Baycon 2024 Report

Baycon is my local science fiction convention and I’ve been attending it, more or less regularly, since the 1990s. It’s moved from one hotel and city to another over the years and I have followed, “as the tail follows the dog.” My attendance came to a screeching halt in 2020 with the pandemic. The last convention I attended in person was FogCon in February of that year. We knew that a nasty virus was afoot but nobody wore masks. We “elbow-bumped” instead of hugging. If anyone got sick, I never heard. Then came the lockdown, as we called it. Conventions switched to virtual attendance. Althought I’m a somewhat slow adopted or tech, I’d become used to video chatting back in 2013, when I took care of my best friend in a different state while she was dying of cancer. My husband and I stayed in touch (via Skype, if I remember correctly). Then when my younger daughter attended medical school on the other side of the country, we visited by video chat regularly. She moved back to this area for her residency. Her final year was 2020, during which her regular service rotations were replaced by caring for dying Covid patients. Needless to say, I became quite cautious about my exposure. So even when conventions began to move from virtual-only to hybrid to in-person, I reconnected slowly. Even when I was ready to attend a convention in person (2023, which shows you how long it took me), armed with masks, hand sanitizer, and rapid tests, the universe conspired to jinx my plans. It was hard. I missed my friends and all the chance encounters and spontaneous expressions of community. All this is a prelude to my first successful return to in-person conventions.

Baycon programming had asked potential panelists to suggest topics. Two of mine were accepted, including Writing Beyond Trauma. Here’s the description I wrote:

These are perilous times for many of us. As survivors or the loved ones of survivors, how has our experience affected us as writers? How do our stories transcend and heal? Escape? Educate our audience? Are there times when the pain is so great, the words simply will not come--what do we do when we have lost our voice and how do we use writing to regain it? In this panel, we will strive to listen respectfully and to leave time between each speaker to absorb more deeply what they have said.

Gossip and Community

The internet is practically an engraved invitation to indulge in gossip and rumor. It's so easy to blurt out whatever thoughts come to mind. Once posted, these thoughts take on the authority of print (particularly if they appear in some book-typeface-like font). Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to question something when it appears in Courier than when it's in Times New Roman? For the poster of the thoughts comes the thrill of instant publication. Only in the aftermath, when untold number have read our blurtings and others have linked to them, not to mention all the comments and comments-on-comments, do we draw back and realize that we may not have acted with either wisdom or kindness.

To make matters worse, we participate in conversations solely in print, without the vocal qualities and body language that give emotional context to the statements. I know a number of people who are generous and sensitive in person, but come off as abrasive and mean-spirited on the 'net. I think the very ease of posting calls for a heightened degree of consideration of our words because misunderstanding is so easy.

I've been speaking of well-meaning statements that inadvertently communicate something other than what the creator intended. I've been guilty of my share of these, even in conversations with people with whom I have no difficulty communicating in person. What has this to do with gossip?

Deborah's Excellent Solar Eclipse Adventure

Tailgate party at Lassen

I've posted earlier about my trek up to Lassen to view the annual solar eclipse in 2012. My same friend organized an expedition up to Oregon for this year's total eclipse, but for various reasons I didn't go. However, my older daughter, Sarah, and I did get a grand view of it from near home (about 72%).

Our first thought was to walk up the street to a place unimpeded by redwood trees, but Sunday morning brought such a heavy marine layer, one that didn't clear until early afternoon, that we looked for an alternate plan. I called various friends farther inland and finally connected with one, about an hour's drive away, who hadn't ordered eclipse shades in time. So Sarah and I, eclipse shades in hand, hit the road very early in case there was significant rush hour traffic. There was.

So the eclipse began with me behind the wheel and Sarah peeking out the window through

Deborah viewing the 2017 eclipse

Sarah viewing the 2017 eclipse

her shades going, "Wow." I tell you, if I had not already seen that first teensy bite out of the Sun, I would have been majorly bummed. Instead my reaction was one of joy -- my kid was thrilling to the very same thing I had loved.

