Narrativity, part 1
I stuffed myself full of sushi last night, so I finally feel recovered enough to write this. Sushi is magical that way.
The problem with writing a con report is that if the con is good, you're too busy to do it during, and too exhausted to do it after.
Narrativity was a really good con.
And I can say that without feeling like I'm tooting my own horn, because what made it so good was our attendees. We got such great people! They were smart, and insightful, and engaged, and really excited to talk story for three days. We had a lot of fantasy and SF writers, of course, but we also had people doing historical, and erotica, and poetry, and all sorts of stuff. And we had visual artists, and musicians, and editors and readers and people from lots of different perspectives. And everybody seemed committed to learning and sharing and having a good time.
My own journey started only an hour behind schedule, which is pretty good as these things go. I swung aside to pick up J, who agreed to run consuite in order to save my ass and whose condo I will be painting until the end of time to repay the favor. J turned out to be a good road-trip companion; a little surprised to learn that when I spoke of a twelve-hour drive with the windows down and music blasting all the way, I really did mean the music would be blasting for the whole twelve hours, but we made it work.
We drove until I got a bit zoney and we made it past the Illinois border, at which point I was terribly adult and responsible, and we actually stopped and found a place for the night. J wasn't keen on the sleeping-in-a-rest-area concept, and anyway the car was stuffed so full of consuite stuff that there was barely room for both of us to sit, never mind lie down, so J had her first experience of a Motel 6, which was, well, pretty typical for a Motel 6. It was fine, but it did remind me of some characters from my first novel taking what they could get on the road.
Next day, far too bright and not so early (who authorized eleventy-billion degrees the whole time?), we journeyed onward through Wisconsin, which is beautiful but far larger than it needs to be, and eventually arrived in Minneapolis. There was the inevitable torrential downpour right as we hit a bit of traffic (this happens a lot when I go to Minneapolis), but otherwise the drive was fine, if far too hot.
The hotel was lovely, and the air conditioning worked, which was about all I cared about at that point. (My car's A/C does not.)
After a bit of recovery (and another shower, because damn, the heat), we tootled around and found useful things like the nearby Target and Cub Foods, and India Bazaar, which had yummy food and good service despite the fact that we were closing the place out. We also began to make the discovery, which would continue throughout our visit, that strip malls in Minneapolis have only one driveway. So we would drive to where an additional exit should obviously be, and then we would drive around the parking lot until we found the way we'd come in, which was the only way out.
This happened a lot.
Thursday morning started with a swim in the hotel pool (something I love and haven't gotten to do in a while), and then J and I met with our hotel contact and got the official tour of the space (which we'd scouted the night before). The Crowne Plaza is an event hotel, geared to weddings and business presentations and the like, and it really is lovely. There was one alcove that J and I decided belonged in an earlier century's British Embassy to China, and either of us would have happily taken it home if it would have fit in the car. Our own space was down at the end of the wing, with the doors to both rooms set in a little alcove so they faced each other, which gave us the feeling of having our own little unit within the larger function space.
Thursday night we got together with some locals and early arrivals for dinner. This occasioned driving basically to the opposite side of the Minn-St.Paul metro area, which was also going to be a theme repeated throughout our visit. I love Minneapolis, it's a great town, but they do have a, ah, creative approach to road signage. Which may explain why every nitwit who signaled left and then dove right across four lanes of traffic to take an exit, or otherwise drove like a ferret with a head injury, sported Minnesota plates. Or maybe MN drivers are just like that. I mean, I made a couple interesting maneuvers, but I was nowhere near that bad, and at least I had the decency to do it with out-of-state plates.
But we got to Northbound Smokehouse, and didn't die in the process, and had yummy smoked-on-site meat as our reward. This was nominally supposed to be a Board of Directors meeting as well as a social thing, but we are not exactly a formal bunch, and, well, let's just say there's a reason my official job title is Herder of Otters. We did eventually get the minimum necessary business done amongst drinks and appetizers, and everybody met everybody and hit it off reasonably well, which was as much the purpose of the gathering as anything.
We staggered back to the hotel in the wee hours, and fell into bed.
Friday morning I woke before the alarm. This was it! This was when we found out if this thing was really going to work. (This was when I found out what I hadn't prepared for, this was when I started running around putting out fires, this was... when whatever was going to go wrong would.) I got another swim, and I think J and I managed breakfast at Perkins; we were there a lot over the weekend, anyway. It's all a bit fuzzy at this point.
My reg table was waiting for me when I got there. Good start!
For being such a fancy hotel, the Crowne Plaza was remarkably cool about things like having signs blue-taped to their walls. So I was able to put up a banner behind the reg table so people could see "Narrativity" all the way from the far end of the wing. Actually, the hotel was pretty cool about everything. Electrical run to the reg table? No problem, and they taped it down and even "elegantized" it by tucking all my power cords under the table skirt. Extra power strips and extension cords in the con suite? No problem, the only caveat being not to overload the circuits, and no problem about telling us which outlets were on which ones. I'll probably mention the hotel a few more times, because they were absolutely great to work with.
