I’m finally returning to Readercon after a few years of pandemic-forced break! And the schedule I’ve got looks quite juicy! Readercon, if you’re not familiar with it, is a science fiction convention, but it’s focused entirely on books and magazines (no costumes, no gaming room, no film room). Outside of academic conferences, it’s got the highest level of discourse of any con I’ve ever been to. It now takes place in the Boston area in the Quincy Marriott on July 13-16.
Thursday Night Reading
Things open with my reading on Thursday night, 9pm in the Blue Hills room. Traditionally, programming on Thursday night at Readercon has been free and open to the public, so please come by and hear me read from my brand-new erotic short story collection, Bent for Leather. (I’ll probably even read the newest story in it…)
Friday
“What has RWA got that we ain’t got?”
Salon 4, 12 noon
This is slated to be a panel on “Can we re-imagine SFWA as an organization that does more for its authors, while avoiding the pitfalls and structural racism that have plagued RWA?” We lost a few panelists, though. If we don’t recruit some replacements, it may end up being a two-person discussion. (If you’ll be at Readercon and have strong opinions about RWA and SFWA, please ping me or the programming dept!)
“Crowdfunding for Wordsmiths”
Thayer Boardroom, 2pm
This is the latest update of my workshop on best practices for crowdfunding publishing projects. “If you are considering Kickstarting an anthology, funding an online magazine, or seeding a publishing imprint, award, or writers workshop, what do you need to know before embarking on a crowdfunding campaign? Which platforms are best suited to which projects? What common problems do crowdfunders run into, and how are they best avoided? Bring your questions and your notebooks!”
Autographing
-outside the bookshop area- 6pm – 7pm
I’ll bring some copies of Bent for Leather (since no bookstores have that yet).
Saturday
“Writing Sex Scenes Without Fear”
Salon A, 1pm
This is the panel I’m most excited about, since I’ll be moderating this group which features three of my favorite writers, Ellen Kushner, whose Swordspoint contained a sex scene so poetic that I recited it for one of my MFA workshop classes (so poetic that some of my classmates were like, wait, was that a sex scene!?!), K.M Szpara, whose erotic near-future SF novel Docile is one of my favorite kinky novels ever, and Sunny Moraine, whose short story submissions to Circlet Press many years ago were so mindblowingly good that the editors all wanted to read them (even if they weren’t working on that particular book). The fifth panelist is the one whose writing I don’t know, Robert V.S. Redick, but both his academic and social justice bona fides look sterling, so I think we’ll get along well.
Sunday
“Fanfic: Progressive, Regressive”
Salon 4, 2pm
This is another one I’m really looking forward to. The inimitable Foz Meadows moderates and, not totally surprisingly, all three panelists have written for Circlet Press as well as fanfic: myself, Catt Kingsgrave, and the aforementioned Sunny Moraine. Here’s the official description:
“Speculative fanfic can go far beyond mainstream speculative fiction in imagining other worlds, other relationships, and other ways of being. But it’s written by fallible humans in the here and now, and can just as easily incorporate bigotries and mindsets that we’d rather leave in the past than carry into the future. This panel of longtime fanfic writers will explore the nuances of these facets of fanfic and how they parallel mainstream speculative fiction’s similar contradictions.”
Single-day and full-weekend registrations are available.
