Cometary Tales Blog Lessons of a BayCon Gofer: There Is No Dog

Lessons of a BayCon Gofer: There Is No Dog

The final day of a convention can be a downer: games are ending, there are no parties pending, the con suite is running short on the good stuff, some people you just got to know are leaving early, and—not the least of it—you’re really, really tired.

The Signs Are On the Wall

The Signs Are Coming Off The Walls, Now

I wasn’t due for “work” until afternoon, but I roused myself earlier, for the last DIY project—Make A Parasol (see Firefly).   Alas, I’d missed a program schedule update & the project was over. Long over—it had happened the day before! Won’t happen this year—I’ve finally joined the Smartphone Universe & so have access to the online schedule for BayCon 2015.

 

There's Planets Around Them Thar Stars

There’s Planets Around Them Thar Stars

I did have a backup plan—a panel discussion on new discoveries about extrasolar planets. But I’m kind of a Kepler fanatic, so the information being shared was, well, old hat. I found myself nodding off while people were talking about one of my favorite subjects.

So off to the Gofer Hole to check in and claim my spot as the Art Show Gofer. The day wasn’t boring any more.

My Final Badge-Ribbon Collection, Nowhere Near Championship Length

My Final Badge-Ribbon Set, Actually a Relatively Small Collection

I had my chance to be part of the Art Auction. That was cool—I’ve never been, because I can’t afford to bid anything near what auction items should go for. Instead, I got to set up bidder numbers for folks who did have the resources and were eager to support these wonderful artists.

Once the Auction wound down, I got to be on the giving end of the Art Show. That is, folks queued up to collect the pieces they’d won in the silent bidding and—later on—the auction. The staff took care of the official tasks of collecting payments and pacifying people who’d not won the pieces they wanted. As a Gofer, I fetched their purchases (from the stacks we’d so carefully arranged the night before) and saw those their faces light up with happiness.

Eventually, all but a few of the neat stacks were gone. A few winning bidders were late to collect their prizes. But we set those safely aside.

In the meantime, all afternoon, artists were coming by and packing up any pieces that hadn’t sold. We helped if needed—fetching supplies, finding paperwork they needed, taking down labels and hooks from the display boards—and it was cool to get to talk directly with the artists. Several artists had entrusted the convention staff to display the work on their behalf, having shipped the art with their registration forms. Most had a piece or two still unsold, and these needed to be repacked for shipping homeward. The original boxes were not necessarily available, so I made the rounds of the vendor room to scrounge empty boxes.

Gradually, one by one, the display boards were emptied, we collected all the hooks, labels, and trash, and the staff tracked down the last of the tardy winning bidders.

It was time to empty the room. Load-out time. Most of the stuff needing shifted was heavy—pegboards, frames, bins full of papers and supplies. So I called dibs on the job of getting all the art-to-be-shipped-home safely out to the Art Show director’s car. It took a few trips through a lobby full of exhausted attendees and staffers. Then I glommed onto an empty luggage cart. Plus, the Gofer King was one of the staffers in the lobby and he dispatched an idle Gofer to help on my last round. Whew.

So, most of these events end with what they call Dead Dog.   That’s one of the things you hear staffers talking about near the end of a convention, but they don’t share with mere members what exactly that is. The deep dark secret is: it’s a party. It’s the staff party that happens when everything’s over, the attendees have gone, and all the clean-up work that can get done is done. Aha, it’s what theater types call a strike party.

Kris & Alison, Art Show Maestrae

Kris & Alison, Art Show Maestrae, at Dead Dog

Generally speaking, it’s a Staff event, but Gofers who stick it out all the way to the end are welcomed into the party. There’s food. All the leftovers from the weekend, that no-one wants to have to haul home. All the ice-cold sodas left in the Magic Charity Soda Machine. Meanwhile, the hard-core staffers take the opportunity to give thank-you speeches to each other and praise the folks who’ve stepped up to chair the event next year.

It felt a little like crashing the party at that point, but the Art Show leaders were saying nice things to me, so I felt better. And Alison asked if maybe I’d help her as staff in 2015.  And finally, finally, I gathered up my own art purchases, and Went Home.

 

Art Show Victory!

