Adventures in Booth Babery: ForgeCon Report

Back there where I said a corset isn't the sort of thing you can just go to the grocery store in? Whether or not that's true, as it turns out, a corset is just fine for breakfast at McDonalds. I would not have guessed that it's the sort of garment that one can order blueberry banana nut oatmeal in and have the only comment be about one's choice of coordinating footwear. Shows what I know.

On the subject of footwear, I noticed an odd trend during ForgeCon: I had much better luck engaging visitors to the Apex booth when I left my shoes under the table. One person suggested that it might stem from how Kentuckians prefer their women. Can't say I know enough Kentuckians to assess whether that's correct or not, and I think he may have been joking. Personally, I suspect it has something to do with my general preference for going barefoot, so when I'm barefoot, I'm more comfortable and I have one less thing to distract my attention from the attendees.

The day in the corset was a blast, though I'm not sure how much it really did much to spur business. I sold some books, introduced a lot of people to Apex, and got some ideas about what to do and what to avoid while minioning the table for the rest of the summer. I actually made it through all 10 hours the vendor hall was open without resorting to my backup outfit. On Sunday, I even got compliments from another vendor who chose Sunday as her Corset Day because of the shorter hours.

My initial misgivings proved unfounded, in part because the ladies from the burlesque booth made my outfit look positively modest. Next to their skirts that could be best described as a ruffled trim on their corsets, I wasn't even in the top 5 on skimpiness. On the one hand, that made me feel a little better that I wasn't underdressed. On the other hand, it did strike me as just a little unfair when the gamers at the next table brought one in as a ringer. Whatever one's feelings about booth babes are, at least Apex's booth babes are honest Apex fangirls first.

Adventures in Booth Babery: Prelude

Back in March, I bought a corset. I've wanted one ever since I started frequenting conventions, and this spring I was finally at a con with a corsetier during a low point in my internal resolve against spending so much on such an impractical garment. Unlike the Doctor Who scarf, steel-boned brown suede with black leather trim and buckles across the front is not the sort of thing I can just go grocery shopping in. But it does match my good fedora and my black pleather miniskirt.

This weekend, I finally have a place to wear my corset (and the hat and the miniskirt and really not a whole lot else). If you're anywhere near Lexington, Kentucky, this weekend, stop by the Apex Publications table at Forge Con.

That's right. I'm going all-in as a booth babe.

Well, not quite all-in. Based on my height and the length of the outfit, I'm only going 61% in, but that's a big step out of my shell of carefully maintained professionalism and propriety. Saturday's outfit is more of the sexy than I'm used to putting out there, especially since it's sort of "at work" and enough of my job description could already apply to a webcam stripper.

I'm trying not to be nervous about this weekend. After all, I've worked the Apex table before. I've even shown up to a convention in a costume that didn't have a whole lot more coverage (yes, I have pics to prove it happened; no, I'm not linking to them). Now, I'm just combining those two and changing the audience whose attention I want to grab from one 60-something-year-old artist to an entire convention. No big deal. I just keep telling myself that and re-reading Richard Branson's blog advocating less stuffy clothing for businesspeople. If the guy with the spaceship says you should be able to be taken seriously without a business suit, it has to be true.

Job Hazard

I love my job...even the parts where I fan my boss while only 48% dressed (if you haven't seen the photo, it's on Facebook). The parts that I can't do from home in my jammies are more like playing dress-up and hanging out with friends than real work. Most of all, there's something immensely satisfying in bringing new stories to readers.

It's not without its drawbacks, though. I do occasionally yell at a manuscript and threaten to tattoo the rules for semicolon usage on the inside of authors' eyelids. Ebook conversions have minds of their own. Too few authors know how to do a good in-person book pitch.

Lately, I've discovered a new hazard of editing books. I get to the end of a book that tickles my innards so well that I want to go screaming to the world, "You have to drop what you're doing NOW and get this story into your brain immediately!" Except that the world cannot, because the book won't be out for months yet. Until then, I have to live knowing that there's this feeling a story evokes, but I'm one of only a handful who has been able to feel it.

Mo*Con Report

Mo*Con is a very unusual convention. With only a few formal panels, most of the programming is spontanously convened DIY discussions among the attendees. Sample topics: new writing projects, novel pitch strategies, the future of publishing, and what a ham looks like raw. I'm not sure how raw ham came up, because I think that's about the only thing we didn't eat. I've never had Indian food before, and I rather liked it.

The theme for this year was coming together as family. I'm wary when that sort of sentiment starts getting tossed around. My natal family and I are — we're not estranged by any means, but the less time we spend in the same time zone, the better we get along. I'd apologize to my family for posting that online, but it's nothing they don't already know. The "family" relationship paradigm is not one I seek to emulate with people I'd like to spend any substantial amount of time with (Hi, Mom! Love you!).

I'm a relative newcomer among the Mo*Con regulars, but everyone made me feel so incredibly welcomed, especially Maurice and Sally Broaddus, who let everyone into their home when we weren't at the church. It was great getting face-to-face time with people I already knew, as well as meeting some completely new people and others I have passing web-based acquaintanceships with. I'm definitely making Mo*Con a regular part of my con schedule. I'm still not sold on the "family" thing, but only because I'd rather have friends.

What I Left Out

My Apex Books Gateway Guide for May is up, looking at An Occupation of Angels. What I didn't say there, because it wasn't relevant to the point of the column, is that with An Occupation of Angels, I finally found a story by Lavie Tidhar that I understand.

