2011 Sirens
Hello!
Sirens, I'm afraid, has come and gone for the year. The boxes of audio-visual equipment are back in my garage, the leftover merchandise has been audited, my attendees and staff have gone home -- and with tomorrow comes financial auditing. Boo.
But it was wonderful, so let me tell you about it.
Saturday, October 2: My job has come with some serious craziness lately, so a handful of tasks that normally would have been done earlier (like, say, collecting the AV equipment from our storage unit) waited until this weekend. And this weekend, too, started with some work craziness that, thankfully, died down right around the time that my first staff members arrived in Denver. So I finished cleaning the house, printed some random stuff, and hopped in the car with Marbles to get lessthanpie, sharina, and smilie117. And then we had lunch at P.F. Chang's, grabbed dinner from Panera for later, and went back to my apartment for organizing and sorting. Yay, organizing and sorting! And then we watched USC play some truly terrible football. *sigh* My first and best fandom will always be football. :P
Best thing: Lunch with lessthanpie, sharina, and smilie117, of course!
Sunday, October 3: Messy day one of two, woe. Before-breakfast visit to the storage unit of dust and spiders so we could grab AV equipment, bulletin board, and so forth. And then back to the house for French toast a la Marbles, and then sorting out what we needed from my garage. (What? You don't think I keep merchandise with the dust and spiders, do you?) Then packing, packing, packing, and re-packing so we could head out in the morning. (How much hair product can one girl with short hair possibly need? Hey, that's rhetorical!) Then we grabbed vlamidala from the airport, had fajitas a la Marbles for dinner, and watched Phil The Amazing Race.
Best thing: Despite all idiocy to the contrary, the doctors are still on The Amazing Race.
Monday, October 4: Messy day two of two, and also the day of driving. After breakfast of bagels, we loaded the car...and were very, very glad that a few months ago a nice person on YouTube taught Marbles and I how to jump a car, so we could jump hers. Twice. Sadly, it refused a third jump, so we spent an hour in the gas station waiting for Danny, the AAA battery truck guy, who was perfectly amazing. New battery in hand engine, we headed off to the mountains. Two hours later, we were there, and we unloaded our first round of stuff. Only to get back in the car and drive two hours back down the mountain to get a very fast lunch and more stuff. And then back up the mountain. Six hours of driving really isn't much (what? I've driven from Denver to Grand Rapids, Michigan, solo in a day before), but when it's all mountains and you don't really get anywhere, it's no fun. But at the end there was Blue Moose Pizza, and Marbles drew a chupacabra on the (paper) tablecloth to commemorate the chupacabra pizza, which is sadly about to be renamed. (Of course, they completely misinterpreted the nature of the chupacabra, so there was not, in fact, any goat on this pizza.) And then I froze my butt off and we went back to the hotel.
Best thing: PIZZA! It is impossible to underestimate my love of pizza. Truly.
Tuesday, October 5: Hmmmm...we had some breakfast at the creperie. (Creperie FTW!) We went shopping, including finding a very pink sweatshirt for sharina and some moose pajamas for lessthanpie. And, hi, the chocolate store, which happily sold me truffles and giant peanut butter cups and caramel corn and caramel apples (also happily, all were awesome). We had Pepi's for lunch, which was kind of eh, except for the dessert, WHICH WAS AWESOME. I could have streudel and kuchen every day. And then, fat and happy with dessert, we went back to the hotel and had a nap, which I was not finished with when Marbles told me I had to get up and do stuff. So we rolled t-shirts and assembled care packages (now with ducks! and fuzzy socks!). And I had a nice hamburger and an even nicer sangria in the hotel restaurant for dinner. (The hotel restaurant? Still slow and overpriced.)
Best thing: Caramel apples!
