Throughout WorldCon my mind was much occupied with the creation of importance. My primary reason for being at the event was because Howard had been nominated for an award. And yet I found myself pondering the very nature of awards. They are of themselves hollow things. Awards only carry importance because a group of people believes in their importance. The larger the group of people, the more prestigious the award becomes, and the more value it has. That value is real. It is a vote of confidence from those who hand out the award. It is a measure of accomplishment. Awards are simultaneously extremely valuable and completely empty. Throughout the convention I got to watch as the science fiction community co-operated to create community and to lend importance to the interests that they all share. The entire purpose of the convention is to state that the genre matters. And it does. I love it. I love the things I’ve gotten from it.
But somehow in the course of helping create value for the awards and for the genre, I inevitably ended up measuring myself according to these standards. The result was sufficient to make me feel very insecure. My one professional short story sale looks very small when compared to the writers with multiple novels. It is hard to feel anything but insignificant when you’re attending a high-powered genre publishing party and your only claim to fame is being the wife of a self-published cartoonist. The people who knew me were kind and gracious. The people who were introduced to me were kind and gracious. Our friends sought me out and made my heart glad. But to the majority I was irrelevant. The delightful conversations were like islands in the swamp of irrelevance. When I describe it this way, it sounds like I had a horrible time. That isn’t true. I had a marvelous time. But I also know that I am not the only one who feels small or irrelevant at conventions. Everyone always blogs about the marvelous moments, but I also believe that everyone who is not A-list and followed by an entourage, also has moments where they feel insignificant. I frequently felt insignificant during the convention. I resolved it by either starting a conversation with someone or by taking a break away from people to gain some perspective. And I truly did have a marvelous time. The good far outweighs the negative.
Looking back I can see how much stress is inherent for the professionals at WorldCon. This is IT, the important convention. People win or lose big awards at this event. Contacts are made, deals are begun. As a result, few pros or intend-to-be-pros are relaxed and ready to make friends. I felt the pressure of this myself. I knew I should not waste any minutes. I should be walking through the dealer’s room talking to folks at press tables. I should take advantage of the Hugo parties that Howard’s nomination gave us invitations for. I should be working the room, talking to everyone. Because you never know which contact will lead to another contact which will lead to a business opportunity. I felt all of that, and I was attending just as the spouse of a nominee. If I had been trying to forward my own work, I can only imagine how stressed I would have been. The pre-Hugo party was full of pre-award jitters. The post-Hugo party was full of complex emotions of elation and disappointment from both winners and losers. When I look at it that way, it is not surprising at all that I failed to connect with people with whom I would have liked to sit down and talk for hours. It really isn’t about lack of interest, or my insignificance, it is about stress responses.
At the convention I found myself spinning plans for writing stories, for creating work that would gain me recognition from the science fiction community. I plotted ways I could put myself forward, the best methods I could use to get noticed for a Campbell Award nomination. Then, in the airport on the way home, the parts of my soul that I had stowed away, unfolded. I realized that there are large parts of myself for which the WorldCon measures of value are completely irrelevant. My success or failure as a person can not be contained by a science fiction award or the lack of it. I can not be alone in this realization either. Because when everyone blogs about attending conventions, they also blog about how glad they are to come home. It is as if conventions exist tangentially to real life. It is easy to get caught up in the spirit of the convention and lose track of the rest of who you are.
And so like many bloggers before me, I say “I am really glad I went to WorldCon, but I’m really glad to be home.”