EFNW 2023, part 2: Day 1 · 8:12pm Sep 12th, 2023

Friday. Day 1.

Opening ceremonies. This is where the public-facing events kick off.

And, uh... okay, I confess. At most of the conventions I've been to, I skip this.

I think it's a bad habit. It started because in the first couple of years when I started going to conventions, I would always arrive on Friday (don't do that, have an actual plan and get there on Thursday). Usually it would be late enough in the day that I'd have already missed the opening ceremonies, so I just got used to not seeing them.

But in these latter years, I've developed an appreciation for them. Interestingly, it comes from my experience as a writer and my increasing understanding of how story structure works.

Conventions are a story. They're the best kind of story; one that we experience with total immersion, because they're one that we live and not just read and observe from a distance. At least, it is to those of us who go there and actually live the story for three — four? More, sometimes? — days. The story we progress through at a convention can, like many stories, fit most of its stages of progression into some of the stages of the Hero's Journey generalized story framework.

One of the most defining characteristics of the way the Hero's Journey conceptualizes a story is that a hero (that's us, we're the hero of our own story) crosses a threshold into a magical or unfamiliar world, is changed in some way by the experiences encountered there, and then crosses back again to return to the ordinary world.

Opening ceremonies are the psychological crossing of a threshold. They're probably not the only threshold most people encounter (travel, getting badged, and other critical steps to just getting in to the convention are potentially others), because real life is messy and not so neatly boxed up into clean segments and the stages of a Hero's Journey are often subjectively interpretable in many different forms anyway, but they're certainly one threshold, and certainly a big and important one to many people. In a way, the opening ceremonies serve to draw a line and mark a point of point of passage from our ordinary world into certain ways of entering and experiencing the other-world that Ponies live in and come from.

Skipping opening ceremonies is, I realize now, a bad habit because it takes away from the story. It diminishes some aspect of the convention experience to not participate in the process of induction and crossing the threshold. Go to opening ceremonies. Yes, sometimes they might be cheesy. What do you expect? It's a production by volunteer amateurs. That's not the point. The point is in what it means to pass through the portal from one world to another. The point is the metaphor. Don't cheat yourself. You've traveled all that way and gone to all the effort to be there, so let yourself experience it.

So this year, I did, and my convention was better for it. Even just waiting in line for it was good, because I met Dreadnought and MasterThief there. For all people complain about LineCon, it has its own way of contributing to the social aspect of a convention sometimes.

During opening ceremonies, we found out that the mystery guests for this year's convention would be:
Nicole Oliver and Tabitha St. Germain!

After opening ceremonies, it was time for...
...The vendor hall.
Yeah, the morning of opening day is a toss-up for the quality of the Vendor Hall Experience. It's about the busiest it gets, because everyone rushes it. Fighting the crowd isn't always great. On the other hand, the reason it gets rushed is because right at opening is when it has the most and best merch the vendors are going to have for the whole convention. Everyone wants a piece of the best stuff before it's all bought, which for some vendors, happens fast.
Looking for an absolutely stunning plushie of your favorite character? Well, there's probably only one or two from the vendor you really wanted to buy from, and she's also probably also the favorite character of like 50 other people, so you'd better be fast. Or just commission a plushie ahead of time and have it shipped to you or pick it up at the convention. That's probably the smarter way to do it. Anyway...
I was mostly in the vendor hall to check out the plushies, on that note. Didn't end up buying any, although there were some very, very good ones there. I, uh, kind of do tend to just make my own. But I do really admire the talent of other makers and it's worth seeing how they do things.

On that point, you know what plushies are great for? Getting autographed! After the vendor hall, that was my next move. I'd had a feeling that the mystery guests would be Nicole and Tabitha, and I planned accordingly: I had a Luna and a Celestia plushie ready for autographing. I even remembered to get a white paint pen to make Luna's dark colors easy to write on and everything.

So my plushie shelf now has upon it, autographed, two Best Sisters/Princesses.

