I’d rather not be blogging right now.

It’s a lovely day out, I am feeling lazy and self-indulgent because I am en vacance,  and I honestly would rather be doing something else.

But there is nothing that interests me going on at the convention until 6 pm, and so I really have no excuse to skip the bloggening today.

So here I am, typing my thoughts into this little blog o’ mine.

About the “nothing interesting till 6 pm thing : I can’t tell if the programming is genuinely uninteresting to me or I am just getting too old, lazy, fussy, and out of touch to appreciate what folks are into these days.

I remember a younger me who was so stoked by everything going on at a convention that he would get up early and spend the whole day in panels. To that version of me, a convention was like watching TV when I was a kid in the 80’s, when I would watch the best thing that was on even if it was something I didn’t even like.

I would go to panels I had no interest in just to continue to be in panels. And I ended up having fun anyway because I got to look into a world of which I was not a part.

But now, it has to be something pretty appealing to me in order to motivate me to get off my lazy butt and go attend something.

Oh well. Like I said before, it would be easier if I had a room at the hotel. Then a) I would get super bored and that would compel me to go explore, and b) the convention would be literally right outside my door instead of six blocks away and therefore the gumption price of panel attendance would be far, far lower.

But there is also the fact that there is not a whole lot of programming at this convention in the first place. I mean, there’s plenty of panels. but not enough so that there are always multiple tracks of programming going on at the same time, and there are stretches of time where there is no programming whatsoever.

So I suppose that, given that, it’s no surprise that the subset of that paucity of programming that I actually want to attend is relatively small.

Yesterday, I went to the Writers Meet And Greet panel at 3:30 pm. That was a minimally organized even where the person running it did not seem to have come prepared and more or less was winging it.

But that didn’t really matter so much because we were all writers and therefore super verbal and eager to talk about stuff.

So I had a good time there. Participated in the discussions and enjoyed hearing the perspectives of other writers about how they approached the craft.

One thing that occurred to me during the panel is how I am a furry and a writer but I never write furry fiction. And that’s… kind of odd.

I have always avoided doing furry fiction because I was afraid of getting trapped in a sort of “furry ghetto” where I would be tagged as a furry writer and thus be unwelcome in the wider world of science fiction in which I wished to make my name.

That’s pretty rich comingfromr a guy who never sends anything anywhere anyhow and therefore is unlikely to get pegged as anything at all by anyone.

But I also think compartmentalization plays a role. There is my furry life and my writing life and I am not interested in combining them.

Still, I am extraordinarily well wualified to write furry fiction, and to be frank, it would not be that difficult to produce work that was substantially better than most of the amateur furry fiction out there.

So I will continue to mull it over.

Then I went to the Furries In The Media panel. It was quite good, like it always is.

It was also delayed by technical issues. Which it always is.

In it, I learned about some town councilman somewhere in the US who had to resign because his political opponents found out about his being a furry and used it to launch a smear campaign against him.

Myself, I am very much a “publish and be damned” kind of guy. I would never resign because of that sort of thing. I refused to be ashamed of who I am.

Not only would I refuse to resign, I would turn the tables on my opponents by making the discussion about their violation of my privacy.

After that panel, I went to dinner with Joe, Julian, Spuug, and Jax. We went to the White Spot at Ackroyd and 3 Road.

Then Joe and I went to Felicity’s house to hang out with her for a while and watch videos and do our usual thing.

Then it was back to the convention for Bad Fanfiction : The Movie. That’s a panel where the moderator writes a terrible piece of fanfiction based on suggestions shouted by the audience  – it’s kind of like improv for writers.

I was kind of disappointed by it this year. There was a group of people who insisted on having their own conversation, plus for some weird reason, the moderator insisted on playuing music during the whole thing.

So between those two things, the atmosphere was not one of open sharing and fun but one where I could barely hear what others were saying and I felt alienated and excluded because it was so hard to concentrate.

Still, we wrote a ridiculous piece where Ellen Degeneres and Optimus Prime rescues a starchild-type baby who then turns into the seven chaos emeralds from Dragonball Z, so, ya know, it wasn’t a total loss.

After all that, I came home and tried to wind down because I was very tired but also highly stimulated, and I hate that mental state.

Eventually I got to sleep, though.

And that brings us to today!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.