Tag Archives: cons

The End of an Era

How’s that for a melodramatic title? “The End of an Era”? My narcissism knows no bounds!

Today I have opted to resign from the Penguicon Board of Directors, ending more than a decade of service to the convention nearly half of which as a member of the Board. There are numerous reasons for this, but as much as I will discuss publicly is described in my letter of resignation, reprinted below. Suffice to say, this isn’t a “rage-quit”, it’s not a call to brigade those who may or may not have done wrong, and it’s not the start of some battle. The direction of the Board and my direction are no longer aligned and so I am distancing myself from them; no more, no less.

I wish the Board and Penguicon both the best, and I will see you all at this year’s event!

Fellow Directors:
Several years ago we as a group met with members of our community to discuss the concerns those members had about the direction of our newly expanded code of conduct and that of the extension of those guidelines by the convention committee. Their apprehensions were and remain valid: certainly the policies outlined could be abused and over-applied; similarly, these policies could be misapplied as zero-tolerance mechanisms for antagonism by those so inclined. All behavioral policies carry risks, and–without strong stewardship and careful oversight–ours could as easily become tools for abuse as they could empty words. We knew this then, and we promised to provide that stewardship and oversight.

I made assurances then as I did over the ensuing years that the purpose of those policies was not to allow such abuses and that those of us on the Board of Directors considered it our responsibility to ensure that these policies were applied evenly, intelligently, and judiciously. I made a personal promise on that call–a promise that I have reaffirmed numerous times in the years since–that I would fight overreaches of these policies as strenuously as I would fight to see them applied where needed; that I would not be a part of a governing body that allows our codes of conduct to fail to be applied nor would I watch them be maliciously applied. I would resign before I would be a part of either type of misconduct.

Since that time, I have had numerous opportunities to honor that promise alongside many of you. I have fought to apply the code of conduct to situations requiring it and I have wrestled with those that would use the policies as a star chamber to punish or expel those they found undesirable. I have found it simultaneously exhausting and fulfilling to do that alongside a board membership that was largely like-minded. Even when we have personally disagreed with one another, I have genuinely felt that we were doing the right thing and fighting together in the direction of that judicious, intelligent application of our guidelines.

Today, however, I come to the end of a much more exhausting and much less fulfilling period. One member of the Board seems to have decided that their agenda is more important than our shared mission and that any attempts that aren’t in alignment with that agenda are to be met with hostility and subversion. More recently, I have watched with some disappointment the formation of cliques within the organization that overlap significantly with the Board and that member. Those cliques, in turn, have started to leverage the guidelines in order to push this singular agenda and–especially since the January 2019 Board meeting–actively abuse the harassment guidelines with the goal of engineering a convention committee of their liking. I remain firmly devoted to our code of conduct, so much so that I cannot abide by the willful abuse of it; an abuse that undermines and lessens the authority of it. With those potential abuses now coming from within our numbers, I find that I must honor the second half of my promise and tender my resignation to the Board of Directors, effective immediately. I cannot prevent the abuses that are on the horizon, and I will not be a part of an organization promoting such malfeasance.

I wish you all well and I know that this year’s convention will be another amazing year. I can only hope that the remaining Directors can find someone with more time and energy to ensure that this mismanagement doesn’t continue to grow.

Thank you for the opportunity to serve,

Signed by…you know…me :)

Penguicon 2018 Panels

I began planning for this year’s Penguicon with the best of intentions. I put together a handful of panels that I wanted to do and submitted them on time, like a proper planner. Then I agreed to be a panelist on a couple that seemed to be a good fit. Of course, I forgot about the recurring board panel. So now my current load for Penguicon is 6 sessions. I’ve done worse, but, I’ve certainly done better :) I don’t know exactly when they’ll be at the moment, but this is WHAT they’ll be: Continue reading Penguicon 2018 Panels

On the Need to Make Great Things Great Again

Among my plans for the day, today, was to put together a quick writeup congratulating the staff of Penguicon for throwing an undeniably successful convention—the 15th in a series! Instead, I’d like to take a moment to respond to a long-time attendee’s paen to modern divisive politics; a blog post with the snappy title “Make Penguicon Great Again.” In his post, Jay “Tron Guy” Maynard makes the assertion that Penguicon has fallen to the “leftists” and resulting event is no longer one that is comfortable for people like him.  Continue reading On the Need to Make Great Things Great Again

April and May Conference Schedule

Everything is happening in April and May, and I’ll be at a decent amount of it. The following is my event schedule for the spring:

Obviously, the break between Penguicon and Self.Conference needs to be filled! Shout out to me on social media if you will be attending any of the above (or something else that I’m missing).

