owlrigh

My stomach churned with nervousness as the train neared Roma Street, the train station nearest to the convention hotel for Conjure, this year's National Science Fiction convention; the one I was to be Fan Guest of Honour at. I'd gotten an e-mail from the convenor only the day before, telling me that there were five panels I was to be on as well as put in a presence at the opening and closing ceremony.

The first panel was only minutes after I was going to arrive, the next right after, and then came the opening ceremony. At ordinary conventions where I don't have to be on panels I get nervous and twitchy; this time I just about squeezed off Ben's hand, he whom I had dragged along with me to experience all things science fictiony.

I need not have worried. The first panel was on fanzines and whether they would survive, and as I suspected there weren't too many present. I didn't prepare for this or any subsequent, but for none need I have worried, as the other panellists were all too keen to fill in any silent spots -- not that there were any -- all by themselves. Bill Wright was staunch -- as were half of our audience of five -- that fanzines were only deemed so if they were paper, and Eric Lindsay was just as keen that electronic fanzines are as viable. Had I said anything it would have been to agree with Eric, but as it was I drank water and looked at Eric blankly when he suggested that a one-off if I wrote a fanzine on my sail would be art, not a fanzine.

Not that I would write on a sail, not after having spent a good day stitching them up and cleaning them!

Leigh Edwards was in the audience, and his contribution to the panel was to sit up there amongst us, bottle of hard booze in hand, and pass it along so we could all take a swig. I was lucky that Ben taught me how to drink spirits a few months back, as always prior to that I would end up choking and a burned gullet. Inhale, take a swig, exhale. Smooth.

On a roll, the next panel was with Dave Cake, Sonny Whitelaw, and Lucy Zinkiewicz; nor for this one did I have to say anything, for Lucy is plenty garrulous and Dave has more experience in conventioneering than myself. My only contribution was to say that I'd been to many! How are conventions relevant and do they foster a sense of community? I do suppose so, and they also noticed that cons these days -- East-coast ones -- are more writerly in nature than they used to be. So it's not just me to notice this one, after all.

"Maybe people do cons so that they feel like gods," was Lucy's suggestion, as the topic spiralled away from how to organise one and that people should go to an Australian equivalent of Smofcon, the American con for convention organisers.

"I am god," said Sonny. "When I'm skipper on my boat, people do as I say." Which was when I found out that Sonny skippered charter boats around Vanuatu and the Pacific.

"I tried that one," I said. "But neither my brother nor my boyfriend are inclined to think me god. They'll learn!"

I hung around the periphery of the opening ceremony, thankful that I was not required to sit in front of a whole bunch of con-goers and twiddle my thumbs for an hour. The Toastmaster, Kim Wilkins, instead read out people's bios and asked them to stand up and wave at everyone. When she called out my name and my bio, however, I was off in la-la-land and it took me a second to figure out it was me.

"Oh, here, back here," said I, and standing where I had been was probably the worst thing I could have done: the heads of everyone in that room swivelled over to where I was, by the door. I couldn't have been more conspicuous. As soon as the clapping was over I skedaddled on out of there, chilled by the cranked-up air-conditioning and head pounding from the headache I'd been nursing all day. I couldn't have chosen a worse time to go cold turkey off coffee.

It was Good Friday, and everything was closed; no food place to be seen except a sushi bar, to which I would direct any person asking me about food. Ben and I ate there, and then later I would return -- for I had bumped into a person I had never expected to see again, someone I went to university with and, despite knowing he was a keen Dr Who fan, wouldn't have expected to see at the convention.

When we picked up our name tags and con bags at registration earlier that day, they'd also given us -- and every other registered fan -- free drink vouchers to be redeemed at the hotel bar that evening. My head throbbing madly, I returned to that luxury of all luxuries: hotel room in the convention hotel itself.

Ben spent most of his time in this room, not at all interested in what the con was about. I did drag him to a panel on the first day, one about comics and Hollywood's enamour of Superman, Batman, and Spiderman -- and the spiralling it gave us about the stuff on the big screen adapted from a comic. The enthusiasm of the panellists, despite everything, did not interest Ben; I came to realise that being a fan is not only about liking something but about the lingo and history, for I knew very well what the panellists were talking about but only because I had long ago gone looking, done some reading.

The second day proved too much for Ben, and he returned to his family's house, which was better than sitting in a hotel room and watching television and being tempted by the overpriced mini bar.

Saturday was also the day my headache cranked up with a roar and I spent most of the afternoon sleeping, thereby missing the panel I was supposed to be chairing.

I had been put on the fanzine production room, so that people could be shown how to do a fanzine. Bill Wright managed to irritate me away from the room with the insistence that people do things his way, instead of the way that they were most comfortable with -- not that it mattered, for in the three days the room was open most of the time it as closed and the rest of the time nobody bothered even coming in, anyway. The five people in charge of the room were the only ones there.

The Conflux information panel at lunchtime promised free food and magazines, so I turned up and listened; the convention sounds interesting indeed, more so than Conjure -- although I can hardly be impartial to Conjure, for the venue was impossibly complicated and annoying and I spent most of it either worried Ben was bored or with a headache. Hardly doing the things I normally am, like trying to cadge free floor space and sitting about talking to people between panels. However, that said, I didn't get the same oomph, same air that I have from other conventions. It's a pity.

