yuki_onna

Reposted from sovay , a member of the Readercon ConCom:

Let us all agree that "This is your father's Readercon" is a really bad slogan. It has a deskful of negative associations and nothing to do with the current plan for Readercon 21, which is a temporary simplification of the program to something whose creation and coordination will not cause nervous breakdowns among members of the committee. Note that I do not mean simplified intellectually. The only issue is the density of program items. The dealer's room will contain its usual stacks of books. The traditional events—Meet the Pros(e), the presentation of the Rhysling, Shirley Jackson, and Cordwainer Smith Awards, and the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition—will all take place. And please, if there aren't parties all over the place in 2010, something has gone terribly wrong with the whole de-stressing idea. Further information will be forthcoming as soon as I have it, i.e., after the committee has a chance to check its e-mail, breathe for the first time since mid-April, and perhaps water some of its plants or pets. For now, please repost and link as you see fit. And if you have any concerns about Readercon, ask.

Don't Panic.

I shall be waiting and staying tuned to all channels, with-holding judgment until it's clear what is actually going on, since that flyer, the source of all the trouble, seems to have been a rogue agent not approved by the Com.

I'm sorry to have caused a lot of trouble via posting--but very glad that this is now a topic of conversation and Readercon knows how upsetting that flyer was. I will never be sorry for speaking up on an issue that is important to me. The fact is, I asked some of my questions to the programming chair personally, and his answers (apparently inaccurate ones) along with the now infamous flyer were all the information that was available. That is a huge communication problem and I'm thrilled and relieved to hear that all may not be as reported. Again, I await further missives. I trust sovay  implicitly.

I also seriously under-estimated the interest in a party with con elements (I never meant to imply I wanted to start a con up here--ye gods, I don't have the time or the money! The model was more FarthingParty than Fourth Street.) The fact is, this is a small and popular island with only about 20 hotel rooms whose reservations have to be made early. There is no way this place could support the 100+ people who said they wanted to come, and those people certainly could not fit in my house or any of the pubs and restaurants here. I was hoping for, like, 25 or 30 people to bring potluck and their conversation hats, not 100+ to expect a formal con, to be fed, all of that. I can't afford it, for one. I cannot and do not want to create a going convention. I do not want to compete with Readercon. Geez. I want to be part of Readercon--just not the one advertised in that flyer. This is Cat's lesson not to post when exhausted and sick.

Sometimes I forget that this is not 2003 and I have more than 30 readers. I am lame, in that respect. But I maintain that doing one's own thing when an institution appears to be going in an uncomfortable direction was a logical and good thing to do. Looks like that uncomfortable direction might not be the case. Hope they still want me back, if it's not. 

However, I hope that some of the issues in yagathai's post will get more conversation through this flare-up, because they are deathly important ones to me--this is a big part of my world, and I don't want it to wither.