Wednesday, October 6: Well, first there was finishing my 120th book of the year (Breathing and then there was breakfast (including awesome oatmeal and burnt-sugar grapefruit for me) at the hotel restaurant. Then there was a pre-con meeting with the hotel, which...well, let's say that the Friday before I sent yet another list of corrections to the hotel and I spent a good chunk of this meeting making even more. The hotel is mostly perfectly nice people, and they have some perfectly awesome people, but I don't know that they're really equipped for what we do. Last year, we had a more experienced conference services person and fewer groups in the hotel. This year, we had a brand spanking new conference services person and there were five groups in the hotel. Add a new chef to that, and we pretty much have a mess that my team spent two months trying to prevent and five days yelling about. But our very nice attendees told me that they couldn't see the issues, so all the yelling and freaking and moving tables ourselves seems to have worked.
After the pre-con came registration bag stuffing, and you know, even though we hand-write thank-you cards and pin buttons to handles and put tissue paper in bags and roll t-shirts and tie ribbons on them, this is so much less work than 1,500 bags of Quidditch t-shirts and special tickets and a million bag-drop items that I can't even tell you. Except I can tell you: Between bag stuffing, which didn't start until 10:30, and meeting the first Sirens Shuttle just before 6:00, we went shopping again. And had gelato. Hee. Then, while Marbles and generalmanda and others went to the hardware store to do something about a steampunk faery costume for the ball (our steampunk faery wasn't able to come and we needed her for the murder mystery!), I even had a half an hour with caramel corn and Dia Reeves's Bleeding Violet, which has one of the best first chapters that I've ever read.
We met the bus just before 6:00, and the Sirens Supper started at 7:00. I had the chicken, which was great, but if anyone has any feedback on the ribs and the trout, that would be wonderful! We'll likely do the same buffet with a variation on entrees next year, so feedback is great. We had twice as many people at this dinner as we did last year, and I had a great time chatting with everyone (and snagging brownies). And we got to sing to Ellen Kushner for her birthday (yes, we brought candles).
Best thing: The Sirens Supper, which is my favorite event ever.
Thursday, October 7: Again, a theme of breakfast, this time with eggs and grilled, open-faced, jam sandwiches (which I'm told are really just toast, but bah to that). And setting up the registration arena with registration supplies, merchandise, volunteer and programming materials...and glittery craft supplies and fantasy trope Pictionary. Not kidding. newsboyhat gave out programming information wearing a crown she'd made. :) Thursday was a whirlwind of checking people in, drawing Edward Cullen and Hermione Granger, making a giant glitter mess, snacking on tea and sandwiches, remembering (finally!) to grab a salad from the marketplace for lunch, re-appropriating the Sirens Supper's brownies, meeting the second Sirens Shuttle, getting the bookstore set up, seeing everyone again at the dessert reception (whee!), listening to Holly Black's hilarious keynote address, chatting with Larry about his awesome origami fantasy creatures, training some volunteers, and going the hell to bed. Because the bookstore was going to load in at 6:30 the next morning.
Best thing: Holly Black is really, hysterically funny.
Friday, October 8: Breakfast again, but this time after work. We all got to bed late, so the 6:15 call the next morning was freaking brutal. We got our stuff over to the new info desk location with about two minutes to spare before The Bookworm of Edwards showed up with over a hundred titles in tow -- all fantasy books by women authors! We got the bookstore loaded in and our desk and silent auction set up just in time for me to grab a bagel with peanut butter and some Clone Wars fruit snacks and head to Books and Breakfast to talk about Bones of Faerie. I was lucky enough to have author Janni Lee Simner, who is utterly delightful, on hand and she, coraa, Zen, Artemis Grey and I discussed the brutality and hope in her book before Janni wandered off to talk about other books, and the rest of us compared Bones of Faerie to The Forest of Hands and Teeth (mostly because I read them around the same time and I cannot seem to separate them in my brain).
Next up was programming, and I had a couple hours of desk sitting before my sex roundtable (okay, it has a less sensationalist title, which is something like "Where Have All the 'Good' Girls Gone?: Purity, Virginity and Equality in YA Fantasy Literature"). During which we discussed whether we want our YA lit to influence or reflect reality, felt a bit like our mothers, and yelled at each other about Twilight. Sadly, my opinion that there is a place for gratuitous, graphic sex in teen literature was very much in the minority (and being the mod, I couldn't even convince people otherwise! But! I did get to (I think successfully) compare bodice rippers with teen lit.