It soon became apparent that we weren't going to arrive until the maximum coverage. I was talking myself into that being okay. Sarah called our friend, who said that the overcast was pretty heavy at their place. So, since we were in sun with only a few clouds, we pulled off the freeway, turned on to a side street and then the first open parking lot. It happened to belong to the Tzu Chi Foundation for Compassionate Buddhist Relief. We scrambled out of the car to see the eclipse at about 25%, with all the ooohs and aaahs and I remember how cool this is! excitement.

Then came the best part. The foundation offices looked closed, but a volunteer drove in and came over to see what we were doing. In huge excitement, I offered her my shades. "Oh, can you see it from here?" she asked. And then looked. Amazement and delight lit up her face. We talked about what was happening in the sky, she looked again and again...and then she ran inside to bring out all the workers she could find. All of them reacted in the same way. Including the special needs children who were doing a cleaning project. Later we toured the facility and talked about giving kindness and love. We didn't specifically talk about sharing wonder, but that was the high point of the eclipse for me. Not seeing it myself, but seeing the delight in someone else's experience of the heavenly wonders.

By the time we got to my friend's house, the skies and cleared. She'd tried to watch it through a colander, but the holes were the wrong shape, leaf-shaped instead of round, and it didn't work. But there was still about 25% left of the eclipse, so she and her family got to see it after all.

It's wonderful to view such a rare and glorious phenomenon. It's even more wonderful to make it possible for another person to have that same experience.

In Troubled Times: Seeking Courage, Finding Strength

Given everything I’ve been dealing with – fear about the unfolding political scene on one hand and the recurring nightmare of an upcoming parole hearing for the man who raped and murdered my mother on the other – I have at times felt powerless. Not just powerless but unable to summon the energy to continue what seems like an endless, life-draining battle. I become prey to fear at these times, fear that I will slip back into unending waking nightmare that was my experience of PTSD. I have worked hard to claw my way back to health, and when I am overwhelmed, I forget all the lessons I have learned and the ways I have changed.

It’s said that fear is False Evidence Appearing Real (or Fuck Everything And Run). It takes courage and a dedication to clear-sighted integrity, seeing what is real both in myself and in the world, to overcome those fears.

But I’ve also heard courage is fear that has said its prayers. I don’t have to be fearless. I’m not sure that’s possible without massive self-delusion. To do what I am called to do even though I am afraid is the essence of courage.

Where do I find such courage? It’s commonplace to suppose that “doing something for someone else” or because no one else can do it is the best way to overcome fear. I’ve done my share of acting according to this belief. I find that although it is sometimes effective, it’s harsh instead of nourishing. It’s a position of desperation. I soon find myself “running on empty.” I’m the last person I take care of or even give consideration to. In fact, the very notion that taking action when afraid can be nourishing came as a startling revelation to me.

There are so many things I cannot change, the past being at the top of that list. But I do have some say in my own attitude. Instead of seeing myself as desperate and without any choices but to plunge ahead, gritting my teeth the whole way, I can see myself as resourceful. I learned to do this for others when my kids were having a hard time in their teenaged years and my therapist pointed out that they didn’t need me to inflict my own worries on them, communicating that I thought they were incapable of handling their problems; what they needed was my faith in their ability to find their own creative solutions.

So if I’m going to be creative and resourceful in facing the parole hearing and the distress rampant in my community, I need to think “outside the box.” Not attending the hearing is an option that never occurred to me in the early years. Once I let go of “I have to do this,” I see other possibilities. Some I can anticipate on a reasonable basis (another family member might attend, a representative of the D.A.’s office might – actually, does – attend; I could send a video of my statement; I could hire an attorney to attend in my place), but I must also keep in mind that my imagination doesn’t dictate what happens. Many times I thought I knew all the possible outcomes, only to discover that what actually happened was something I had no way of anticipating.