My usual reaction to one of Lavie Tidhar's stories is "I have no idea what just happened, but I loved every minute of it." I'm glad that An Occupation of Angels is different (I loved every minute of it, but I could follow it), because otherwise, I would have had to dissect how he achieves the such breathtakingly sublime WTFery. While the writer side of me wants to know how he does it, the reader side of me is a little afraid that, if I know how it works, it'll stop working for me.

Let the Neuroses Begin

Jim C. Hines has a great post, Hugo Lessons Thus Far. Since I'm not on the ballot, most of his lessons are things to file away for later. However, one particular person I know is on the ballot, so I do need to pay attention to one of the lessons:

What should I wear?

Women: Anything less than the perfect blend of elegance, professionalism, beauty, and class will be judged harshly both by those in attendance at Worldcon and those observing the webcast online.

My sarcasm detection is notoriously bad, but I really hope this is humor. Otherwise, I'm going to spend four months agonizing over whether a black satin cocktail dress is too little professionalism (or just too little satin), and if "class" and "sequined cleavage" are mutually exclusive.

Site Updates

The more things that are worth updating my site over, the less time I have for updates. Hard to believe, but two books I've edited have been released since the last time I updated that part of the site. Now that I've finished proofreading a third book and gotten into the middle of edits on a fourth, I've finally gotten that part of the site caught up with the books that are out and available for purchase. Give it a couple more months, and it will be behind again.

I also have my About Me page updated to reflect my new position as Apex Publications' senior editor. At some point, I should probably get up some information about my con schedule for the summer, since I'll be at about a half dozen cons between May and October.

Big News

I announced it on Facebook when it first came down about a week and a half ago, but the alien head is officially out of the bag: I've formally joined the Apex Publications team as senior editor. Apex Overlord Jason Sizemore was nice enough to post an announcement to Facebook and Twitter so I didn't have to explode containing the squee before the official updates percolated through the internet. That's just one more reason he's a great Overlord. If we've learned anything from movies with evil genius bent on world domination, it's that competent minions are a rare commodity (though Apex attracts only the best minions!). You don't want one splattered all over the walls because of the excitement of being promoted to henchperson.

Passwords and Virtual Skin

So, Facebook explicitly stated that prospective employers should not ask for prospective employees' Facebook passwords. Really? We live in a world where that had to be said? Are employers actually doing this to check on their prospective hires' social media accounts, or is the request some sort of pre-employment screening for susceptibility to social engineering attempts? Because asking for passwords as part of the interview process seems less like a valid pre-employment question and more like the world's most inefficient phishing scam. I'd certainly want to avoid hiring people who fell for it, especially if part of their potential job is knowing anything of importance about the business.

As we live our lives increasingly online, our social media accounts are us on the Web. Giving an employer my Facebook or Twitter password gives them the ability to present themselves as me in a space where I spend a lot of my time and interact professionally and personally. With my password, there's nothing stopping the employer from updating my status as if they were me or defriending my friends. If they were so inclined, they could even change my password, locking me out of my own profile and essentially commandeering my established online identity. They could steal my identity in a way that actually harms that identity, rather than just leading to some low-grade bank fraud.

In the virtual worlds, passwords and logins are the electronic equivalent of our bodily integrity and autonomy in physical space, and giving them up to someone other than the virtual service itself should not be done lightly. I apologized to my own husband for the time I didn't realize I was looking at Facebook through his stored login on the desktop and clicked past the first screen - and that's the man I've shared a bed with for 14 years. I considered it a significant show of confidence when Apex Publications trusted me with the login information for the ebook stores, and when I inadvertently found myself in the boss' personal account for one of the retailers rather than the company account, I could not have been more embarrassed if had I walked in on him naked in real life.

In the physical world, our skin provides a hard delineation between what is us and what is the rest of the world, and whatever else may go on outside the skin, even in our nebulous personal space, for the most part we've agreed that proceeding past the skin without informed consent constitutes a violation of our physical selves. Now that we're cultivating virtual selves as well, it's high time to enforce the social agreement that no one can compel us to let them past our online skin into our virtual selves.

Meeting the Easter Bunny

On the heels of the first woodchuck sighting of the year, I now have eyes on the first bunny. They hang around all winter, and I see tracks in the snow, at least when I have snow, but it's always nice to see the little furry bodies that go with the feet. They're going to be disappointed when they find out I'm not planting a garden. Bunnies being bunnies, they'll manage, though.

To commemorate First Bunny, I give you the 100% true story of when I saw the Easter Bunny:

It was the first Easter after my family moved from California, so I must have been a couple of months past 2-1/2 years old. I've heard conflicting stories for why we moved, but whatever the reason, we ended up within visiting distance of my maternal grandparents. Their house sat on a bit more than 3 acres out in the country between two cow pastures and a forested hill, not far off the side of Mt. St. Helens that was still there in June 1980. The prior owners had landscaped the front and side with sculpted topiary trees, a koi pond (which, as long as I remember, never had water, much less koi), and what we called simply the Grove, a circle of rhododendrons around a large oak tree. I don't know what the initial landscapers had in mind when they designed this particular feature, but it made a perfect Easter Egg hunting ground.

My sister and I stayed up at the house while my parents, or maybe grandparents, hid the eggs. It was quite obvious even then that Easter Bunny needed the grownups' help to hide the eggs. It was a bunny, after all; they're quadripedal, which doesn't leave many extremities free for carrying the eggs while hopping from hiding place to hiding place, and they can reach maybe a foot off the ground, tops. Once the eggs were stashed for the hunt, the adults came up to the house to get us. As we stepped through the gap in the rhododendrons into the Grove, a rabbit sat in the middle of all of the hidden eggs. The Easter Bunny wasn't any different from the wild cottontails that hopped around the rest of the year, but there it was, on Easter, sitting with the eggs.