Woefully, I had lunch desk duty, and I missed Marie Brennan's keynote, which I hear was freaking fantastic: all sorts of smart and insightful. And then more programming, during which I spent a lot of time yelling at the hotel. You see, starting at 3:00, we were doing author signings and tea, so we needed a significant addition to our current set-up. And at 2:45, this set-up was obnoxiously incomplete. This was the day when not only did we re-sort the hotel's tea so that it was correct, we moved tables and chairs ourselves. But the signings were wonderful! Thank you, authors!
Then more programming, including recruitment for Narrate Conferences's 2011 boot camp. (If you want to join, e-mail me!) And then a break, during which I put on my pajamas and my robe and was the warmest I'd been all day. (*sigh* The heat in this conference center apparently comes from the ballroom and the door vestibules only. So when the ballroom doors are closed for programming and the municipal lawyers upstairs keep going in and out and in and out and in and out, it gets freaking cold. I should have worn my bathrobe all weekend.) And we made a second giant glittery mess making faery wings and the author readings were lovely (I hear Terri Windling's essay about "home" made people homesick and teary).
Best thing: Listening to past Narrate boot campers talk about how Narrate's changed their lives. But comparing bodice rippers to YA lit is a close second! :))
Saturday, October 9: More Books and Breakfast, this time discussing Ash, and Malinda Lo graciously joined us -- and told us wonderful stories of writing the book and discovering that Ash was more interested in Kaisa than the prince. (I also learned that there are a legion of people out there who wanted Ash to end up with the creepy faery guy. WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE?) And then on to programming. Today was the Fandom and Feminism panel day, and I think tartpants, sarahtales and I were reasonably articulate and smart -- and the audience was, too! But, gah, there was so much fandom to cover and only 55 minutes!
Terri Windling spoke about the origins and evolution of fairy tales during lunch (Snow White once came with necrophilia! Little Red Riding Hood, originally a tale about female resourcefulness, became a warning to be dutiful!), and then made everyone cry with her ending about finding stories that speak to you. And we stole the leftover cookies and repurposed them for tea. The tea set-up, thankfully, went much more smoothly today, though we were prepared to bounce the lawyers out of the cookies.
We had to do a quick change to faery attire, which for some of us consisted mostly of throwing on a fuckton of glitter and some wings, but for some people was a truly amazing transformation: Marie Brennan came in full Onyx Court attire, generalmanda came as a knight of the Onyx Court, and Erynn came as an aspen faery, complete with real branches and leaves as her wings. We all had the blue faery drink, which was surprisingly tasy, and moved over to the Faerie Lights Ball, for glowsticks and vogue-ing. And the murder mystery, during which we discovered that the aforementioned aspen faery killed King Oberon, and we crowned her the new queen.
There's no rest for the wicked, so we removed the faery attire, though not the glitter, and put on our jeans and tennis shoes to pack up the office and load one car so Marbles's dad could take stuff down the mountain the next morning. Yeah, another short night.
Best thing: Erynn's impromptu coronation speech.
Sunday, October 10: I was so busy with the auction and the speechifying and announcing next year's guests (see below!) that I didn't get breakfast until I grabbed the guys as they were taking the oatmeal away. :)) But we talked about all sorts of things for next year, and formed a hug line for the bus, and waved the bus off, sadly. And packed everything up and took it home, which sounds less complicated than it actually was (we didn't get home until after 5:00). Then there was Chinese food and more Phil Amazing Race and bed. So I could come to work this morning.
Best thing: Watching people shyly hang back from the hug line, and then decide they wanted to dive right in.
Whew. Another year, another conference, more amazing attendees. Thank you, everyone who came! I miss you already!
Which means that I should mention that Sirens is back next year, again in Vail, this time with Justine Larbalestier, Nnedi Okorafor and Laini Taylor -- and a theme of monsters and what it means to be monstrous. I can't freaking wait! (And the reading list is coming!)
