Gaylaxicon Day Three
In which our fox awakes late, speaks on a number of different panels about fandoms, diversity, and werewolves, regretfully attends a Closing Ceremony, and reflects on future conventions.
After crawling out of bed around ten, running down to the breakfast buffet at ten-thirty, and finishing up in time for my eleven o’clock panel, I was ready to spend a day Talking About Stuff.
The first panel was “Writing Across Fandoms,” with Lyda, Naomi, Eleanor Arnason, and Haddayr Copley-Woods. Lyda, Naomi, and Eleanor are in a Minnesota writing group together that sounds pretty awesome, and the experience of all four was with selling stories to pro markets, publishing novels with large houses, and so on. Eleanor (author of “Ring of Swords,” a terrific book), talked about all the furry things she’d written before knowing there was such a thing as the furry fandom; Naomi talked about her Ursa Major story. Lyda has written romance under another name, as well as science fiction and fantasy, sometimes combined. Haddayr has written a lot of genre-inspecific books too. And my experience was with starting to write for a more mainstream SF audience, as well as having my books cross over to gay romance.
We talked about why we write things that don’t fall neatly into one category or another, and I think the conclusion was that they were stories we wanted to see, and that we viewed them as challenges. We all seemed to have a little contrarian streak that made us want to write things people generally said were impossible. And we talked about how to address other fandoms we stumbled into—with respect. If you stumble in unintentionally then there’s not a lot you can do about it, but if you’re trying to push into a new fandom, it behooves you to read a bit of it first so you don’t repeat what’s been done. A lot of the panel ended up being “how I accidentally wrote a furry story,” but we allowed as how furry is one of the easiest fandoms to accidentally write into because everyone knows animals and, sooner or later, probably writes about them.
My second panel was on “Diversity in SF,” with John Ricker and Erika Hammerschmidt. I’d had lunch with John the day before and had corresponded with Erika about the panel, and I think overall it went well. They are both self-identified high-functioning autistic people, and talked about bringing that kind of awareness to their stories. I talked about gay characters and how cultural background is different when including furries. We had a lively audience discussion that brought us around to how important it was for minority people to see heroes in their literature who are like them.
I signed some books and then at 3:30 went to talk about “Werewolves and Sexual Identity” with Catherine Lundoff, whom I’d also met at WorldCon and had been sort of corresponding with since we released similarly titled and themed werewolf books within two weeks of each other in April.
Catherine’s book, “Silver Moon,” is about a middle-aged divorcee going through menopause and becoming a werewolf as she discovers a pack of similar werewolves in her town. My book, “Silver Circle,” is about a middle-aged divorcee discovering a werewolf pack while on a vacation and falling in love with a young, dangerous werewolf (yes, it’s a straight romance).
We had a really good discussion of why werewolves have become a symbol of freedom, why they relate well to the queer community, and why we both picked middle-aged female protagonists while most often, werewolves and stories of changing who you are happen to adolescents.
Finally we found ourselves at Closing Ceremonies, all too soon. Gaylaxicon, in case you don’t know, rotates like WorldCon between different cities and staffs, and the North Country Gaylaxians have been planning this convention for about three years—since soon after the last one. They did a great job with it; there were about 300 people there and I think everyone had a good time.
The next Gaylaxicon is in Atlanta in May. I don’t think I’ll be able to make that one, but if it comes back to Minnesota, or if some enterprising folks would like to bring it to the West Coast, Kit and I will most definitely be back.
