Nerdcon: Stories 2016

I bought my ticket for Nerdcon: Stories on impulse this year. It was after I knew I was going back to school but before I knew the schedule and I didn’t tell anybody for  while because I was on the fence about contacting Nerdcon and returning the ticket. I am so very happy that I decided to play hooky with school and attend this wonderful event. I was lucky enough to, totally by chance, end up in the same Airbnb as a fellow attendee of the conference. I went by myself last year (read about that here) and fully planned on flying solo this year as well, but it was so nice to have someone to nerd out with. I also loved that I could count on my new friend to tell me about the interesting panels and events that she went to and I missed. I think there is value in attending events like this one alone but part of that value is that you get to meet great new people like my new friend, Michelle!

Some of you may know that Hank Green put up a video explaining that, from a business perspective Nerdcon was a failure. Tickets didn’t sell as well as they planned, and some other things, but honestly, just go watch the video. I haven’t attended a ton of other conferences (i.e. I haven’t attended any other conferences) so I have no point of reference, but I think that part of what makes Nerdcon great is that it is so small. In the most selfish (self destructive?) way possible I’m happy that they didn’t sell all the tickets. I don’t love dealing with huge crowds for even just a few hours much less an entire weekend. I was never elbowing or getting elbowed for the sake of making it to a certain panel, I knew that I would get in and it would be calm, and if I ran into someone awesome once, chances were I’d run into them again.  That’s my kind of conference. To let the hippie version of me take over for a moment, I dig the chill environment, man. I understand that, ultimately, the business aspect of a con need to be profitable (or at least break even) in order for it to continue, but if this was a failing con then it was the most successful, lovely failure I’ve ever witnessed.

This year the con felt smaller than last year and I’m not sure if that’s because there may have actually been fewer people or if the vibe was just more intimate. Playing into this intimate feeling was the very cool opportunity to go to a kaffeeklattsch with various panelists. The kaffeeklattsch that I was given was with Daniel José Older (whose book I talked about recently here). It was me, nine other wonderful people and Daniel José Older in a conference room talking about books and writing for an hour. (If you were wondering this is, essentially, my idea of what heaven must be like, conference room after conference room filled with coffee, tea, and smart people talking about writing and books.) This was such a wonderful opportunity and experience. What was extra awesome was I happened to sit next to one of the ladies in the kaffeeklattsch during a panel later that day! Friend goal of the day: accomplished.

There were several panels and conversations throughout the weekend discussing inclusion of minorities in various genres and how important it is. It astounds me a little bit that anybody gets pushback when they try to write a character that they and others will relate to. One of the more heart wrenching moments of the weekend was hearing author Cindy Pon talk about how her second book got rejected by several publishers because they already had an Asian fantasy book. This is so mind boggling dumb to  me that I think I actually sputtered and harrumphed out loud when I heard it. It was mentioned that those with established power (white/male/able bodied) see someone as the protagonist that doesn’t mirror themselves they get scared. To those people I posit, do you really want look in the mirror and see what you’ve got memorized already? Wouldn’t it be so much more interesting to look in the pond and see some new worlds? It’s so easy, no matter the story, to find common ground with the characters, no matter their life experiences, they are still human (depending on the story this may not be true but there are usually some human traits and qualities stuck in there somewhere). At the risk of overextending this metaphor, I think it’s so important to look into the pond to see how your reflection plays out in unfamiliar worlds. The whole learning empathy from stories doesn’t work if you only read stories that you recognize from your own life.

With this in mind, I recommend going to the NerdCon website here to find the names of all the wonderfully kind and talented authors that participated in NerdCon, buy their books, read their stories, and support their art. Happy reading!