ConFusion 2017

This weekend, I’ll be attending ConFusion in Novi, Michigan. In addition to getting to rub elbows (literally, the bar gets crowded) with the likes of Daniel Abraham, Ty Frank, Amal El-Mohtar, Joe Hill, Gail Carriger, Mark Oshiro, Cherie Priest, Tobias Buckell, Jim Hines, Mur Lafferty, and something like infinity more authors, publishers, and people of note, you get to attend great panels about gaming, literature, science, and even movies and television.

‘Fusion is one of the two local conventions that I make it a point to attend each year, and for $60, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better price for a weekend of entertainment, food, and beer. You’re basically losing money by NOT attending. I think. I’m actually pretty bad at budgeting, so someone might want to check my math.

But when you’re done checking my math, come see me at ConFusion this weekend!

Post-Hugo 2016

The 2016 Hugo Awards are over, winners and non-winners alike are enjoying celebrations of fantastic fiction and fandom, and we all have a lot to be proud of!

Make no mistake though, over the next hours and days, the bad actors that have been struggling to ruin something beautiful for several years now will be revising history to show how much they’ve won, how much they’ve been vindicated, how much the Hugos have been diminished, and how much they really don’t care. Yes, all of these at the same time! Don’t be fooled. For all of their attempts, this year we have done exactly what we must continue to do: nominate works that we love, vote for those we think deserve the honor of a Hugo, and place those that we feel do not below ‘No Award.’

Doing exactly that resulted in an amazing set of wins this year that reflect superb works of fiction. This should be what it is all about, everything else is mere distraction.

Continue reading Post-Hugo 2016

Manager vs Leader Talk at Penguicon 2016

Dawn Kuczwara (@DigitalDawn) and I talked a bit about the difference between managers and leaders at Penguicon this weekend. Penguicon always pulls a different sort of talk out of us, and this is no exception. The informality of the panel-style discussion lent itself to several things…

Continue reading Manager vs Leader Talk at Penguicon 2016

ConFusion 2016

I’ll be spending this weekend at one of the two conventions that I consider to be “home” for me. Over the last decade, ConFusion has increasingly become a place to be for authors of sci-fi and fantasy–so while there is plenty more going on here this weekend, if you are into genre fiction, you owe it to yourself to come visit the more than 50 authors that will be milling about in a much more relaxed, personal atmosphere than you’d expect. Continue reading ConFusion 2016

Losing My Mind

So, at some point I need to revisit that blog post wherein I discussed how overwhelmed I have been and what I’m going to do to fix it with an eye toward “well, did I fix it?”

This is not that post. This post, in fact, flies pretty effectively in the face of that post…this is a post of sharing my busy-ness. Never let it be said that I learn from the past even slightly.

Last weekend was slammed: a birthday party, seeing friends I don’t often get to see, tons of work…then a concom meeting for Penguicon that was simultaneously gratifying (we got a LOT done) and grating (a pretty key member “overslept” a noon to three meeting, and only started responding when I snarked about it on Twitter). So, in one weekend I had to jettison someone who used to be a friend and take on a tremendously increased amount of work to make sure the con happens well.

That part could have gone better.

This weekend is similarly beyond the pale: Ger and I are having company Friday, then Saturday it’s volunteer work at the school, Ikea, and the AASFA spring voting meeting (where a small but whiny group of jack-holes are clamoring for the ability to go to cons at a cheaper rate. It’s weird…when I was poor, I went without. It never occurred to me to demand that it becomes mandatory that everyone else must finance my frivolity…) Sunday, Ger and I are hosting a work meeting/gathering so that programming and anyone else that wants to can socialize, work, and get ready for con.

In the weeks that follow, I have a trip to Boston for PAX East (where I’ve volunteered to be an Enforcer), a brief respite, then Penguicon (coinciding with final exams, term projects, and probably more than a few tears).

So how is your spring shaping up?

Epic Failure

Today should be a day of victory. By all reports that I’m seeing so far today, this weekend’s ConFusion went brilliantly. Our numerous author guests had an enjoyable time, attendees seem unanimous in agreeing that the event was amazing, and most of the staff has expressed a wish to return in the same capacity because of the fun they had putting this thing together. I should be glowing, but I’m not.

We fucked up big.

Instead of feeling elated and spending Sunday evening and Monday morning celebrating, I spent much of the time receiving a well-deserved dressing down from the director of events and the general manager. A relationship that has lasted nearly a decade has been damaged severely, and it that stings considerably.

