What I've Been Doing
All of last week and this week so far I've been either busy with the kitchen renovation (which is weird that I've been so busy since I don't do anything but open doors and move things out of the way) or I've been out of town. (I went to visit friends who were having birthdays, and we went shopping, wandered around creek beds, drove to fun places, and flirted with heat stroke.) The kitchen is almost done but now we have to wait an extra week for the painter because I screwed up the scheduling, so I feel dumb.
The WorldCon situation was/is really, really upsetting. It was basically finding out abruptly that some people in the programming team made some of the Hugo nominees feel unwelcome and unwanted and did a crap job on the program, and this was a huge disappointment and really upsetting. After a 25 year career with a lot of ups and downs, I never expected to ever have one Hugo nomination, let alone two, and this has really tarnished the whole experience for me and a lot of others. A Hugo nomination, particularly in the writing categories, is a huge, material boost to a career, and it's especially important for marginalized writers, and even more important for the newer marginalized writers on the ballot who are starting off their careers with this boost in visibility and getting well-deserved accolades for their brilliant work.
Someone who decides to screw up the WorldCon programming for the nominees for whatever reason of their own can't change that, but it does hurt, and hurt a lot, to be made to feel unwelcome at a convention where there is supposed to be a big party to celebrate you.
The convention is trying to fix the situation, and to fix it a lot of the program has to be thrown out and redone. (This is a con with 5000+ people and there's a lot of programming.) Some awesome people, like Mary Robinette Kowal (who does the programming for the Nebula Award conference) and artist goh John Picacio (who ran the Mexican Initiative to bring 50 Mexican-American writers and artists and other creatives to WorldCon) and a team of others are having to drop everything to get this done in time. Which is really incredibly awesome of them to take on this workload to make this better and I know they'll do a good job. But I still really wish it hadn't happened.
ETA: Also wanted to post a link to this: Amal El-Mohtar's WisCon 2017 speech, about Steven Universe, feminism, and conversation: https://marthawells.tumblr.com/post/176263721102/wiscon-guest-of-honour-speech-2017
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The WorldCon situation was/is really, really upsetting. It was basically finding out abruptly that some people in the programming team made some of the Hugo nominees feel unwelcome and unwanted and did a crap job on the program, and this was a huge disappointment and really upsetting. After a 25 year career with a lot of ups and downs, I never expected to ever have one Hugo nomination, let alone two, and this has really tarnished the whole experience for me and a lot of others. A Hugo nomination, particularly in the writing categories, is a huge, material boost to a career, and it's especially important for marginalized writers, and even more important for the newer marginalized writers on the ballot who are starting off their careers with this boost in visibility and getting well-deserved accolades for their brilliant work.
Someone who decides to screw up the WorldCon programming for the nominees for whatever reason of their own can't change that, but it does hurt, and hurt a lot, to be made to feel unwelcome at a convention where there is supposed to be a big party to celebrate you.
The convention is trying to fix the situation, and to fix it a lot of the program has to be thrown out and redone. (This is a con with 5000+ people and there's a lot of programming.) Some awesome people, like Mary Robinette Kowal (who does the programming for the Nebula Award conference) and artist goh John Picacio (who ran the Mexican Initiative to bring 50 Mexican-American writers and artists and other creatives to WorldCon) and a team of others are having to drop everything to get this done in time. Which is really incredibly awesome of them to take on this workload to make this better and I know they'll do a good job. But I still really wish it hadn't happened.
ETA: Also wanted to post a link to this: Amal El-Mohtar's WisCon 2017 speech, about Steven Universe, feminism, and conversation: https://marthawells.tumblr.com/post/176263721102/wiscon-guest-of-honour-speech-2017
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message 1:
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Clare
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Jul 31, 2018 09:53AM
Thanks.
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