WriterCon: win edition!

So hey, lots of stuff about WriterCon was great.

Stuff that was made of win:

The ConSuite, the hotel restaurant and MNP as a whole were really, really friendly to special dietary needs and I only felt like a freak once. Celiac disease is a really hard symbolic illness for me at cons -- I literally cannot break bread with people. For this stuff not to be fucked up changes everything.

MNP is a funny, funny city and has a cool fountain involving water and metal that clearly stands over the hub for Torchwood 17.2.

The vending room! I shared a vending table with marthawells and elleparker. Martha and I both made sales and I heard lots of people saying they weer going to get Elle's book (it's ebook only, so we couldn't do it at the table).

Great audiences! You guys, I've never, ever talked about the writing fight scenes stuff as official content before -- it's more like wacky shit I rant about at bars or sometimes in this journal. I was nervous as hell and you all were great. I didn't have to poke people with sticks to get them to talk, I had fun and I learned a lot, which is an awesome experience to have as someone leading a workshop! Folks at the Language of Love (with ladycat777, versaphile and invisible_lift as the other panelists) were also rad. Thank you for coming and literally being the best con audiences I've ever had.

Wow, WriterCon is socially pretty functional! I'm actually not great at the mingling and meeting new people thing, so I was thrilled that so many other people were and made the initial approach. I wave at lots of you, including shiverelectric, scarlettgirl and folks I met at the DW/TW wake and at lunch who's LJ userid's have not caught up to me yet (find me, find me, find me!)

People I already knew! I wave at rusty_halo and miep and I suppose should give a shoutout to kalichan here as well -- because OMG, it was her first con.

folks promoting their fandoms. WriterCon's origins are in Buffy fandom. I've seen one episode of the show ever, but Patty's into it, so hey, people were still enthused enough to have me walk out of the con saying, finally, maybe I should check Buffy out!

It also got me reenergized about Harry Potter.

It also made me less angry about a lot of the wangst in Doctor Who and Torchwood fandom. We had reasoned discussions about everything from CoE to the new Doctor to our interactions with various pro's connected to the Whoniverse, all without being assholes. Nice!

No shame about transformative works and a serious interest in craft. No sense that fanfiction is just practice, but a recognition that its parameters make it a unique art in and of itself. And you all laughed at my "is that like cancer?" joke anyway.

Creativity in action. invisible_lift, kalichan, miep and I wrote post-it note fic, which requires a lot of scanning in, but will be posted soon. I also understand that I missed a great concert from xionin and am really sad to have missed the podfic session general_jinjur did -- did any podfics come out of the weekend?

An amazing ability to come up with plan B. When shit went wrong, people handled it!

Yay for being in a sex-positive environment where sex was not also a currency or the only way to get attention. Both gen and sex-related panels were well-attended, kinks were discussed relatively openly (I think think we could have used a panel on writing kink though), issues related to writing sex (such as non-con, dub-con, rape content, character age issues) got good discussion and people dresses in a wide variety of ways -- and commanded equal respect from others -- throughout the con.

A remarkably low amount of women policing other women for "appropriate feminine behavior" -- I went to an all-girls school growing up and am very sensitive to the subtle ways in which women, raised to believe they are in competition for scarce resources (i.e., men, affection, status, beauty, etc.) that aren't actually scarce do shitty things to each other. We're apparently quite enlightened at WriterCon and don't. That was AWESOME.

Also, when people were given a little nudge about how men were being marginalized at the con, people made a point of checking themselves and things got better. Doctor Who and Torchwood fandom, at least my corner of it is very mixed gender and very queer and very racially and ethnically diverse. Other fandoms and fandoms as a whole aren't necessarily. But it was nice to see people behaving in a way, or working to behave in a way that made a diverse fandom future seem possible. It was important to people at WriterCon not to recreate what's broken about other subcultures, and that was great to see.

In the *fail department, I learned a valuable lesson myself. Because of what I do for a living and where I live and because of the professions and locations of most of the people I'm close to, I'm used to living in a very out world where queer people are identifiable by sight and dialogue. WriterCon felt both very straight and hostile to me at first, because of my own biases and it turned out the con was more queer and queer-friendly than I realized, even with the incidents of *fail I previously documented.

There will be one more post on WriterCon, this one talking about what I think could be improved about the Con from an orga perspective. But I like this con, I want to go back, I want more.