Sirens, I'm afraid, has come and gone for the year. The boxes of audio-visual equipment are back in my garage, the leftover merchandise has been audited, my attendees and staff have gone home -- and with tomorrow comes financial auditing. Boo.
But it was wonderful, so let me tell you about it.
Saturday, October 2: My job has come with some serious craziness lately, so a handful of tasks that normally would have been done earlier (like, say, collecting the AV equipment from our storage unit) waited until this weekend. And this weekend, too, started with some work craziness that, thankfully, died down right around the time that my first staff members arrived in Denver. So I finished cleaning the house, printed some random stuff, and hopped in the car with Marbles to get lessthanpie, sharina, and smilie117. And then we had lunch at P.F. Chang's, grabbed dinner from Panera for later, and went back to my apartment for organizing and sorting. Yay, organizing and sorting! And then we watched USC play some truly terrible football. *sigh* My first and best fandom will always be football. :P
Best thing: Lunch with lessthanpie, sharina, and smilie117, of course!
Sunday, October 3: Messy day one of two, woe. Before-breakfast visit to the storage unit of dust and spiders so we could grab AV equipment, bulletin board, and so forth. And then back to the house for French toast a la Marbles, and then sorting out what we needed from my garage. (What? You don't think I keep merchandise with the dust and spiders, do you?) Then packing, packing, packing, and re-packing so we could head out in the morning. (How much hair product can one girl with short hair possibly need? Hey, that's rhetorical!) Then we grabbed vlamidala from the airport, had fajitas a la Marbles for dinner, and watched Phil The Amazing Race.
Best thing: Despite all idiocy to the contrary, the doctors are still on The Amazing Race.
Monday, October 4: Messy day two of two, and also the day of driving. After breakfast of bagels, we loaded the car...and were very, very glad that a few months ago a nice person on YouTube taught Marbles and I how to jump a car, so we could jump hers. Twice. Sadly, it refused a third jump, so we spent an hour in the gas station waiting for Danny, the AAA battery truck guy, who was perfectly amazing. New battery in hand engine, we headed off to the mountains. Two hours later, we were there, and we unloaded our first round of stuff. Only to get back in the car and drive two hours back down the mountain to get a very fast lunch and more stuff. And then back up the mountain. Six hours of driving really isn't much (what? I've driven from Denver to Grand Rapids, Michigan, solo in a day before), but when it's all mountains and you don't really get anywhere, it's no fun. But at the end there was Blue Moose Pizza, and Marbles drew a chupacabra on the (paper) tablecloth to commemorate the chupacabra pizza, which is sadly about to be renamed. (Of course, they completely misinterpreted the nature of the chupacabra, so there was not, in fact, any goat on this pizza.) And then I froze my butt off and we went back to the hotel.
Best thing: PIZZA! It is impossible to underestimate my love of pizza. Truly.
Tuesday, October 5: Hmmmm...we had some breakfast at the creperie. (Creperie FTW!) We went shopping, including finding a very pink sweatshirt for sharina and some moose pajamas for lessthanpie. And, hi, the chocolate store, which happily sold me truffles and giant peanut butter cups and caramel corn and caramel apples (also happily, all were awesome). We had Pepi's for lunch, which was kind of eh, except for the dessert, WHICH WAS AWESOME. I could have streudel and kuchen every day. And then, fat and happy with dessert, we went back to the hotel and had a nap, which I was not finished with when Marbles told me I had to get up and do stuff. So we rolled t-shirts and assembled care packages (now with ducks! and fuzzy socks!). And I had a nice hamburger and an even nicer sangria in the hotel restaurant for dinner. (The hotel restaurant? Still slow and overpriced.)
Best thing: Caramel apples!