2015 Art Show Staff!

Gofer Lesson of the Day:  If you stick it out to the end of everything, you can get into the fabulous Dead Dog party.  There will probably not be any dogs there, just tired-out volunteers.  Like you.

How to do this:

Method #1:  Walk into the Gofer Hole and sign up.  You do need to be 16, but there’s no upper limit.  Yes, really, you, too, can be a middle-aged Gofer.  For BayCon 2015, the secret lair is in Tasman.  Go up the escalator, turn right and it’ll be on your right before you reach the convention center.

Method #2:  Email the King of the Gofers.  That’s gofers15@baycon.org.  You get double credit for helping at setup on the day before the convention starts. If you’re super-eager to help & don’t get a reply, email me (cometary@cometarytales.com) and I’ll help you make contact.

You might also like to read:

Nothing but a Day One Photo GalleryNothing but a Day One Photo Gallery

This is just a gallery of photos from the first day in the Grand Canyon.  Not in any particular order, either.

To see the photos in full format (and, in the case of vertical images, the full view), double-click on any one image, then use “previous” and “next” buttons to move around.

Yes, of course, the images are copyrighted.   Says so at the bottom of the page AND in the image IFTC’s.  Trip members–read the details, though.  You got  rights!  And if you can’t figure out the who’s-who, just email me, OK?

 

Review: Best Intentions, by J DarkReview: Best Intentions, by J Dark

I love a good crossover novel . . . or in this case, series of novels. An author who can successfully blend the tropes and themes of two kinds of worlds can perform that magical feat of pulling you outside your own world and showing you the things that bind people together, no matter what world they’re inhabiting.

The Glass Bottles series by J. Dark will give you that. Here, J Dark blends the noir detective story with urban fantasy. What makes it work is that the features of both worlds are both given their full due. Don’t think of this as a mashup–it’s more than that, it’s an overlay that draws on compelling elements of each type of story to bring fans of either just what they need. I’ve just finished the first one, Best Intentions, and I think you’ll agree that this is a dark, engaging tale that draws you in … and maybe kicks you a few times in the gut before it lets you go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’ll get yours, you demanding film noir fan: the grim, gritty streets of The City, the denizens of the underworld–some better than they seem, some worse, the wiseacre Private Eye with the dingy little office, the mysterious crime that the police can’t handle, the stranger at the door…a stranger who may need her help…or may be about to kill her. Yeah, the PI is a dame, OK, a hot dame, no less, you got a problem with that?

Oh, and you, you urban fantasy addict, you get: a fully-worked out magic system that’s unique in its own way, but that you can pick up on as the story progresses, demons, pentagrams, spells, and rituals. These are all set against a backdrop of a seemingly ordinary city that’s fallen on tough times and normal complications of families, friends, and law versus order. All of these are contained within an ordered universe with an explanation for why-things-are-this-way…an explanation that ties directly to the deepest peril that the hero of the story must face.

While I don’t do spoilers, I will share a tiny content warning–this is not a story for children–got that?–not any more than the Maltese Falcon is a lighthearted romp for the kiddies. And while there are interesting magical–make that magickal–animals that play important roles, this is nothing like a Harry Potter story.

Here’s your setup. No Spoilers.

Fern Fatelli and her sister Fawn work on either side of the private-public law-enforcement line, in the city of Dayning (a fictionalized urban enclave of Halifax, Nova Scotia). Fern’s got her PI business to tend to, with equal parts moxie, magick, and good old-fashioned gumshoe footwork. When she needs a bodyguard, her old buddy–who also happens to be a troll–stands by her. There’s some baaaad stuff going down in the city…there are these strange little bottles that seem to suck something essential right out of a person, but no one knows what they are, where they came from, who is using them … let alone, why.

Our Fern is comfortable in the lower echelons of her city, using her limited magick on the old PI standards–scrounging up evidence on adultery for a disgruntled spouse. But this time, a seemingly typical case lands her in the role of hero, the one who has to solve an enormous puzzle to save her friends, her family, and her world…to save them all from an ancient evil that was set loose long ago, with the very best of intentions.

