Outwrite Was Cool
Aug. 7th, 2017 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
child_of_the_airFor reasons that were largely (okay, entirely) ashnistrike's doing, I got to be on a panel on speculative fiction "Beyond the Binary" at Outwrite, a convention-ish thing about LGBT writing at the DC LGBT center along with her and wolby. I was fairly terrified beforehand, given that I haven't read that much SF compared to other people, and given that I'm not a writer and it was a panel full of writers, but it seems to have gone quite well. I got the impression that my comments were useful and reasonably coherent (even the attempt to explain Charlie Stross' novel Glasshouse really quickly so I could explain my complicated feels about it and gender), though I'm sad that I afterward realized I failed to give my pronouns as "'she' in the Radchii sense" and to mention the short story "Revolution in 1950," by Stanley Weinbaum, which might be the first science fiction story ever to deal with the issue of medical transition.
Other cool things at Outwrite included that I managed to write a poem---my first that didn't feel horribly cliched in nearly a year---during the panel before the one I was on. I've posted it on Facebook; if you don't follow me there but are interested, let me know and I can send a link. And after my panel, someone from the audience came up and introduced themselves as a high school acquaintance who had also turned out to be trans, so that was cool. The weird consequences of being back in the DC area, I suppose.
And, after the convention was over, I had dinner withwolby, ashnistrike, and their families. That was really cool and involved discussions of transit, religion, science fiction and fantasy, dinosaurs (and people who identify as such), and kitties.
Finally, I came up with the phrase "From broth we came, and to brine we shall return," and now need to figure out how to use it somehow. Possibly in a liturgy for something. Or a poem, though my chances of ever making "Cape Ann" (my most recent horribly cliched poem, which it could almost fit the theme of) into anything tolerable feel pretty low.
ashnistrike's doing, I got to be on a panel on speculative fiction "Beyond the Binary" at Outwrite, a convention-ish thing about LGBT writing at the DC LGBT center along with her and wolby. I was fairly terrified beforehand, given that I haven't read that much SF compared to other people, and given that I'm not a writer and it was a panel full of writers, but it seems to have gone quite well. I got the impression that my comments were useful and reasonably coherent (even the attempt to explain Charlie Stross' novel Glasshouse really quickly so I could explain my complicated feels about it and gender), though I'm sad that I afterward realized I failed to give my pronouns as "'she' in the Radchii sense" and to mention the short story "Revolution in 1950," by Stanley Weinbaum, which might be the first science fiction story ever to deal with the issue of medical transition.Other cool things at Outwrite included that I managed to write a poem---my first that didn't feel horribly cliched in nearly a year---during the panel before the one I was on. I've posted it on Facebook; if you don't follow me there but are interested, let me know and I can send a link. And after my panel, someone from the audience came up and introduced themselves as a high school acquaintance who had also turned out to be trans, so that was cool. The weird consequences of being back in the DC area, I suppose.
And, after the convention was over, I had dinner with
wolby, ashnistrike, and their families. That was really cool and involved discussions of transit, religion, science fiction and fantasy, dinosaurs (and people who identify as such), and kitties.Finally, I came up with the phrase "From broth we came, and to brine we shall return," and now need to figure out how to use it somehow. Possibly in a liturgy for something. Or a poem, though my chances of ever making "Cape Ann" (my most recent horribly cliched poem, which it could almost fit the theme of) into anything tolerable feel pretty low.