Wednesday, October 6: Well, first there was finishing my 120th book of the year (Breathing and then there was breakfast (including awesome oatmeal and burnt-sugar grapefruit for me) at the hotel restaurant. Then there was a pre-con meeting with the hotel, which...well, let's say that the Friday before I sent yet another list of corrections to the hotel and I spent a good chunk of this meeting making even more. The hotel is mostly perfectly nice people, and they have some perfectly awesome people, but I don't know that they're really equipped for what we do. Last year, we had a more experienced conference services person and fewer groups in the hotel. This year, we had a brand spanking new conference services person and there were five groups in the hotel. Add a new chef to that, and we pretty much have a mess that my team spent two months trying to prevent and five days yelling about. But our very nice attendees told me that they couldn't see the issues, so all the yelling and freaking and moving tables ourselves seems to have worked.
After the pre-con came registration bag stuffing, and you know, even though we hand-write thank-you cards and pin buttons to handles and put tissue paper in bags and roll t-shirts and tie ribbons on them, this is so much less work than 1,500 bags of Quidditch t-shirts and special tickets and a million bag-drop items that I can't even tell you. Except I can tell you: Between bag stuffing, which didn't start until 10:30, and meeting the first Sirens Shuttle just before 6:00, we went shopping again. And had gelato. Hee. Then, while Marbles and generalmanda and others went to the hardware store to do something about a steampunk faery costume for the ball (our steampunk faery wasn't able to come and we needed her for the murder mystery!), I even had a half an hour with caramel corn and Dia Reeves's Bleeding Violet, which has one of the best first chapters that I've ever read.
We met the bus just before 6:00, and the Sirens Supper started at 7:00. I had the chicken, which was great, but if anyone has any feedback on the ribs and the trout, that would be wonderful! We'll likely do the same buffet with a variation on entrees next year, so feedback is great. We had twice as many people at this dinner as we did last year, and I had a great time chatting with everyone (and snagging brownies). And we got to sing to Ellen Kushner for her birthday (yes, we brought candles).
Best thing: The Sirens Supper, which is my favorite event ever.
Thursday, October 7: Again, a theme of breakfast, this time with eggs and grilled, open-faced, jam sandwiches (which I'm told are really just toast, but bah to that). And setting up the registration arena with registration supplies, merchandise, volunteer and programming materials...and glittery craft supplies and fantasy trope Pictionary. Not kidding. newsboyhat gave out programming information wearing a crown she'd made. :) Thursday was a whirlwind of checking people in, drawing Edward Cullen and Hermione Granger, making a giant glitter mess, snacking on tea and sandwiches, remembering (finally!) to grab a salad from the marketplace for lunch, re-appropriating the Sirens Supper's brownies, meeting the second Sirens Shuttle, getting the bookstore set up, seeing everyone again at the dessert reception (whee!), listening to Holly Black's hilarious keynote address, chatting with Larry about his awesome origami fantasy creatures, training some volunteers, and going the hell to bed. Because the bookstore was going to load in at 6:30 the next morning.
Best thing: Holly Black is really, hysterically funny.
Friday, October 8: Breakfast again, but this time after work. We all got to bed late, so the 6:15 call the next morning was freaking brutal. We got our stuff over to the new info desk location with about two minutes to spare before The Bookworm of Edwards showed up with over a hundred titles in tow -- all fantasy books by women authors! We got the bookstore loaded in and our desk and silent auction set up just in time for me to grab a bagel with peanut butter and some Clone Wars fruit snacks and head to Books and Breakfast to talk about Bones of Faerie. I was lucky enough to have author Janni Lee Simner, who is utterly delightful, on hand and she, coraa, Zen, Artemis Grey and I discussed the brutality and hope in her book before Janni wandered off to talk about other books, and the rest of us compared Bones of Faerie to The Forest of Hands and Teeth (mostly because I read them around the same time and I cannot seem to separate them in my brain).
Next up was programming, and I had a couple hours of desk sitting before my sex roundtable (okay, it has a less sensationalist title, which is something like "Where Have All the 'Good' Girls Gone?: Purity, Virginity and Equality in YA Fantasy Literature"). During which we discussed whether we want our YA lit to influence or reflect reality, felt a bit like our mothers, and yelled at each other about Twilight. Sadly, my opinion that there is a place for gratuitous, graphic sex in teen literature was very much in the minority (and being the mod, I couldn't even convince people otherwise! But! I did get to (I think successfully) compare bodice rippers with teen lit.