J Dark has a way with creating twists that will catch you off balance. Just when you think you sort of know what the solution to the mystery is going to be, something comes in out of left field–something that was there, all along, that you weren’t paying attention to–and everything changes again. You’ll enjoy the ride, but it’s like a roller coaster in the dark, so hang on tight.

At this point, there are three Glass Bottles books released, plus a short story, a prequel actually, A Last Good Day, that’s available for a free download at the publisher’s website. The books are on Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and several digital-books sites. J Dark has a blog, too, where you can read about writing or try to catch up with a serialized sci-fi work-in-progress.

If, like me, you’re kind of curious about this re-imagining of life in Nova Scotia–or, as it’s been renamed in these books, New Scotland–there’s a trove of imagery on Google’s map images–check out this awesome shot by Mark Lamontagne that captures the blend of old and new echoed in J Dark’s vision.

What’s with the weird words?What’s with the weird words?

Translations In the Real World
(Photo by Tflanagan at KSU, Saudi Arabia,
Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)

One of the first things people ask me when they read certain of my stories is “What’s the right way to pronounce all these weird words?”  My stock answer is:  “However you like! It’s all made up, whatever sounds right inside your head is fine by me.”

Starting the process of doing an audio book for All That Was Asked has forced me to face the fact that, well, really there is a “right” way.  For one thing, the story centers on language–in fact, the working title of the book was “Translations by Ansegwe.” In general, for the stories where I have a made-up culture with their own language or an “evolved” culture that’s grown from more-or-less familiar cultures but uses a language other than English as their root language, I do know how those words should be pronounced. I’m that wonky sort that blows off an entire afternoon at Worldcon to attend a linguistics workshop, so, well, that’s where I’m coming from. 

In the real world, I know French pretty well, I watch a lot of foreign-language TV (though of course I’m relying on subtitles), I live in place where I hear Spanish and Russian regularly, and I have technical-world acquaintances with a great variety of language “homes” from India to Europe to Africa to both Chinas.  I’ve struggled to learn a smattering of my culture-base language–Gaelic. And I grew up being hauled around to various places in the U.S. and England.  I even still “hear” (and alas for spell-checkers, spell) most English as Brit-style.  End result:  I love the interplay of languages and the way everyone talks. I do not claim to be a polyglot, but I’m a diligent researcher and I just love all those sounds.

In my writing, most of the problematic words are names, because I think of such stories as having been “translated” from the alien/alternate history language set.  Names tend to get left over after a translation, because even if I’m translating a story from French to English, I wouldn’t change “Tourenne” to “Terence” or “Gervais” to Gerald, because a) the names aren’t really the same and b) the sounds of names add the flavor of a language without requiring a reader to actually know a foreign tongue directly. Spoiler? My current work-in-progress has characters named Tourenne and Gervais, and they live in a francophone culture that doesn’t exist anywhere in the real world.

In the made-up language base for All That Was Asked, I have lots of names for people, place-names from more than one country in the alternate-universe world, and a few name-based terms.  (The academic types in the story have dreams of winning their version of the Nobel prize, so they talk about it a lot.  The Nobel prize is named for a person, but . . . it’s a thing.)  I wanted the central names to make sense, to have relateable sounds, and to have some commonalities.  For instance, in English we have a lot of names that end in ‘-y’.  I selected some sound elements that would fit into different names and tried to make them sound like they came from a distinct self-contained culture–except for a few names I made up specifically to sound like another culture, in the same world. 

I decided on a family-personal naming order that made sense for the culture–Family first, Personal second, and most people refer to each other and address each other by their personal names, because everyone knows what family everyone else belongs to.  And I made names longer than we’re used to in English.  In our culture “power names” tend to be short, in theirs, most people have multisyllable names, and powerful people tend to have longer names.

For other sets of words in this story, ones that are “translated” to English, I “hear” the words in British/European English rather than American English, because that fits better with the social style of the people and gives it a little bit of distance for American readers.  It may sound really fussy–especially for such a short little book–but I think having a clear auditory sense going into it helped me with building the alien culture.  I just have to hope it carries through to readers and listeners–not a burden to cope with but an added feature of the story.

In my next post, I’ll give you a blow-by-blow pronunciation guide for All That Was Asked, with a few background bits to liven it up a bit.

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