Some background.

As the hotel liaison, I have several responsibilities, but the most important ones include ensuring a consistent channel of communication between the hotel and the convention, protecting the convention’s interests and facilitating the throwing of the event we are trying to create, and protecting the hotel’s interests to ensure that the trust they have placed in our treatment of their considerable investment is not misplaced.

The first I achieve principally by serving as a single point of contact between all of the various departments of our convention and the various departments of the hotel. In this way, I am able to collect all of the information that is available and use that big-picture view to coordinate with the chairperson to ensure that his or her vision for the convention happens. Sometimes, this means that I must whine, beg, borrow, and cajole in order to get special concessions from the hotel and its staff. Sometimes it means I have to engineer cooperation between multiple convention departments to make sure their desires match the physical realities of the convention space. Sometimes, it means that I have to tell the hotel or the convention “No” or “Not in that way” during planning.

During the course of doing all of the above, so it is that I protect the convention and the hotel from one another. This is not to say that there is an adversarial relationship—nothing could be further from the truth between ConFusion and the Troy Marriott (although I have certainly worked events where calling the relationship “adversarial” would be being very kind)—but it is to say that both parties are understandably focused on their own goals and often have difficulty seeing the goals of the other party. It is my job to smooth that out…to establish what is the most important to both parties and to convey that sufficiently to each side.

One of the many reasons I adore working with the staff of the Troy Marriott is that they, more than any facility I have ever worked with in all of my years of doing events, see our “side” of the event very clearly. They readily grasp what is important to our event and its attendees in a way that has made the event a pleasure to put together. Our convention staff, conversely, have very little understanding of what is important to the hotel. It makes for an interesting dynamic that is quite the opposite of professional events I’ve managed where the corporate-types all readily grasp what the venue needs and the venue neither knows nor cares what the event needs.

I present all of this as a necessary backdrop for the disrespect that we displayed for the hotel this year. During the setup of the convention we destroyed the planning that the banquets staff had put in by running them around undoing things that had been requested (and in some cases re-doing that which they had undone), giving contradictory requests, and in several cases being outright verbally abusive to their staff. Throughout the convention itself, we repeatedly ignored their rules on signage, attire, and food and alcohol consumption.

Then, we started really misbehaving.

By weekend’s end, we had flagrantly ignored several issues of considerable importance to the hotel, and in many cases caused literally THOUSANDS of dollars in damage. We undid much of the benefit of their remodeling in a way that, were this a sitcom, would have seem hyperbolic and unrealistically absurd. We were complete assholes.

Let me take a moment to clarify, though. This was not the attendees…this was the doing of our staff and department heads. If you were an attendee, guest, or volunteer, you very likely did not do anything untoward at all. Every single major issue that occurred was perpetrated by the people who should know better than anybody how to behave.

It is this fact, more than anything else, that really adds sting to the insult. It would appear that when I indicated to the staff and concom that we were not allowed to do certain things and that we were allowed to do other things but only in certain ways, the take-away from that was that I was simply being a dick and could be ignored. Clearly, it seems, I only say these things to pick on people. Obviously, I’m just being mean. So I was ignored.

When I saw the wreckage we caused (and heard about more that I hadn’t had a chance to witness), I was enraged. When our event director—and later the general manager—described to me the things that they had seen, that rage turned to shame and embarrassment. These people had treated us like friends and family for years. I have had a relationship with them that is longer than most relationships I’ve had with individual people; and I’m relatively new on the scene. We were never treated merely as clients and we treated them worse than we would even vendors. We abused staff, we violated their property, and we did so with ruthless aplomb.

I am not generally disposed to tears, and when Christie, the director of events, shared with me what she had found I had to literally put down my head and fight back tears. Whatever betrayal I might have felt must have been pitiful compared to sitting on the other side of that desk.

The worst part of it is, the vast majority of this can be hung directly on me. It was my responsibility. With departments directly by my friends and by associates I trusted implicitly, I was lax in surveying their areas. I spent less time doing circuits of the convention and, when I did, I expended precious little focus on those areas governed by people that I had known for years, that had stood up in my wedding, or that had done admirably in the past. I allowed my trust and my natural propensity toward laziness to result in a piss-poor performance.

Perhaps the lake of beer that soaked carpet in one room would have been a mere puddle had I been more conscientious. Maybe the furniture that was to varying degrees damaged would not have been had I been on the scene more frequently to prevent its movement. Even the food chunks and grease that were run down bathtub drains by individuals doing dishes might have been prevented by closer inspection of the property. Perhaps if I had been more vehement in preventing certain individuals access to the hotel staff, they wouldn’t have been given the run-around as much as they were.