"Going Silent"

When I notice that someone I've been following on a social media site (including a blog) has "gone silent," I want to know why. Some of this is idle curiosity of the gossip type. Occasionally, the reason can be much more serious than such happy occasions as the person taking a vacation or being buried in an engulfingly-wonderful work project. My own excuse for not posting more regularly this year is that I'm happily wending my way through editorial revisions (that is, revisions in response to feedback from my editor) for my June DAW release, The Heir of Khored.

On at least one occasion, quite a few years ago, the other person's silence was due to a life-threatening situation that prevented the person from obtaining help. Only the concern of friends who noticed brought the necessary assistance. (In this case, the person had been incapacitated and without food or water for 48 hours in a closed apartment in the summer.) I was one of the people that took action for our friend, asking someone local to to a welfare check on the person, and I came away from the experience with a profound respect for the power of social media to create positive communities that not only nurture and enrich our lives, but can literally save them.

The Feathered Edge: Moonlight and Martial Arts

I love the way each story in this anthology carries with it a history, not just of that particular tale itself but of the growth and comradeship of the author. So in order to talk about Dave Smeds's wonderful "A Swain of Kneaded Moonlight," I have to go back to how I first met him. We both had stories in the fourth volume of Sword & Sorceress (1987), edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley. (It's a marvelous volume, if I do say so, with stories by Mercedes Lackey, Jennifer Roberson, Charles de Lint, Diana L. Paxson and more, some of us just starting out our careers.) As an editor, Marion encouraged new writers and eventually a whole community of successful authors who'd made their first sales to her emerged. "Gullrider" wasn't Dave's first sale; he was already building a reputation as an up-and-coming fantasy writer with quite a few short fiction sales, a novel in print (The Sorcery Within) and another in publication when Sword & Sorcery IV came out.

"Gullrider" showed a number of characteristics I would grow to recognize as hallmarks of a Dave Smeds story - an original idea, carefully developed, meticulous attention to story craft, and a "heart" that stays with me long after I've put down the volume. At a time when the generic fantasy default was telepathic dragons, Dave took us soaring with sea birds and diving with mermen.

Various of us whose early sales were to Marion managed to hook up at conventions, this being before the internet made geographical separation irrelevant. I might have been introduced to Dave by Jennifer Roberson, another rising star I'd met through Marion, or perhaps we made our way to one another on our own. Dave and I discovered that we were not only writers of fantasy but martial artists. Dave's art was goju-ryu karate and today he is a senior black belt and instructor in that style. I'd met other writers who were also martial artists; it was like a secret underground, with the recognition of the discipline required, an appreciation of the balance of mind, body, and spirit. Not only that, most of us found our martial arts experiences sneaking into our fiction. This was certainly true for Dave!

Eclipse Diary, Part 4 - Afterthoughts

Chris at Lassen Park

The next morning, my friend and eclipse-buddy Chris and I drove up to Lassen Volcanic National Park, as she had never been there before and it seemed a shame to drive all the way and not see any of it. The road was closed by snow only a few miles past the entrance, but we stopped to goggle at the snow-draped mountains and sulfur vents. As the perfect ending to our adventure, we met a trio of avid cross-country skiers, preparing for the day’s outing. We swapped eclipse stories and theirs topped ours, hands down. They’d made the ascent to the top of Lassen, broken open a bottle of champagne while they watched the eclipse, and then skied back down.

Eclipse Skiing Party

Looking back, I’m struck by the wide range of knowledge of the people we encountered – from the astronomer who had not only his telescope (with solar lens) and camera (with solar lens), but everything hooked up to a laptop, and the physicist who explained to anyone who asked how a pinhole camera works and why the Moon looks red in a lunar eclipse, to the wine-sippers who hadn’t even realized when the eclipse began or what they were seeing. I fell somewhere in between. I want to understand what I’m seeing, but at heart, I’m more interested in what it means in the lives of the people who, to varying degrees and for varying reasons, formed a spontaneous community. I want to spin it all into stories. I suppose that’s why I’m a writer and not an astronomer.

But it sure was cool.

