HeliosphereNY 2023 Con Report

This blog isn't dead. I realize that I haven't had a lot of time to devote to it (or to any of my other blogs), but more updates will occur. In the meantime, here is the "after con" report from this past weekend.

HeliosphereNY
Piscataway, NJ

Yes, I get the irony. After the pandemic, the con and the previous hotel parted ways. We moved to Piscatawy for two years, and now it appears that the con will continue to exist here. Luckily I drive because it doesn't seem to be close to public transportation. I could be wrong on this -- I haven't checked.

From Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the trip took about two hours on a Friday afternoon. I had to choose between getting around Manhattan and into the Holland Tunnel, or down the BQE and make it to Staten Island before the expressway got nuts. I can't say I picked wrong, but I might not have picked the quicker of two evils. I made it there just before my first panel started.

I had a busy con this year. I always tell them to put me where they need me, and this year they did. I was on four panels plus I had a reading. So I was scheduled for five things even before I picked discussions that I wanted to sit in on. And then there were signings and launch parties, too. Let me take them all in order, staring with Friday afternoon.

What is Streaming Doing?" It was a "miracle" that I found the Miracle Room. I was the final panelist to arive, and we only had one audience member to start. More arrived after. It was a lively discussion on the problems with programming for streaming. There's a vicious cycle that people won't watch streaming series until a full series has been completed, or worse, people wait until the series is complete. No one wants to invest time in a show that gets cancelled prematurely. The downside to this is that shows don't get ratings right away, so they get cancelled before people even find them.

The Ice Cream Social is always fun because I like ice cream. I had plenty of toppings so I didn't need to go back for seconds. As it turned out, my Pandemic Book Club was meeting at the same time, so I found a quiet corner for my Zoom call.

After that, I missed the later panel because I honestly didn't realize that there were any after the Social. I had a nice time having cocktails and hors d'oeuvres, courtesy of Dr. James Prego, who was a panelist on my earlier panel. A number of peple joined us later, and we called it a night not long afer midnight.

Saturday morning, I had the pool to myself. It was heated. The pool house at the Holiday Inn isn't much to speak of. For one thing, there isn't any furniture to put your stuff down on.

This year, the breakfast buffet was included with the room, so I didn't have to leave to go to IHOP. Standard fare, but the place was a bit crowded because of a tour group which had stayed the night. (There was two buses outside waiting for people.)

Don’t Ruin the Moment! Paying Attention to the Little Things: This was a panel I suggested, but it wasn't the panel I suggested. I wanted to talk about suspension of disbelief, but the wording of the panel description made it sound more like a writing panel than a viewing panel. The writers and editors on the panel ran with this. I had no problem going along with this -- I had plenty of material. I'd been told that there had been a lot of interest in this panel. Given the folks I shared the dias with, I can believe this. It was like an all-star panel and me. (Imposter syndrome anyone?) It was fun and informative. Maybe next year, I'll suggest my panel again and stress the viewing angle. I could even plug my Bored Panda interview.

Jersey Pines Ink (Dina Leacock and Ann Stolinsky) Launch Party: I probably should've used this time to get lunch, but I was curious about the launch party. There were a couple of readings from the new anthology Trees, and there were prizes. Books were giving away, and I had the first choice. Since most of the books were dark fantasy or horror, I gravitated toward the Whodunit anthology. (I noticed that Gordon Litzner was included among the authors, but I didn't get a chance to have him sign it.) My lunch that day consisted of a bit of crudité and some jelly beans.

Making Our Monsters or Finding Them: I sat in this discussion about cryptids, which featured several authors of cryptid novellas, which were part of a line from Systema Paradoxa (from eSpec Books). I need to read a few of these so I can propose one of my own -- and I need to do this before they run out of cryptids. Not likely that they're run out, but the remaining ones aren't as well known.

Reading: I had a reading with two others, which should've mention 20-25 minutes per person. The first reader was ready to stop at 10-15 minutes because it was a good spot, but another author said, "No, you have a lot of time." These readings, at other cons, don't usually run this long. I had a bunch of stories on my iPad, ready to read in a ridiculously large font. I read "The Feast of Groggry the Cronaut" from In A Flash 2020, which is under 2000 words long. The third author was ready to jump in. I said I had a quickie I could read after, which was 1000 words long and had been published in Daily Science Fiction. (This impressed one of the other readers as DSF was a tough market to crack. Sadly, they ceased publishing in 2022.) Anyway, the last story seemed to last a lot longer than mine did, and in fact spanned several chapters. I sat there quietly steaming becasue as an author of flash, I could've easily have read one or two more quick stories. Last year, I read at least 5 stories in did it in under 20 minutes.

