![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
some things I did at Mythcon
Aug. 9th, 2007 03:17 pm1. As chair, I was "on" virtually continuously for four days. This can be exhausting for an introvert, and I took care to allow intervals of down time to huddle in a corner. But it's a lot easier when you know well and feel comfortable with the people you're displaying yourself in front of.
2. Answered questions and solved problems. I've not forgotten my amazement at the first convention I worked on, in a very junior position, on finding that every time an attendee asked a question about the con, I knew the answer. My chairman had prepared me well. This time I tried to prepare my committee well, and know the answers myself, and to be definitive when the answer was something I had to decide on the spot.
Solving problems, also. Life is much easier if you can take snags in stride, and work the problem rather than biting anybody for being slow or forgetful. I forgot a few things myself. But I surprised myself by being accepting of these things, and finding ways around them. My motto came from Shakespeare in Love:
"Everything will turn out all right in the end."
"How will it?"
"I don't know. It's a mystery."
3. Carried boxes, moved furniture around, set up the theatre for the evening shows myself. Rule one: the chairman is never, ever above doing grunt work. Even if you only have time to carry two boxes, that's two that the hard-working other people don't have to carry.
4. Delegated. Another useful tool. It's great to have people to whom you can say, "Please take care of this," and let them do it. Some committee members volunteered regular reports on how things were going. Others I checked with when I needed to. It worked both ways.
Of course I didn't get to much programming - that's what con chairs do, they miss programming, and I was prepared for it - but I did get in a few places, especially in the evening plenary sessions.
5. Played in a couple of dramatic readings: Roger Crabbe in a dramatized exerpt of Kushner & Sherman's Fall of the Kings at opening ceremonies, and C.S. Lewis in David Esselstrom's Inklings playlet. A command performance reprise of this for the Guests of Honor in the con suite in the middle of the Sunday night party, for which everyone stayed quiet for the 12 or 15 minutes it took to perform the play, was one of the magical moments of Mythcon.
6. Read my more analytical, systematic illustrated (with recordings) review of Tolkien-inspired music as a sequel to Ellen Kushner presenting a tape of her more subjective, impressionistic Sound & Spirit program on the subject. Mine was a 90-minute abridgement of 2+ hours of material I'd given at previous Mythcons. Nobody asked for the identity of the flower-child song that repeated the phrase "Three Rings for the Elven-kings" eleven times while I counted them off on my fingers. Maybe they didn't want to give it any wider circulation.
7. Got to dance one dance at the English country dancing before having to run off and do something else. Before it started, I talked with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
divertimento who was at the piano. "Do you remember my LJ post about the index I wrote to the five-year-old's book?" "Yes," he said. "Well," I said, "that's the author over there, with her mother."
8. Monday afternoon a gratifyingly large party came along on my walking tour of Berkeley fantasy sites. We paid extensive homage to locally-set works of Diana Paxson, MZB, Lisa Goldstein, and Peter Beagle, with briefer nods to Anthony Boucher, PKD, UKL, Poul Anderson, and the almost-fantasy of David Lodge. I also threw in, for no extra charge, Historic Sixties Berkeley ("You are now standing on the most historic patch of sidewalk in the world") and Historic Academic Berkeley ("Ernest Lawrence built his first cyclotron right over there where that building now is").
9. I did not get to the paper given by the person whose book manuscript I'd reviewed for a university press. (Yes, I'd known about this paper when I read the manuscript.) But I talked to someone else about it afterwards, who said, "He's been rewriting his material in response to a comprehensive critique he got from a publisher," and I had to bite my tongue and refrain from saying, "Yes, that was me."
2. Answered questions and solved problems. I've not forgotten my amazement at the first convention I worked on, in a very junior position, on finding that every time an attendee asked a question about the con, I knew the answer. My chairman had prepared me well. This time I tried to prepare my committee well, and know the answers myself, and to be definitive when the answer was something I had to decide on the spot.
Solving problems, also. Life is much easier if you can take snags in stride, and work the problem rather than biting anybody for being slow or forgetful. I forgot a few things myself. But I surprised myself by being accepting of these things, and finding ways around them. My motto came from Shakespeare in Love:
"Everything will turn out all right in the end."
"How will it?"
"I don't know. It's a mystery."
3. Carried boxes, moved furniture around, set up the theatre for the evening shows myself. Rule one: the chairman is never, ever above doing grunt work. Even if you only have time to carry two boxes, that's two that the hard-working other people don't have to carry.
4. Delegated. Another useful tool. It's great to have people to whom you can say, "Please take care of this," and let them do it. Some committee members volunteered regular reports on how things were going. Others I checked with when I needed to. It worked both ways.
Of course I didn't get to much programming - that's what con chairs do, they miss programming, and I was prepared for it - but I did get in a few places, especially in the evening plenary sessions.
5. Played in a couple of dramatic readings: Roger Crabbe in a dramatized exerpt of Kushner & Sherman's Fall of the Kings at opening ceremonies, and C.S. Lewis in David Esselstrom's Inklings playlet. A command performance reprise of this for the Guests of Honor in the con suite in the middle of the Sunday night party, for which everyone stayed quiet for the 12 or 15 minutes it took to perform the play, was one of the magical moments of Mythcon.
6. Read my more analytical, systematic illustrated (with recordings) review of Tolkien-inspired music as a sequel to Ellen Kushner presenting a tape of her more subjective, impressionistic Sound & Spirit program on the subject. Mine was a 90-minute abridgement of 2+ hours of material I'd given at previous Mythcons. Nobody asked for the identity of the flower-child song that repeated the phrase "Three Rings for the Elven-kings" eleven times while I counted them off on my fingers. Maybe they didn't want to give it any wider circulation.
7. Got to dance one dance at the English country dancing before having to run off and do something else. Before it started, I talked with
divertimento who was at the piano. "Do you remember my LJ post about the index I wrote to the five-year-old's book?" "Yes," he said. "Well," I said, "that's the author over there, with her mother."8. Monday afternoon a gratifyingly large party came along on my walking tour of Berkeley fantasy sites. We paid extensive homage to locally-set works of Diana Paxson, MZB, Lisa Goldstein, and Peter Beagle, with briefer nods to Anthony Boucher, PKD, UKL, Poul Anderson, and the almost-fantasy of David Lodge. I also threw in, for no extra charge, Historic Sixties Berkeley ("You are now standing on the most historic patch of sidewalk in the world") and Historic Academic Berkeley ("Ernest Lawrence built his first cyclotron right over there where that building now is").
9. I did not get to the paper given by the person whose book manuscript I'd reviewed for a university press. (Yes, I'd known about this paper when I read the manuscript.) But I talked to someone else about it afterwards, who said, "He's been rewriting his material in response to a comprehensive critique he got from a publisher," and I had to bite my tongue and refrain from saying, "Yes, that was me."
