Con*Stellation XXX: Corona Borealis

Another long-missed opportunity that my hometown has offered for years - a science fiction convention! 2011 is the first time that I have known about, and as a result have attended, my local science fiction convention. It is put on by North Alabama Science Fiction Association (NASFA), and has been running for thirty years now.



On Friday afternoon I picked up my convention badge. Somehow the spellings never quite seem to work out for me. But the alternatives always sound cooler than my real name.



The Guest of Honor for this year's convention was Gene Wolfe. Gene Wolfe! He's sitting in the middle of the table in this picture taken during the Opening Ceremonies. To the left is Guest of Honor Artist, Lubov. On the left end of the table is Master of Ceremonies, Stephanie Osborn. To the right is Gay Haldeman, Fan Guest of Honor, and her husband, Joe Haldeman.

Gay and Joe Haldeman were an awesome duo. Gay handled panels with deftness and wit and humor. Lubov kept appearing near me at random times during the convention, always wearing beautiful skirts and tops that seemed like she had plucked them from her paintings.

And Gene Wolfe! He was delightful. He told wonderful stories and anecdotes on the panels, and a few in the hallways too. He gave a reading from his current project,The Land Across.

On the last day of the convention, there was an author signing. I had brought my copy of The Fifth Head of Cerberus. I'd been trying to work up the courage to talk to him all weekend.



He asked me if it was my copy, and he said it was in wonderful condition for such an old edition. He signed my copy of his book, and I gushed for a minute about how much I liked his writing.



Yay Gene Wolfe! I'm so glad I had the chance to meet him.

Con*Stellation also had a nice Art Room. There were probably twenty or so artists that had art for sale. They had a great range of art, from amigurumi cthulhu to an original painting by Lubov.

There was an amazing Martian landscape, "Oasis on Mars", by F.R. Amthor. I made the mistake of waiting to buy it. On Sunday morning I came to the con ready to take it home, but someone else had purchased it.

 There was one print that I fell in love with and bought right away (presented here by Furball):


"Hero Worship" by Sarah Clemens.

There's a little card in the corner of the print that says, "It brings a tear to their eyes to see The Big Guy stomp Tokyo". I love the wistful look in the dragon's eyes, and the cunning in the cat's.



Each year the convention has a kind of patron saint constellation. This year it was the Corona Borealis. The t-shirt art is done by the same artist every year, and it is a tradition for regular con-goers to wear the t-shirts of Con*Stellations past. One of my favorite past-con t-shirts was an aquamarine shirt with Delphinus.

In the dealer room, I successfully kept myself from buying a Star Trek plate painted with the Enterprise sailing into a nebula. I don't have a good place to display it at the moment without the fear of a cat knocking it over. But someday I will have a china hutch with a few antiques I have inherited. And some Star Trek plates. It is going to be awesome.

I learned how to play the Eleminis  card game, and bought a set to play with my brother. I bought a copy of Tales from a Goth Librarian from Kimberly Richardson. And, I bought these:



Yes. SeaQuest badges. Aren't they awesome?

Con*Stellation was a great small convention. There weren't so many people there that I got overwhelmed with agoraphobia (well, except for once during the Friday night mingle session where everyone was in a small room). And the Guests of Honor were always visible hanging out at the panels, in the hallways, on the sofa in the lobby. I talked to some people I had never met before and came away feeling a recharge in my sense of science fiction community.

My dream is to go to the World Fantasy Convention within the next few years, but whether or not I can go, I'm glad that I'll be able to attend my extremely awesome local science fiction convention. My many thanks to NASFA for all of the great work they did to make the convention happen!

The Cake Appreciation Society

In my application essay to Clarion West, I wrote that I wanted to hangout with Science Fiction writers, because I didn’t know of any in my city. 

Shortly after I came home from Clarion West, I went to a meeting of the North Alabama Science Fiction Association. When I introduced myself as a Science Fiction writer, they told me that NASFA was a group of fans. “That’s cool,” I thought, “I’m a SF fan. This is great. What more could I want?”

And then they gave me the phone number of a person who is the contact for a local Science Fiction writers critique group. 

Yes. There is an in-person critique group for science fiction stories in my city. HUZZAH!!

I had never heard of this group in all of my years of living in Huntsville as a child and young adult, nor in my visits home after I had moved away. But this was my failing - I had thought such a thing was impossible. Surely Science Fiction writing groups only happened in big cities like New York and Seattle. 

At the North Alabama Science Fiction Association meeting that night, they had an auction to raise money for the upcoming convention, Con*Stellation. One of the last items to be auctioned off was a  signed collection of short stories written by the North Alabama Science Fiction and Cake Appreciation Society (NASFCAS). I bid on it and won. 

It took me a few weeks to work up the courage to call the phone number for the writing group. When I finally did, a nice lady named Lin told me about the critique group. Then something awesome happened.

“Your voicemail said that you just got back from Clarion West,” Lin said.

“Yes. It was wonderful.”