I finished up with autographs in time to catch Fiaura's panel, "Tabletop to Fanfiction to Original Series." It was mostly a grab-bag of various facets on the process of getting a story all the way to print publishing.
I'm... not sure I agree with all the advice, or what felt like an overall pessimistic tone – at least not in the context of a fan convention, for fans who are probably doing this more for fun than for financial success as a writer with published stories.
I get that publishing books isn't easy, and that you're not really that likely to succeed as a commercial author. But I think some of the advice was also kinda plain wrong, such as claims that it costs thousands of dollars to get a print run. That doesn't mesh with the information directly available from on-demand printers (who can print any number of books you want, down to just one copy, for very reasonable prices - I can probably do Seashell, for example, for... well, I don't want to cite hard numbers, but not prohibitively expensive for me or for potential buyers by any means!), or with the experiences of, for example, the Twilight's Book Nook authors, all of whom I'm pretty sure did not spend thousands to have copies of their books physically available at the convention's bookstore.
This is not to discount Fiaura's experiences. She has, after all, had quite the tough road to publishing her own FoE story in book form, involving going to court to get her work blessed and signed off on as parody (I think) and other hoops. It's an interesting story, and I'm sympathetic to the frankly bullshit she's had to struggle through and put up with to get where she is. But for most authors in the fandom, I don't think the goals, the roadblocks, or the costs are really going to be the same, especially when someone is just doing it for the fun of writing fanfic and the novelty of being able to say, "Haha, I published a book!"

Fun fact: I actually have been published in a magazine (a very, very low-circulation one you've never heard of and never will, and which paid nothing for submissions - so nothing to boast about, which is why I never have). But publishing a book would be way cooler. That's why I'm gonna do it. I think that's why most people would, and I don't think it has to be all that hard, so I hate to see people discouraged by tales of gloom and pain.

After that panel, I wandered back over the vendor hall again, mostly 'cause there wasn't too much else going on that I wanted to do at the time. After an unremarkable little while there, it was closing in on time for me to do my own panel - GMing 101! I was one of three panelists. The other two were my former roommate, LITMAuthor, and Caerdwyn, a community guest and someone excessively qualified as a panelist because he's been GMing since the '70s. I think the panel went well. We all did pretty well bouncing off each other to teach some young GMs a bit about how to run a fun game for their groups. And that right there is really sort of the core take-away of the panel: make the game fun. That's why people play. If the game's not fun, something's not right, and it's usually the GM's job to manage those things. Sometimes that means using GM prerogative to supersede or overrule rules that are hindering being able to craft a satisfying narrative for the players' characters. Sometimes it means using the GM's dice screen judiciously and selectively ignoring the actual outcomes of dice rolls that would lead to uninteresting or unfulfilling outcomes in favor of creating dramatic stakes and close calls. And sometimes, it just means plain old conflict resolution and time-management skills to make sure everyone is getting something they wanted out of the game (and helping players define "what they want" in specific, actionable terms in the first place, for that matter).

And then, after that panel... I went to take a nap. I needed to recharge, because at 5:30 I had another panel to present, this time by myself. It's the first time I've done a panel entirely by myself, and I wasn't totally sure how it would go.
It was about the Hero's Journey.
I made a cool visual aid for it and everything. You can see it here: The Hero's Journey: The Slideshow!
Those slides pretty much cover what's important about what I presented, so I won't go too in-depth about it. If you want to see the panel yourself, I'll probably do it again at next year's EFNW (and the next time around, it should be Now Even Better^(TM)). The Hero's Journey is an incredibly important concept in storytelling, though, so I would encourage everyone to learn about it on their own. Tons of useful tools come out of understanding how stories fit into this framework and how it informs structure.

My day was pretty much done in terms of "convention things" after presenting that panel, because it was kinda my big event for the convention and I was worn out from all that went into it. Fortunately, I think it went well! Now that the ice is broken on doing panels solo, and I didn't die or anything, I guess that's a band-aid torn off so maybe there'll be more from me. I'm sure I'll find ideas for things I think our writing community could get something out of.

And then, it was dinner time. I went to a restaurant somewhere in the Bellevue collection shopping area thing with Vic Fontaine, Jet Setter, Admiral Biscuit, and I think Olden Bronie. It was good. The restaurants usually are. Maybe not the most remarkable, but I don't think anything in the area is likely to be bad.

And that was Friday, done. Eventful day! Panels! Autographs! Vendor hall! And most important, hanging out with friends! It was a good grab-bag of all the good convention stuff that a good convention should have.

And there were still two more days to go. To be continued!

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