Meant to write this yesterday, but a story happened instead.

Here I am, back from VancouFur 2015. I had an awesome time. Went to a ton of panels, got to do the hotel thing, saw people I know, hung out in furry town for 4 days, it was fab.

Tonight, I am going to give you nice people the quick and dirty version of a con report so I can put down these memories while they are (relatively) fresh.

So tonight, I will do the panels I went to. Tomorrow, more general impressions and anecdotes.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Only did one panel. Programming didn’t start till 6:30. This was the “landing” day, for people to get to the hotel, get registered, unpack their stuff, and basically get ready for the mayhem.

7:00 PM : Writer’s Meet and Greet. Very informal, just Tony GreyFox and a bunch of us writer wannabees shooting the breeze. But writers love to talk to other writers. There is a shared understanding, a mutual vibe to writers that is hard to define. Obviously, we’re all super verbal people with a strong urge to communicate, but below that, there’s something else. Maybe we all share a “storyteller” gene. Who knows. Anyhow, enjoyed the heck out of it. There should be more events in life where writers get together to just hang out and talk without anything like criticism entering into it.

Friday, March 6, 2015

The first full day of programming. I was revved up and eager to go.

12 noon : General Anxiety Group. Appropriately, I was 15 minutes late for this panel, and therefore had to convince myself that it was okay to arrive late and that it would not mean that everyone would stare at me and hate me when I came in. It was a great panel, with a lot of us anxious/depressed types getting a chance to tell out stories to people who totally understood. The main leader of the panel was a hyper/anxious type (as opposed to the sluggish/anxious, like me) and I found her honesty and manic energy quite refreshing. Near the end, she was beginning to obsess over whether the panel had helped anybody and whether it had been worth doing and so forth, so I made a point of stopping her panic cycle by breaking in, then asking the audience “Do you think she did a really good job today?” and they all said yes and cheered and applauded for her.

It’s when I can make moments like that I feel like I might be just a little bit magic.

1 pm : Flash Fiction Panel. I was not pleased with this panel. The host showed up without pens or paper for us, which you would think would be the most basic and obvious requirements, and if there had not been someone with a pad of foolscap and a plethora of pens in the audience, we would have been doomed. Plus, it was in the cleverly titled “Secret Room”, otherwise known as the hotel’s garage, where it was cold, dusty, and prone to vehicles driving in and out as we tried to write.

I am totally not making that up.

As to the actual flashing of our fictions, I took a bit of a hammering on my writer’s ego because I thought I was going to just blow everyone away, but I had forgotten that I am not good at being brief, and therefore not good at being fast. Plus I feel compelled to finish everything I start, so when the timer ran out, I was compelled to cheat and keep going for a little while. And then we had to read the thing out, and that’s a whole other set of variables.

Luckily, it turned out not to be a contest at all, so nobody judged my hasty work. We just read our stuff out loud and people either got it or didn’t.

I did the first story on paper, but the other two or three on my tablet. I might post them here at some point.

3 pm : Writing In 3d : It’s Showtime Had no idea what this was before I went to it, but it had writing in the title, so show up I did. Turned out to be a long and somewhat tortuous discussion of the difference between “showing” and “telling” in writing. I can’t say I learned much, but that has mostly to do with my being 41 and knowing all about the subject already. Plus, it kind of lacked focus and drive, and the older I get, the crankier I get about getting to the goddamned point.

4 pm : Self Publishing For Beginners. I’ve been to a half dozen of those kinds of panels, so it is debatable whether I am a beginner any more, but still. Picked up some leads as to where to go should I ever start writing furry fiction. Dare I unite the two worlds I live in?

I dunno. Maybe.

After this, there was nothing I wanted to attend until….

10 pm : Bad Movie Night. Obviously I just had to attend this one. Every time me and my friends get together, it’s Bad Movie Night! It was, unsurprisingly, mostly MST3K/Rifftrax content. We watched a bunch of shorts, including a fave of mine Jimmy Goes To The Fair, and a movie called The Rebel Set, which I must have seen before but didn’t remember. It was actually a heist film, and a half-decent one even without the MST3K treatment. Had a very compelling and sexy guy as the criminal mastermind who turns out to be the villain.

We also watched a short produced by the City of Montreal in 1948 about all the playgrounds they were building for all the children of Montreal. It gave me a heavy dose of what I will call pre-nostalgia, nostalgia for a time before you were born. It was so full of optimism and benevolence and a sense of making the world a better place for future generations! And a sense of the best kind of order, the kind that supports and protects people so they can live their lives without fear in a saner, safer, more comfortable, more affluent future.

Compared to today, when people are so shortsighted they can’t even see the point of government, that 1948 seems like heaven.

Saturday and Sunday will be covered next entry.

And of course, I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.