Books & Brews, with Charles Gannon: Again, I should've gotten something ot eat, but I discovered a sign-up list for a Books & Brews, which was not on the official schedule. The last time Chuck Gannon was at Heliosphere, a couple years before the pandemic, there were several B & B's going on, and I signed up in advance. After all, he was a Guest of Honor. The funny thing was that he asked more about us than we asked about him. He even remembered me (back then) when he saw me later that night, and recalled that I was trying to get published again after a long dry spell. This time, we had been on a panel together, and I had two books in front of me: my collection of flash stories, In A Flash 2020, and an anthology that I'm in, Devilish & Divine. He was impressed by this and wanted me to tell him about it. And then we got into what's coming in the Caine Riordan universe. He kept spoilers to a minimum because he didn't know how many books we'd each had read. I would've admitted to reading the first 3 if anyone asked, but that would've been slightly bending the truth. I am reading the books now, at least the first three because that's generally my pattern with series.

The eSpec Books Launch Party: I showed up prepared to read, but in the interest of time and because of the raffle to come, they only had readings from authors in books that were launching. (That is, books from the past year, since the last Heliosphere, but particularly the ones that just "Kickstartered".) And there should've been another reading, but one participant had to miss the con for medical reasons.

When that ended, I retrieved my books from my room because there was an autograph session for every author at the con. I don't know how many fans wandered in or if it was mostly authors buying from authors and signing books for other authors. (As it was, there was one person in the room who was in Devilish & Divine whose signature I didn't have yet, but I didn't realize it at the time.) I sold one book. That paid for dinner which I finally took instead of a later panel. A couple hours were spent in a room with a private party afterward.

Evening came and morning followed ...

Breakfast was not as good, but I learned that next year, I need to come back later because they bring out different stuff later. No crossiant, just bread. The toaster was way back at the start of the line along with a couple hard bagels that I could cut through. No pancakes, but waffles showed up later on, as did the bacon. Bacon, good, these waffles, meh. Even later, there was corn-beef hash. I didn't try any. Maybe next year.

Weirdest New Words I Learned in 2023: I didn't know what to expect from this panel, but it was fun. A lot of it dealt with Tik Tok driving words, and unlike in Mean Girls, "influencers" can make words happen. Fellow panelist Lancelot Schaubert has been deconstructing English and learning language in general, so he had a lot of interesting insights to contribute. Amusing aside: when I mentioned that "plumbago" was another word for graphite (courtesy of Jeopardy), he could pull out the etymology of it but wouldn't have realized that it was a word to begin with.) Our moderator, Sarena Strauss, had us (audience included) do a writing exercise with five words or phrases that popped up in the discussion, included "weirorange", coined by Jenifer Rosenberg, meaning the color you see weird you close your eyes tight and rub them.

This is what I wrote: The night sky was illuminated bright shades of weirorange as fireworks exploded in sync with the stridulations of the orchestra. My family was oblivious, kitlepitching their own snarky remarks about my mulkvisti brother who'd just crushed out.

a few definitions: stridulations are the sounds insects make rubbing body parts, kittlepitching is hogging the conversation, crushed out is slang for breaking out of prison (and had I more time, I might've used it figuratively instead of literally), and mulkvisti is a Scandinavian word from an audience member which means the one I don't hate as much as the rest of you.

As interesting as the Wednesday Addams panel might've been (and I was curious about the "audience participation" part), I went to readings from the upcoming book, The Four ______ of the Apocalypse. We got to hear Dany Ackley-McPhail's "Four Lunchladies", Hildy Silverman's "Four Batchelors", and Keith R. A. DeCandido's "Four Septagenarians". It promises to be a great book.

I missed the GoH Interview because I had ...

Fan Fiction as Practice: I dug out my old fanzines for this one, but sadly I shouldn't have bothered. This was the panel that got away, even more than the Disbelief panel. It went off the rails pretty quickly, and any and every attempt to right the train was immediately tipped over again. Basically, it turned into a very long discussion, or rather multiple discussions about the problems of Mary Sues in fan fiction, fiction in general, and original works, and what the actual definition of a Mary Sue actually is, and what the problems of Mary Sues in fan fiction, fiction in general, and original works, and what ... and what the hell happened to the time. It didn't stop until we were over time, so no one got any closing comments. I also didn't get to mention my fanzine, which I was told the first time I tried mentioning my fan writing background, I was told we'd get back to that. We did not. There was also very little talk about "practice" and more about "fixing" the source material, which seems rude when your in someone else's sandbox, but sometimes the sandbox owner took their shovel and went home. And others stopped writing fanfiction because they moved on to writing official licensed material. For my part, I mostly haven't written in the universe of a single show, but in the Car Wars universe, which doesn't have main characters. So I was an odd fit for the panel, even if fan fiction was my practice for writing.

Last panel I attended was Genre Blending ~ You Got Ghosts in My Steampunk!, which seems to be all the rage with anthologies these days, but goes back quite a ways. There was some history of blending genres (a little pendantic at times) and when the moderator was asked if he had any specific questions to discuss, he pulled out a couple of books and read examples. I exclused myself and walked out into the deluge in the parking lot and started home, hoping the lousy weather would keep people off the roads.

Not the greatest end to the weekend, but I did pick up a nice hero for the ride home. Next year, we'll be back in the same hotel, so it seems HeliosphereNY will be in NJ for the forseeable future. Hopefully, I'll have a new book to read from next time around, and I'll have them limit the number of panels I'm on so I can attend others that I might like. One member did apologize for keeping me so busy. But it was okay, I had fun. And I was fed.