Letters from Meg⸺ May

It's starting to feel like summer. After all, summer is convention season. Since I've just gotten back from BayCon and finished a spectacular weekend at the Bay Area Book Festival, it's summer for me.

​BayCon is a smallish fancon held in San Mateo. I had a truly excellent time there this year, mostly because the guests were all so cool. I fell in love with the Library Bards, a couple of nerdy filkers with stage presence for days. I got to speak on panels about whether technology is helping us build a utopia or a dystopia alongside some thoughtful, eloquent people. Most of us believed that we're already living in both, working toward both, and that technology is a tool rather than a force for good or evil. I also got to enjoy some really unusual programming, on things like tea in space and women in horror. I had an absolutely wonderful time.

​The Bay Area Book Festival rocked, and for so many reasons I can barely contain it all. I got to see Roxane Gay speak. She's a hero of mine, and if you haven't read her before I suggest her short story collection called Difficult Women. I read it the day it came out and I can't stop thinking about it. I got to speak on panels with Cory Doctorow, Annalee Newitz, and Aya De Leon about activism through writing.

All this time at conventions and events has reminded me of some behaviors that I absolutely can't stand, so I put together a little listicle on how to behave at a Q & A. I know my beloved constant readers know better than to pull any of these garbage moves, but I'm sharing it with you anyway because everybody can help out. At AWP in 2015 I saw a young woman in the audience call out a bloviating time burglar when the mod failed to do their duty, and she was my IDOL for the day. 

I'm turning in my horror novel to my agent this month, and I can't wait to be able to tell you more about it. In the mean time, I wanted to share this story by my friend Kristen Arnett in Sun Dog about life as a millennial that I think is just gorgeous. 

It's the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love here in the Bay. It's impossible not to think about what this place used to symbolize to the nation and the world. There are just the barest, most raggedy wisps of that spirit left. I was at one of my favorite bookstores last night, The Booksmith, which is right near Haight-Ashbury. I was defending my title at Shipwreck, a competitive erotic fanfic event, and the book was Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." 

There we were, at the epicenter of peace, love and dope. Inside, we were poking fun at the reasons everyone used to come to San Francisco, most of us living on the tech money that brings people now. Outside, kids were sleeping in the street, living on nickels from the tourists who only come to hunt for ghosts. Time eddies in San Francisco. It's as flat as the Bay, and it's always running backward and forward, faster than anywhere else in this country. 

It's always 1967. It's always 2025. Elon Musk is putting women on Mars and Wavy Gravy is telling kids to stay in school. It's always right now, but traffic is bad and BART is experiencing 20 minute delays. People always come here looking for something that was over a long time ago, or something that's going to happen any minute now. 

Most of them leave when they realize somewhere else is more their speed. 

I'm a futurist. There I am up top: in a merry band of science fiction authors, all of us tuned in, turned on, and dropped out.

And here I am in the past: amid practical pranksters and student debtors, all of us trying to build a future out of what was written before we were born. 

I am exactly where I'm supposed to be.

Now and forever, 
Meg