Woefully, I had lunch desk duty, and I missed Marie Brennan's keynote, which I hear was freaking fantastic: all sorts of smart and insightful. And then more programming, during which I spent a lot of time yelling at the hotel. You see, starting at 3:00, we were doing author signings and tea, so we needed a significant addition to our current set-up. And at 2:45, this set-up was obnoxiously incomplete. This was the day when not only did we re-sort the hotel's tea so that it was correct, we moved tables and chairs ourselves. But the signings were wonderful! Thank you, authors!
Then more programming, including recruitment for Narrate Conferences's 2011 boot camp. (If you want to join, e-mail me!) And then a break, during which I put on my pajamas and my robe and was the warmest I'd been all day. (*sigh* The heat in this conference center apparently comes from the ballroom and the door vestibules only. So when the ballroom doors are closed for programming and the municipal lawyers upstairs keep going in and out and in and out and in and out, it gets freaking cold. I should have worn my bathrobe all weekend.) And we made a second giant glittery mess making faery wings and the author readings were lovely (I hear Terri Windling's essay about "home" made people homesick and teary).
Best thing: Listening to past Narrate boot campers talk about how Narrate's changed their lives. But comparing bodice rippers to YA lit is a close second! :))
Saturday, October 9: More Books and Breakfast, this time discussing Ash, and Malinda Lo graciously joined us -- and told us wonderful stories of writing the book and discovering that Ash was more interested in Kaisa than the prince. (I also learned that there are a legion of people out there who wanted Ash to end up with the creepy faery guy. WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE?) And then on to programming. Today was the Fandom and Feminism panel day, and I think tartpants, sarahtales and I were reasonably articulate and smart -- and the audience was, too! But, gah, there was so much fandom to cover and only 55 minutes!
Terri Windling spoke about the origins and evolution of fairy tales during lunch (Snow White once came with necrophilia! Little Red Riding Hood, originally a tale about female resourcefulness, became a warning to be dutiful!), and then made everyone cry with her ending about finding stories that speak to you. And we stole the leftover cookies and repurposed them for tea. The tea set-up, thankfully, went much more smoothly today, though we were prepared to bounce the lawyers out of the cookies.
We had to do a quick change to faery attire, which for some of us consisted mostly of throwing on a fuckton of glitter and some wings, but for some people was a truly amazing transformation: Marie Brennan came in full Onyx Court attire, generalmanda came as a knight of the Onyx Court, and Erynn came as an aspen faery, complete with real branches and leaves as her wings. We all had the blue faery drink, which was surprisingly tasy, and moved over to the Faerie Lights Ball, for glowsticks and vogue-ing. And the murder mystery, during which we discovered that the aforementioned aspen faery killed King Oberon, and we crowned her the new queen.
There's no rest for the wicked, so we removed the faery attire, though not the glitter, and put on our jeans and tennis shoes to pack up the office and load one car so Marbles's dad could take stuff down the mountain the next morning. Yeah, another short night.
Best thing: Erynn's impromptu coronation speech.
Sunday, October 10: I was so busy with the auction and the speechifying and announcing next year's guests (see below!) that I didn't get breakfast until I grabbed the guys as they were taking the oatmeal away. :)) But we talked about all sorts of things for next year, and formed a hug line for the bus, and waved the bus off, sadly. And packed everything up and took it home, which sounds less complicated than it actually was (we didn't get home until after 5:00). Then there was Chinese food and more Phil Amazing Race and bed. So I could come to work this morning.
Best thing: Watching people shyly hang back from the hug line, and then decide they wanted to dive right in.
Whew. Another year, another conference, more amazing attendees. Thank you, everyone who came! I miss you already!
Which means that I should mention that Sirens is back next year, again in Vail, this time with Justine Larbalestier, Nnedi Okorafor and Laini Taylor -- and a theme of monsters and what it means to be monstrous. I can't freaking wait! (And the reading list is coming!)