I set up Reg, and waited. A few people trickled in; it was nice to start putting faces with the names I'd spent so long with. Skippy the Streambook and my spare printer performed heartily, and even my personal email (which had inexplicably refused to play nice with the hotel wifi thus far) suddenly started working, and while I felt like I'd never quite gotten combobulated, the reg system seemed to work just fine and people got what they needed.
And then we got access to the rooms a little earlier than scheduled, and then J had more help in the con suite than she quite knew what to do with, and after that everything's kind of a blur. People came! They liked the choice of badgeholders! Panels happened! Opening ceremonies actually started without me, but luckily I caught it in time, and extended Steve's thirty seconds to a whopping two minutes or so. At some point I remembered that I had a system for people to flag me down if I wasn't at the table, and managed to poke my head into panels for a few minutes, and mostly to pop into the consuite and lay out my cookies and such.
The cookies. Ah, yes, the cookies. I made my usual decorated sugar cookies, despite the incredible time-sink that they are, because darn it, my con deserved cookies. They were more of a challenge than usual, partly because I'd let the time get away from me and had to do them as a rush job, and partly because of the weather. It was so blasted humid that when I picked them up to decorate, many of them just crumbled like mush in my hand; I ended up having to toast the previously-baked cookies in the oven the way you do bread for breadcrumbs, just to dry them out enough to handle. But I got them done, and I managed to repurpose the cookie-cutter storage so I could pack them in single layers, because the icing hadn't had as long to set as I'd have liked (and the even longer I'd have liked, because of the blasted weather). And they all survived the trip just fine, and people oohed and ahhed and ate them, and that was happy-making.
(Note to self: I made three batches of dough, minus one tray and part of another that I overcooked. That was overkill for the turnout we had (I actually brought a few home), but would probably be good if we double attendance next year.)
I ended up eating out of the consuite most of the weekend. A couple people did ask me on Friday if I was chained to the reg desk, which I think was a preliminary to asking me to join them for dinner, but unfortunately I didn't feel like I could leave Reg at that point. (I have plans for routing around this next year.) Luckily J did a brilliant job of stocking the consuite, so there was meat and cheese and bread to survive on.
And then panels were over for the day. The music circle took over the panel room, and from all reports was a rousing success. The late-night conversation in the consuite didn't materialize as I had hoped; there were a few people there til the small hours, and they were cool and fun to talk with, but it lacked the critical mass that I associate with the really amazing con conversation groups.
Which does not mean that I got anything like a decent amount of sleep that night. ;-)
This entry was originally posted at https://lizvogel.dreamwidth.org/205520.html because I got tired of dealing with whatever LiveJournal had broken this time. Comment whereever.
The problem with writing a con report is that if the con is good, you're too busy to do it during, and too exhausted to do it after.
Narrativity was a really good con.
And I can say that without feeling like I'm tooting my own horn, because what made it so good was our attendees. We got such great people! They were smart, and insightful, and engaged, and really excited to talk story for three days. We had a lot of fantasy and SF writers, of course, but we also had people doing historical, and erotica, and poetry, and all sorts of stuff. And we had visual artists, and musicians, and editors and readers and people from lots of different perspectives. And everybody seemed committed to learning and sharing and having a good time.
My own journey started only an hour behind schedule, which is pretty good as these things go. I swung aside to pick up J, who agreed to run consuite in order to save my ass and whose condo I will be painting until the end of time to repay the favor. J turned out to be a good road-trip companion; a little surprised to learn that when I spoke of a twelve-hour drive with the windows down and music blasting all the way, I really did mean the music would be blasting for the whole twelve hours, but we made it work.
We drove until I got a bit zoney and we made it past the Illinois border, at which point I was terribly adult and responsible, and we actually stopped and found a place for the night. J wasn't keen on the sleeping-in-a-rest-area concept, and anyway the car was stuffed so full of consuite stuff that there was barely room for both of us to sit, never mind lie down, so J had her first experience of a Motel 6, which was, well, pretty typical for a Motel 6. It was fine, but it did remind me of some characters from my first novel taking what they could get on the road.
Next day, far too bright and not so early (who authorized eleventy-billion degrees the whole time?), we journeyed onward through Wisconsin, which is beautiful but far larger than it needs to be, and eventually arrived in Minneapolis. There was the inevitable torrential downpour right as we hit a bit of traffic (this happens a lot when I go to Minneapolis), but otherwise the drive was fine, if far too hot.
The hotel was lovely, and the air conditioning worked, which was about all I cared about at that point. (My car's A/C does not.)
After a bit of recovery (and another shower, because damn, the heat), we tootled around and found useful things like the nearby Target and Cub Foods, and India Bazaar, which had yummy food and good service despite the fact that we were closing the place out. We also began to make the discovery, which would continue throughout our visit, that strip malls in Minneapolis have only one driveway. So we would drive to where an additional exit should obviously be, and then we would drive around the parking lot until we found the way we'd come in, which was the only way out.
This happened a lot.
