WisCon Recap

It's Sunday afternoon as I write this. There's still quite a few events left in the convention, but I think by this point my participation will be limited, as I'm drained by this point. Here's a summary of the weekend from my perspective.

After dropping my son off at school on Friday, I drove straight up to Madison, picked up my badge, and set up the Broad Universe table. After lunch and a visit to one of my favorite stores on State Street (The Soap Opera), other Broad Universe members and I opened the table. We had a few snafus at first but were able to get them resolved. Once we were good to go, I hurried off to the "The Fandom Awakens" panel. It was very well attended for a panel at the start of the convention; I'd say we had at least fifty people in the audience. The other panelists were engaging, and it went well. I tended the table until my family arrived and the Dealers' Room closed. We went to a local Chinese place Alex likes and had dessert at the Red Elephant. I snuck into the opening ceremony briefly, but after that I went swimming with my family. We had a lot of fun playing with a beach ball someone had left behind.

I woke up early (5:00) on Saturday, but stayed in bed for another hour or so before swimming laps. We went out for breakfast and visited the Farmers' Market before I had to return to open the table and resolve yet another issue. At least I was able to grab lunch from the con suite before the Broad Universe reading. There were only a few people attending; I found out later that the door locked when we closed it, so some people who stopped by couldn't get in. I read from Chaos Season. It went well, but I did catch a duplicated word in the scene. I'll fix that in all formats as soon as I can. I did have time to stroll through the art show and attend a panel on Food Privilege, but after that I was back to tending the table until the end of the day. We met some local friends for dinner and went swimming again (this time with pool noodles) when we arrived at the hotel. By this point, I was tired and a stomach ache. I checked in on a couple of parties and the gaming room, but went back up to my room without doing much.

I still didn't feel great when I woke up on Sunday, but I was on a 8:30 panel, so I grabbed some oatmeal and headed out to the panel about the scarcity of female action figures and other toys. It went better than I expected. I was able to attend another a reading in a nearby coffeehouse and got to hear Naomi Kritizer read "Cat Pictures Please." I had lunch at the BU table again, but I did have time in the afternoon to attend a self-care panel, stop at the Strange Horizons tea party, and listen to what not to do with female characters (basically, female characters get criticized more heavily than a male with the identical traits). After this, I'll take down the table and go visit more local friends. (I did get more table backup than I expected, and I also sold more books than I normally do.) Still not sure yet if I'll be at the SignOut today. It's time to celebrate my son's birthday and visit my parents.

I hope you had a good weekend. Feel free to share what you did in the comments.