“I went to Clarion West, too. Back when they first started,” Lin said. 

Whoa! Not only is there a science fiction critique group in my city, but there’s a writer who went to Clarion West in it! I’ve been living in Huntsville for a year. I could have been working on science fiction stories with a group of talented writers all this time. I could have talked with someone who went to Clarion West and asked questions about the workshop. 

I was too focused on the opportunities that were elsewhere. I was focusing on objects in the distance, and everything close by was blurry. 

But then again, Clarion West gave me some important writerly tools that helped me connect with my local fan group, and then my local crit group:

• The courage to say that I am a science fiction writer, without preparing myself for an imagined rebuke. Mary Robinette Kowal told us not to be ashamed for writing science fiction or for calling ourselves authors. In the past, I probably would have just told the NASFA members that I like reading science fiction. And they would not have known that I write, and would not have given me Lin’s number.

• The need for sharing my stories with others, and getting feedback from them. I’ve always been jittery in workshops. They still make me nervous, but after hearing eighteen people respond to my stories week after week, I began to realize that what they were saying was immensely helpful to my writing. At Clarion West, I began to think of feedback from my peers as part of the writing process - an important step between a somewhat working story and a ready to go out for submission story.

• The sense that hanging out with other writers is part of life. This is more than just the concept that critiquing is useful to writing. It’s more of the feeling of community existing as a real and accessible part of the world, and knowing that you are part of that community. I’ve heard of people attending a convention, or taking a class in dancing, and having that connection, saying “This is my tribe.” Clarion West connected those wires for me, and that’s partly why leaving was so hard. 

Last week was the monthly meeting of the critique group. I revised some stories, and took my little laptop with me so I could share them. The meeting was at a member’s house, and the house was on top of a mountain. 

My car is old, and dying. I only made it a short way up the steep slope, going inches at a time with the engine rumbling, before I pulled off of the road and turned around. 

But I am determined that my car’s inability to climb a mountain will not be a metaphor for my writing. 

The NASFCAS members are holding a public reading next weekend at Con*Stellation. I’m going to be there to listen to their stories and meet them. My tribe is the seventeen other writers I spent six weeks with this summer, and it is also this expanding, enveloping circle of the new writers that I meet. 

Click Your Heels, Come Home

After visiting the Ham Radio Festival two weeks ago, my father and I attended the 30 Year Celebration Festival at the US Space and Rocket Center. 

I’ve been going to the Space and Rocket Center since I was a kid. I can remember racing my small plastic space shuttle on the asphalt outside the Space Center, grinding the little plastic wheels on the sidewalk to make the ignition sparks light up.

Living away from my hometown for years, and coming back without having really planned to, has changed my perspective on the city.   

The Space Center was one of the many things I took for granted about living in Huntsville.

The Celebration at the Space Center was huge. There were tons of people everywhere. We had to park in a grassy field and ride a school bus to the Space Center, because the usual parking lot was completely full. 

We picked up free Mission Badge stickers and listened to a band play songs from The Sound of Music as we wandered beneath the Saturn V rocket. Then we lined up and waited for the big deal - an astronaut autograph signing. 

We’d been out and about since 9am, and we were getting a bit tired. But there was a whole separate building of the Space Center we hadn’t been in - a building with a traveling Dinosaur exhibit! So Dad settled into the theatre to watch a short film about the last space shuttle mission, and I walked over to the museum building in search of dinosaur awesomeness.

But the dinosaur exhibit was mainly an excuse for small-child friendly activities, like digging in a sand box to excavate fake dinosaur bones. I spent a minute staring at a cast of the T-Rex Sue, the mainstay of the exhibit, and then wandered down a hallway, hoping for some more grown up dinosaur fun. 

Instead I walked into a hallway that somehow survived the museum’s recent overhaul. The Space and Rocket Center used to be packed full of archival goodness. Amazing objects from the space program. Things that filled you with awe and excitement and the desire to know more.

Doesn’t it just make you want to read up on the history of the space program? Or at least watch Apollo 13?

But I guess models of Space Lab and displays of spacesuits don’t bring in as much money as traveling exhibits. So all of these archival bits were whisked away, and the empty space filled with activities for the very, very young.

Except for one, small hallway, one I spent a lot of time in when I was younger, because it held the only Hugo Award I had ever seen in person.

 

The one that belonged to Wernher Von Braun. 

Seeing his Hugo Award motivated me to keep writing when I was younger. It let me know that yes, there are other people out there who love these stories of space and science and strange things as much as you do. 

My parents took me to so many kid-friendly museums when I was a child. We went to one nearly every time we took a family vacation.

I cannot remember any of them.

But I remember standing in front of the dinosaurs at the Smithsonian. I remember being awed and frightened by the wingspan of a pterodactyl.

And I remember wandering through the Space and Rocket Center, the models of people in Space Lab and the International Space Station sparking within me a burning desire to leave Earth and go into space.

How can we inspire the next generation of star voyagers if flimsy traveling sideshows push away the images, the excitement of discovery?