Thursday morning started with a swim in the hotel pool (something I love and haven't gotten to do in a while), and then J and I met with our hotel contact and got the official tour of the space (which we'd scouted the night before). The Crowne Plaza is an event hotel, geared to weddings and business presentations and the like, and it really is lovely. There was one alcove that J and I decided belonged in an earlier century's British Embassy to China, and either of us would have happily taken it home if it would have fit in the car. Our own space was down at the end of the wing, with the doors to both rooms set in a little alcove so they faced each other, which gave us the feeling of having our own little unit within the larger function space.
Thursday night we got together with some locals and early arrivals for dinner. This occasioned driving basically to the opposite side of the Minn-St.Paul metro area, which was also going to be a theme repeated throughout our visit. I love Minneapolis, it's a great town, but they do have a, ah, creative approach to road signage. Which may explain why every nitwit who signaled left and then dove right across four lanes of traffic to take an exit, or otherwise drove like a ferret with a head injury, sported Minnesota plates. Or maybe MN drivers are just like that. I mean, I made a couple interesting maneuvers, but I was nowhere near that bad, and at least I had the decency to do it with out-of-state plates.
But we got to Northbound Smokehouse, and didn't die in the process, and had yummy smoked-on-site meat as our reward. This was nominally supposed to be a Board of Directors meeting as well as a social thing, but we are not exactly a formal bunch, and, well, let's just say there's a reason my official job title is Herder of Otters. We did eventually get the minimum necessary business done amongst drinks and appetizers, and everybody met everybody and hit it off reasonably well, which was as much the purpose of the gathering as anything.
We staggered back to the hotel in the wee hours, and fell into bed.
Friday morning I woke before the alarm. This was it! This was when we found out if this thing was really going to work. (This was when I found out what I hadn't prepared for, this was when I started running around putting out fires, this was... when whatever was going to go wrong would.) I got another swim, and I think J and I managed breakfast at Perkins; we were there a lot over the weekend, anyway. It's all a bit fuzzy at this point.
My reg table was waiting for me when I got there. Good start!
For being such a fancy hotel, the Crowne Plaza was remarkably cool about things like having signs blue-taped to their walls. So I was able to put up a banner behind the reg table so people could see "Narrativity" all the way from the far end of the wing. Actually, the hotel was pretty cool about everything. Electrical run to the reg table? No problem, and they taped it down and even "elegantized" it by tucking all my power cords under the table skirt. Extra power strips and extension cords in the con suite? No problem, the only caveat being not to overload the circuits, and no problem about telling us which outlets were on which ones. I'll probably mention the hotel a few more times, because they were absolutely great to work with.
I set up Reg, and waited. A few people trickled in; it was nice to start putting faces with the names I'd spent so long with. Skippy the Streambook and my spare printer performed heartily, and even my personal email (which had inexplicably refused to play nice with the hotel wifi thus far) suddenly started working, and while I felt like I'd never quite gotten combobulated, the reg system seemed to work just fine and people got what they needed.
And then we got access to the rooms a little earlier than scheduled, and then J had more help in the con suite than she quite knew what to do with, and after that everything's kind of a blur. People came! They liked the choice of badgeholders! Panels happened! Opening ceremonies actually started without me, but luckily I caught it in time, and extended Steve's thirty seconds to a whopping two minutes or so. At some point I remembered that I had a system for people to flag me down if I wasn't at the table, and managed to poke my head into panels for a few minutes, and mostly to pop into the consuite and lay out my cookies and such.
The cookies. Ah, yes, the cookies. I made my usual decorated sugar cookies, despite the incredible time-sink that they are, because darn it, my con deserved cookies. They were more of a challenge than usual, partly because I'd let the time get away from me and had to do them as a rush job, and partly because of the weather. It was so blasted humid that when I picked them up to decorate, many of them just crumbled like mush in my hand; I ended up having to toast the previously-baked cookies in the oven the way you do bread for breadcrumbs, just to dry them out enough to handle. But I got them done, and I managed to repurpose the cookie-cutter storage so I could pack them in single layers, because the icing hadn't had as long to set as I'd have liked (and the even longer I'd have liked, because of the blasted weather). And they all survived the trip just fine, and people oohed and ahhed and ate them, and that was happy-making.
(Note to self: I made three batches of dough, minus one tray and part of another that I overcooked. That was overkill for the turnout we had (I actually brought a few home), but would probably be good if we double attendance next year.)
I ended up eating out of the consuite most of the weekend. A couple people did ask me on Friday if I was chained to the reg desk, which I think was a preliminary to asking me to join them for dinner, but unfortunately I didn't feel like I could leave Reg at that point. (I have plans for routing around this next year.) Luckily J did a brilliant job of stocking the consuite, so there was meat and cheese and bread to survive on.
And then panels were over for the day. The music circle took over the panel room, and from all reports was a rousing success. The late-night conversation in the consuite didn't materialize as I had hoped; there were a few people there til the small hours, and they were cool and fun to talk with, but it lacked the critical mass that I associate with the really amazing con conversation groups.
Which does not mean that I got anything like a decent amount of sleep that night. ;-)
This entry was originally posted at https://lizvogel.dreamwidth.org/205520.html because I got tired of dealing with whatever LiveJournal had broken this time. Comment whereever.