Sunday morning I spent in a tizzy -- my Guest of Honour speech was on that afternoon, and I hadn't prepared for it at all. I'd assured the convenor, Kate, that all was ready with an airy hand-wave only the previous day; little did she know that the mere thought of it was curdling my stomach enough to turn milk to cheese.

"What are you going to do?" Ben kept asking me, and I would put him off. When a long-time friend, Al, rang me and let me know that he had just motored his catamaran up the Brisbane river, I put it all off some more and went to meet him.

I had a vague idea of how to start -- I'd read the con book and noticed that my personal history was a lot more fanciful than I had imagined. Why, I apparently had a bunch of musicians in the family and was so myself! More rightly, someone skimmed a fanzine I wrote some years ago and presumed that the musicians I interviewed and their musical backgrounds were in fact my own. It gave me a perfect opening, and then it would be question and answer.

"It doesn't matter anyway," I told Ben eventually. "Everyone's just going to ask me about the boat."

And I was right, and also I was not entirely right. People did ask me about Gecko, but also why I didn't write anymore, why I liked fanzines, and what were my motivations for writing and why I thought my personality was like it was. Silences cropped up, I would twiddle my fingers, and then point at someone and tell them to ask me a question.

I walked into the room and looked around. There were people! The expected drjon and strangedave, but also others, entirely unexpected. I thought there'd be all of maybe three, but instead there were more like fifteen, with a few coming and going. I sat in the front, nervous, all too conscious of the wobble in my voice I get when so, fiddling with the water glass.

"You did good!" said people to me later. "You didn't look nervous at all."

That evening Ben and I headed on down to Govinda's, the Hare Krishna eatery we were to meet my friend, Al, and his current lady friend. As we neared the door we could hear sounds from up where Govinda's was located, and we bravely ascended the stairs.

A Hare Krishna bloke came up to us right away.

"Oh, we're just waiting for a friend to come," said Ben. "We'll wait out here."

"You can wait inside, he will come inside too."

"He's a short, bald man," I said, peering in through the glass door and blocking out the song.

"Lots of men like that in here," he replied, and with that he took our money and we were ushered in through the door.

I would not have been surprised to hear a resounding clang of a steel door closing and the bolt being pushed home.

A bunch of Hare Krishnas were up the front, and the room filled with would-be eaters. The Hare Krishnas were singing and banging away on instruments, which then faded into a woman talking about meditation, yoga, and being free of material things. It quickly grew tedious and I flicked through the cookbooks for sale. Still it went on and on. An hour went by.

When she ceased talking I perked up a bit, sure food was about to result. But no; it was only the start of the rest of our evening, where Hare Krishnas banged away on electronically amplified instruments and sang Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Hare, Krishna Krishna, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Hare Hare, Rama Rama -- or some such, over and over, for another hour of singing and dancing and deafening music.

At first it was all right; I bumped into a man wearing a duplicate of my nifty Wonder Woman t-shirt which children so adore (they always come up to me when I wear it), and then the people dancing easily. It became a conga dance into which I was drawn, and on the way back I dragged Ben into it with a vice grip.

But the music was loud and deafening. I stopped on the side, stopped up my ears with my fingers, and grimaced all around. The food was only $7, but I presume that is why they do it: get you to pay your money for the buffet, and then you lock yourself to the place out of an unwillingness to walk away from deafening music and endless dancing because of a few dollars.

It was fun, but a bit too much, and when dinner came, it was most welcome. We sat around on the floor in rows, stainless steel eatware before us. First came the delicious, if sweet, drinks; then the food, all served from big plastic white buckets and big spoons, Hare Krishnas doing the rounds, then sitting amongst us to eat themselves. Opposite me was a man who looked vaguely familiar, big plate piled high with food, but I could not quite place him.

The next day I saw him playing xylophone in front of Borders, the same clothes on. Funny how homeless people don't quite make an impression on you other than in a vague way.

Monday, the last day of the con, I briefly poked my head into the diseases and the future panel, but one of the speakers was umming and arring so much that I left in irritation and walked about the city instead, happily going through bookstores and looking at things I could have bought if I'd had money. All of the money I'd taken to Brisbane with me I'd spent the day before the con -- at a boat store, buying boat bits.

I hung around the con, and roars of laughter drew me to the juvenalia readings, where Justine Larbalestier, Sean Williams, Kim Wilkins, and Scott Westerfield were reading out bits of things they'd written as youngsters. Hilarious! Things were dreadfully bad, as bad as the stuff I used to write when at a similar age, full of purple prose and unpronounceable names, things happening in the blink of an eye, etc.

Then it was time for the last panel I was on, and I might as well not have turned up; it was supposed to be on whether writing fanfiction was good practice for professional writing ... but it didn't go there. Instead Lucy -- in her overpowering way -- talked about just about everything to do with fanfiction under the sun, about motivations for writing it, about slash, and on -- and again, I didn't say very much, although this time I was cranky about panellist monopolisation and wished I hadn't even turned up to it, especially since Ben was being bored at the back of the panel.

Straight after that, I left -- one of the few times I've ever left before the closing ceremony, and it only occurred to me after I'd gone that my presence may have been needed. I hugged some people who were close goodbye, then strode out.

"Those guys were giving you hugs like," said Ben, demonstrating a hug being given while staring down my chest. "They were staring at you, babe."

Some things don't change.