For this year’s WisCon I figured that with such an overcrowded progam full of the likes of Samuel R. Delany, Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Lois McMaster Bujold, Geoff Ryman, Kate Wilhelm, Jane Yolen and etc. etc. it would be a good idea for me to not do a reading. I’d step aside and make room for the lumies and the up-and-coming writers such as Meghan McCarron and Lauren McLaughlin (just to name two of my faves).
Plus, I really hate doing readings. Ugh! And there are enough occasions throughout the year when I can’t skip ’em. I’m glad I did. I’d’ve been so stressed about it . . . So phew.
I also decided to skip out on the sign out which is the massive signing held on the last day where all the published writers sit with pens poised ready to scribble their name on whatever their readers want. Again, I was thinking about making room, if only for Ursula Le Guin’s massive queue. And such a queue it was curling around and around the enormous ballroom!
But I was also having a fit of the Australians and thinking that putting my name down for it was kind of writing tickets. I mean I haven’t been publishing for that long—my pro fiction career’s only 14 months long—I’m not that well known, don’t have many books, who do I think I am anyway?
But on the second day someone asked me if I’d be at the sign out. I started to say, “Well, you know, I figured there was no need—”
“Really?” they responded. “Because it’s so convenient to just take my books along and get them signed all at once. Otherwise I’ll have to walk around with your book, hoping to run into you again.”
“Oh,” I said, not having thought of it like that. “Sure, I’ll do the sign out.”
In all the discussion about self-promotion and what’s appropriate we not-hugely-successful writers forget that we do, in fact, have readers. That there are people who really, really want our signatures on their copies of our books. Just like I’m extraordinarily glad that I have books signed by the likes of Octavia Butler, Angela Carter, Dorothy Dunnett, Karen Joy Fowler and Kelly Link. Those are all books that mean a huge amount to me. The signature of their authors makes them that extra bit special.
I don’t know why this is so, but it is. I guess it’s the idea that Butler or Carter or Dunnett once touched these books that I own that sends a thrill through me. No matter how daggy that sounds. And in the case of Link and Fowler, who I know personally, I read their inscriptions and am instantly reminded of our friendship, of times spent together talking and bitching about writing, love, life and etc.
So I did the sign out and despite a cold and fatigue, I enjoyed it. I sat between John Scalzi and Nalo Hopkinson and in the lulls between signing we gossiped and giggled together. I signed for a young Japanese PhD student, writing about James Tiptree, Jr. who was a big admirer of The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, for the wonderful Deb Stone who spends her working hours battling the demons of censorship, and for a teenage girl who was maybe fourteen or fifteen years old—maybe younger—who came up to me just as I was putting my pen away, clutching a copy of Magic or Madness.
Was I still signing? she asked tentatively. Sure I was. So I did and then her father took a photograph of her beaming beside me, MorM still in hand and I was even more glad I decided to do the sign out after all. And that I’d finally gotten it through my thick head that sometimes this writing game isn’t about the author at all.
I love how knowing about the history and politics of cricket (West Indies not getting a black captain until the 1950s and then only after a long-running campaign orchestrated by C. L. R. James; the long campaign to get an Untouchable to play for India), and about women’s basketball (Title IX, and when it was allowed into the Olympics, and how little coverage it gets in the mainstream press) adds so much to watching any individual game.
