Wrong use completely for one of these tags

[mrissa]

Fourth Street was a Fourth Street! Yay Fourth Street! I seem to have gotten only homeopathic quantities of some wonderful people I like, but Fourth Street is so full of wonderful people I like (and not, alas, full of infinite energy sources for me) that it's very hard to avoid this outcome. And it was still a very good Fourth Street full of wonderful people I like.

And now I am home and resting and have sold a novelette, "The Radioactive Etiquette Book," to Analog. So yay go that! It's a madcap interplanetary comedy of diplomacy, complete with aliens and wayyyy too many moving parts, so I'm glad I got all the moving parts sorted out to editorial satisfaction. Hurrah!

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Wiktory! Congratulations.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

Congratulations!

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

That is a fantastic title.

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

Also, you sold a novelette! Yay!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I got the title ages ago--really, really, honestly years ago--and it took several false starts to get the right setting and voice and everything else.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

Wishing you a GOOD cover for the Analog this time. It was great to meet you, finally. You seemed to be partaking of the con much more fully than I would expect for someone complaining of limited energy. I am now afraid of Full Energy Mris.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So yah, Full Energy Mris is a bit terrifying. (I can hear timprov from the basement going, "A bit?") But the emergency power naps helped, and crashing out today has helped, so I was able to do my con.

And honestly, it is my con. I have far more expectations for what I will do and what I will be able to do and what I have to do at Fourth Street than at any other con in the world. So if I spend a fortnight flattened afterwards--well, it's Fourth Street. You do what you must.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

Sweet!

[ckd]

I too was unable to spend as much time as I would have liked with as many people as I would have liked, so it's not just your energy constraints that lead to that outcome. But still, less than six weeks until farthingparty.

Also, SQUEEE sale and as cloudscudding notes that is a great title.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

(llama!)

[kitgordon.livejournal.com]

Great news: congrats! It was great to see you at 4th Street.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Good to see you too!

[aedifica]

Congratulations! And hooray for an upcoming Farthing Party where I'll get to see you.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

I know I was sad that you and Christopher and Mris and I didn't get more time together. The degree to which 4th Street is full of awesome people one knows and likes and can't always make time for is a mixed blessing, and doubtless fed into the perceptions of some newcomers that they were sidelined.

[aedifica]

Yeah, I said to ckd that that was my only regret about the weekend--not getting to see you all. (I did get to meet a few newcomers and enjoyed talking with them; I'm sorry to hear not everyone felt welcomed.)

[moiread]

> and doubtless fed into the perceptions of some newcomers that they were sidelined.

Are there any posts up yet that you know of where discussion about this is happening? If so, do you mind tossing me the links? I don't want to shift focus away from Mris' post but I do want to know what's going on.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am about to answer cloudscudding on this; chinders may be going to talk about it, but I think she has good volunteering ideas, and I'm glad she's taking point on this, because I like the stuff she's saying.

This came up in the con postmortem, and I think that con postmortems are often a way for people who start the con postmortem going, "Good con! I had a good time!" to go into negative mode whether they intended to or not, but that may or may not be the only issue here.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

I was a newcomer and I did not feel sidelined. I felt fully assimilated.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm very glad to hear that. I knew I wasn't going to be joined at the hip with you, and I figured you wouldn't expect that--but I'm glad that my time with you and other people's time with you and various other factors all combined to make you feel welcome.

[cathshaffer.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, indeed.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I see this a lot in established communities (and I've never even been to Fourth Street). I think it's not entirely avoidable. From a newcomers' POV, trying to understand can help, but only to an extent: you want others to have a good time and see their beloved friends, but you also want to have a good experience yourself. You can try to be outgoing, introduce themselves and try to join conversations, but you don't want to do that to the point of annoying people.

On the other hand, old-timers are likely to want to meet new people as well as old friends, so you feel like you're being very open and friendly, and it gets annoying to hear complaints that people feel left out.

I've been on both sides of this in various places and still don't have any perfect solutions. One thing that can help a lot is structuring participation - so people who run the community can arrange mixers targeted at new people, for instance, or new people can volunteer for a bit so that they have an established place and role as well as more chances to meet people.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Huzzah!

Hoping for 4th street panel notes when people can . . .

[moiread]

Huzzah! I salute you with my mango juice.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Congratulations!

[bad-latin.livejournal.com]

Congrats on the sale!

In the "Get Your Reality Out Of My Fantasy" discussion, you mentioned a friend who was a great aficionado of Tolkien ripoffs and suchlike. Afterwards, my husband turned to me and said with some desperation, "Where are all these Tolkien ripoffs? That's exactly what I want to read and nobody is writing them anymore!" So, if you recall any of the books your friend had been into, and can pass on any recommendations, that would be super awesome and really greatly appreciated.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Heh. Please recall that I said I was 19 at the time. I turn 34 next month. So "nobody is writing them any more" is not going to really get you any new ones from an anecdote when I was 19, I'm afraid.

[bad-latin.livejournal.com]

I know. :) I suspect he was desperately hoping for something he'd missed the first time around.

[blue-hat-guru.livejournal.com]

Heard about this one ages ago; no idea if it's any good or not.

http://www.e-booksdirectory.com/details.php?ebook=2646

[bad-latin.livejournal.com]

Not one he'd heard of; thanks!