by our general ages and conditions, mostly we’re not as a group. But if there’s real parties, that will be tomorrow. We’ll see what happens.
Weird thought – I think I’m the best dressed guy here, with black double breasted suit and shimmering burgundy shirt, looking sharp. If only I was thinner. I had STYLE to burn.
Actually, a guy at one of the party suites wanted to know where I got my shirt – I said value village, but unbuttoned and took it half off so we could read the label.
Worried a little about the Cyberattack or Cyber-meltdown. Some company named Crosspoint sent out a bad security patch and half the computer systems in the world crashed. Something like 5000 flights cancelled. Hopefully it’ll all be sorted by Sunday.
I’m utterly drained – just worn out.
Tomorrow is the Doctor Who Panel, I’m moderating that one. Chuck Rothman is in it with me, as well as Bill Horst-Kotter and Devo Space. That’s at 10:00 am.
Then 2:00 pm – What makes a Great Book Cover – J.F. Holmes, Jeff Menges and Suford Lewis as Moderator.
And that’s it. Hopefully, with a more relaxed pace, I can actually see some panels, attend some Klatlches, maybe talk to people and relate, visit the dealers room, etc. Basically, enjoy a little. See what the rest of the con is like.
Sunday at 10:00 am will be the last panel – Marketing your Self Published work. JF Holmes and Michael Green. I think I maybe the bad example.
After that, at liberty at the convention until 4:00 – head to the airport. Fly at 7:00 home by midnight.
Next month, When Words Collide in Calgary.