Eclipse Diary, Part 3 – Ring of Fire

Deborah's attempt to photograph the eclupse (far right)

Photographing through a welding visor

The solar system is mostly empty space with leeetle teeny objects hurtling round a star (and some of them, around others) that, while quite medium and ordinary by galactic standards, is by far the largest, most massive object anywhere around. So Earth is hurtling around the Sun, the Moon is hurtling around Earth (and therefore, around the Sun in a sort of perambulatory – not a correct astronomical term, I believe – fashion). And every once in a while, the Moon comes between the Sun and the Earth, thereby blocking the sun’s rays and casting a shadow over a leeetle teensy area of Earth’s surface. Sometimes the disk of the Moon obscures the Sun – that’s a total eclipse, and in the area of the resulting shadow, there’s no sunlight, so it appears to be night – but, because the Moon isn’t always the same distance from the Earth and objects appear smaller when they are farther away, at other times, they line up but a ring of Sun remains – an annular eclipse. And because the lineup has to be exact for either of these to happen, the shadow cast by the Moon falls on only a small area of Earth. Hence, our journey to Lassen Volcanic National Park. (My husband stayed at home and got to see a partial eclipse.)

Astronomer Explains His Strategy

Once we’d established ourselves in a suitable viewing area, hoping fervently that the clouds we’d seen earlier would remain cooperatively absent, the countdown began. Solar eclipse shades are very cool things, if a bit hokey. They’re cheaply made, like glasses used for 3-D movies, but the film has to cut out all the harmful rays from the Sun in order to allow direct viewing, so everything else looks utterly black. I’ve spent my lifetime Not Looking Directly At The Sun, so at first it was odd (to say the least) to put on these black-out shades and do just that. The Sun appeared as the single luminous object in a field of black.

And then…a tiny dimple appeared in the orange disk.

Eclipse Diary, Part 2 – A Community of Sun-Gazers

Mt. Lassen from Lake Almador

This is the second part of my solar eclipse adventures, accompanied by my intrepid neighbor and walking buddy, Chris.

Today’s lesson, young grasshopper, is that things turn out the way they do, no matter how different that is from how you expect them to be. All the information we had been given was that the best place to view the annular solar eclipse was from Lassen Volcanic National Park, plus there would be an educational presentation at the Information Center auditorium. Life, however, does not always follow what is given out in magazine articles and websites. When, after a morning of hiking around Lake Almador, we arrived at the park entrance, a long line of cars awaited us. The time for the presentation approached, with almost no forward progress. At last, when the entrance kiosk came into view, a Park Ranger informed us that not only was the parking lot full, or about to become so, but that we would not be able to view the entire eclipse from the park. She advised driving to Redding, about 90 miles away. She mentioned the Mineral Vista Point, considerably closer, but thought that the parking area might already be full.

In the tiny town of Mineral, we stopped to chat with the proprietors of the all-purpose lodge/market/general store. A number of people who’d turned back at Lassen had clearly decided that the way to view the eclipse was from the café patio, a cold beer in hand. They didn’t seem to mind that there were some rather large hills to the west. We, on the other hand, decided to try the Vista Point, reserving the lodge parking lot as a backup plan.

Eclipse Tailgate Party

When we arrived at the Vista Point, some 10 miles down the road, the formal parking areas were full, but we nabbed a shady spot off the road. I suspected that we would be only the first of many to park there, and I was right. We found an astronomer setting up a telescope and camera with special solar lenses. Before long, we’d struck up conversations not only with him, but his physicist friend and wife, and a family from San Jose. (I confess, I broke the ice here when I noticed the teen wearing a shirt saying, “Bow Ties Are Cool,” and began a Whovian conversation, during which Chris – who is an ardent Trekkie – entered into a spirited debate with the young man on the relative merits of DS9 and TNG, therefore imbuing the viewing with the flavor of a gathering of fans.) That family had brought a welding visor, and father and son busily figured out how to take photos of the eclipse through the visor glass plus the eclipse glasses.