looking forward.

Every year I have the same experience with WisCon programming.  I read through the options, I sign up for things, and then when I find out what panels I'm on, I have a vague befuddled feeling.  Something on the lines of "huh, really?  I signed up for this?"  (This is not a critique of the process--I love the WisCon programming process.  The failure here lies not in their system but in my memory.)  It's okay, though, because they're always panels that sound interesting.  This year, I'm scheduled for two panels, both of which sound good except for the fact that I'm not quite sure what they're about.

The Changing Language of Communication, Saturday 10-11:15am.  What's this one?  My first guess was that it has something to do with weblogs, except that it's in the "Writing SF&F: The Craft" programming track, so that's probably not it.  Projecting future ideas about communication, either language or technology?  That sounds very cool, so maybe that's it?   My co-panelists here are Lauren McLaughlin, Bill Humphries, Kat Beyer, and Brendan Baber; I know and like three of the four, always a good sign.

Feminist Fiction Is So Five Minutes Ago, Saturday 2:30-3:45.   Another great set of co-panelists here (Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Lyda Morehouse, Rebecca Maines, and Kameron Hurley), but again I'm not entirely sure what we're talking about.  If you just threw me this phrase and told me to give an impromtu five-minute talk about it, I could do that.  (The talk would center around all of the 1970s feminist fiction I've read, including things like The Women's Room and Fear of Flying and The Female Man and The Kin of Ata Are Waiting For You and Woman on the Edge of Time, and the kind of split-consciousness effect of being a woman born in 1976 and first reading these books twenty or thirty years after they were published. It's an echo kind of feeling, because these books are so raw and so angry, and the things they're angry about are at the same time very familiar and very alien.)  What I would love, and what I can't seem to find, is the longer program description that must have been available to me when I signed up for this in the first place.

So that's what's coming.  I think it's fair to say that I haven't fully comprehended the fact that WisCon is so soon, because it comes so close on the heels of graduation.  Graduation (and my filing deadline) is soon; everything else happens somewhere Beyond. 

Comments

[Cabell]

Dude, I'm on a panel Friday afternoon called "Culture Shock!" It's in Reading SF&F, and I have no idea what it's about. None.

[David Moles]

I totally failed to actually sign up for panels this year.

[Jackie M.]

Susan, have I ever told you that you have the best category tags? Though "oh woe, my life is hard" was my personal favorite.

[Susan]

Jackie, I'd refer you to Ms Bond and Mr Rowe as my inspirations for category tags. But yeah, I liked "oh woe, my life is hard", and it's only gone because I don't want to encourage myself to make posts that could be tagged that way. Y'know.