Certainly the actual perpetrators of these acts (and countless others) are in the wrong and should certainly feel their own sense of shame for a job done poorly, but that does not ease my share of the burden. I failed, and I failed miserably. It would not be inaccurate to say that I failed epically. Epic ConFusion indeed.

I would like to apologize for the torrent of words this became, but it’s been weighing on me for nearly 48 hours now. I’m still not okay with this, and I have some significant decisions to make as to how to proceed with…well, pretty much everything.

For now, however, I have to return to the tasks of real life while dealing with the wreckage that we have caused. There’s a set of tasks I really look forward to…

Epic ConFusion Announcement

Today and tomorrow…the Tuesday and Wednesday before the convention…the calm before the storm.

Last night I submitted the final revisions of our layouts to the hotel. Tomorrow, I meet with the complete hotel staff to get last-minute feedback and provide last-minute instructions for the event that kicks off this Friday. Then, on Thursday, all hell breaks loose and ConFusion descends upon us like a deep, unsettling madness.1 A little bit about the weekend to come:

Guest of Honor Dinner

Things kick off a bit early for those that can make it to the hotel Thursday night. We have arranged to take over the hotel’s restaurant for a few hours so that we can dine with our honored guests and some of the roughly infinity 2 authors that are coming out for the weekend. Afterwards, we usually wander up to the consuite for an informal meet & greet while we test to make sure our snacks are fresh and our beer is at the proper temperature.3

If you want to participate in the GoH Dinner, seating is obviously limited by the space we have available, so please RSVP at hotel12 (at) stilyagi (dot) org so we can save you a seat. There are a handful of seats available, so respond soon!

Programming

We have a TON of great panels and events going on this weekend; and for once I’m not scheduled to be on a single one of them. It feels rather nice, actually, to know I’m not required to be anywhere that my role as hotel liaison doesn’t lead. That having been said, there are several things I’m pretty interested in…

I, Suck (Friday 7pm) — some of my favorite authors of genre fiction (John Scalzi, Pat Rothfuss, and Jim Hines) and a few other authors that I haven’t had a chance to read but I’m told are pretty great5 talk about some of their worst work. All are very funny panelists, so this should be fun.

Opening Ceremonies (Friday 8pm) — obviously I’ll be milling about here to hear our GoHs speechify and to make sure all goes smoothly…and perhaps to dance in a thong to “Sexy and I Know It”

Superhero Movie Roast (Friday 10pm) — Dawn and Greg have been mocking movies at cons for years and it never fails to kill, and this year’s movie is a great pick for roasting…plus you get the added bonus that the movie roast generally supplies half the quotes that become the in-jokes amongst convention attendees for the rest of the weekend…just…like…Scarlett Johanssen…

John Scalzi and Tobias Buckell Reading (Sunday 10am) — I have no idea which stories they’ll be reading from…but I cannot imagine it will matter, I’m eager to read more from both of them.

Patrick Rothfuss Reading (Sunday 2pm) — All I know is that this better be from the third book in the Kingkiller set, or I might actually cry. WHY ISN’T THIS BOOK DONE YET!!! :)

Closing Ceremonies/Feedback Session (Sunday 3 & 4pm) — Find out who you can thank for all of the fun you’ve been having all weekend, get an introduction to ConFusion 2013 (including the announcement of several really exciting honored guests), then give us feedback so we can improve the convention movign forward.

Randy Bradakis (Sunday 4:50pm) — From the program book: “Randy Bradakis tells you things that he wants to say, and explains why things in the program book weren’t right. Jer Lance yells at him.” Just one of the things I do for you, the attendee…

Parties

Friday and Saturday nights both have a great lineup of parties. Wander the 15th to 17th floors to partake in free food, free booze, music, merriment, and probable debauchery. Oh, and if you see the ConChair, make sure to give him a drink. He needs it. Don’t let him say no…he’s just being modest…he needs that drink. :)

1 That’s not so much “metaphor” as “an accurate assessment of a future event” for what it’s worth…in all the best possible ways.

2 For really loose definitions of “infinity” that means something entirely different.

3 Studies have shown3 that the most effective way to verify these things is by having people eat our snacks and drink our beer.

4 Source: Jer’s Head, 2012

5 Hey, there’s like, eleventy-billion authors at this con, I can’t be expected to have read them *all* can I? :)