June 16, 2025

Liner Notes #19: Owning What You Do

How to begin? In the five weeks since the last newsletter, a whole lot has happened. Last month, I didn’t think I’d be here, though that’s frankly ridiculous because what did I think was going to happen when I announced a convention?

Let’s back up.

On April 30, Kathy Bond, the WorldCon chair, posted a statement verifying that ChatGPT was used in the panelist vetting process. The reaction was, predictably, not good. Up until that point, I’d had my fair share of bad communication from WorldCon, and to this day, I wonder if they realize that people simply are not receiving emails from them. I’d applied to be a panelist, of course, wanting the WorldCon boost for The Memory Hunters release. I waited as friends got confirmation that their ideas had been received and then got confirmation that they’d been accepted as panelists.

Me? I wasn’t even getting the newsletters I’d signed up for.

I wasn’t the only one in that situation. But add onto it the ChatGPT usage, which, on top of the fact that genAI/LLMs steal our work to train on, is environmentally devastating, and the SFFH community took up arms. People withdrew from WorldCon. It turned out that people like Andrea Stewart and Micaiah Johnson had been rejected. And other people, like me, had been ghosted. It was a disaster, and I was mad, and when I’m mad, I do stuff.

I decided that I was going to run a fringe con at the same time as WorldCon with no ChatGPT. Easy, right? Who needs the sycophantic plagiarism machine anyway? Spite, thy name is Mia, and thou art an Aries sun, Aries moon, and Taurus rising. And so, ConCurrent Seattle was born. This is a one-time deal (my friend John laughed in my face when I said that). ConCurrent is about giving the middle finger to ChatGPT and providing alternate programming that wouldn’t have been found at WorldCon. This means I have a nonzero number of WorldCon rejects with plenty to say paneling at ConCurrent!

The entirety of the last month has been given to con planning. I’m the logistics person at home and I’ve been at my fair share of cons and music festivals, so I jumped into action. I’ve had plenty of help along the way—I won’t say I did this alone when I had support and cheering on and people ready to participate in the program from jump. A couple of weeks ago, I put out the call for volunteers, and now I have a squad of four, expanding soon.

The one wrinkle: We aren’t totally funded yet. We still have time, but we’re only halfway funded at this point. This is my one and only plea for donations. If you have a few spare dollars, could you toss them my way to help fund a con that is BIPOC-centered, genAI-free, and has a mask requirement? We’re gonna have a good party AND no one’s gonna catch covid, and it’s only going to cost us 5000 USD total.

Donate

Help ConCurrent Seattle reach their goal by donating or sharing with your friends.

Other things to know about ConCurrent, other than the website (https://concurrentseattle.weebly.com/)—it’s free to attend. It’s welcoming to all. And it’s across the street from the main WorldCon hotel.

But this is a mailing letter about owning what you do. I have a strong tendency to downplay everything I’m involved in because I have this somewhat justified belief that anything I can do is anything anyone can do. In my defense, I am surrounded by incredibly brilliant, accomplished, artistic people, and doing too much is par for the course, especially for Dalcrozians. We’re big into having many hats. Stephen, if you’re reading this, I tell people all the time about your teaching, conducting, house building, and doctorate-getting all at once. That’s the level of “doing stuff” that I’m up against!

I’ve been told by multiple people how difficult it is to run a con and how hard it is to do what I’m doing. I have a much better roadmap in my head on what to do and I’m very action driven, so it’s been easier than most people think. Easier than writing a book, by far. But, yes, owning what I do—I spent May building the skeleton of the con alone. I’ll own that. A couple of months ago, I had a chat with my eldest kid, and during the course of that chat I admitted that I don’t celebrate my wins very much, if at all, because there’s always something on the horizon and I’ve got to angle toward it, and I was also raised by a mother who doesn’t believe in praise (I am unsure, even now, if she thinks I’m smart and driven, or stupid for helping people for free [I used to run a sizable nonprofit dedicated to helping caregivers learn to babywear, and my mother said to my face she wasn’t going to support me in any way, not even morally {Why do so many older people hate community help and/or babies?}]). It’s not setting a good example for my kids if I achieve something and then dismiss it as ordinary, no matter how I feel about it.

I created a con. It’s happening. I willed that shit to life. Not bad.

I also have a book coming out in July and will be launching it with Charis Books & More and the Georgia Center for the Book on Tuesday, July 29, at Decatur Library at 7:00 p.m. Don’t let me flop on that either! Come see LD and me cut up on stage.

The Memory Hunters: Mia Tsai in Conversation with L. D. Lewis Tickets, Tue, Jul 29, 2025 at 7:00 PM | Eventbrite

Charis and the Georgia Center for the Book welcome Mia Tsai in conversation with L. D. Lewis for a discussion of The Memory Hunters.

I’ll also be going on tour—more on that later. This mailing letter is getting long and I haven’t owned half of what I’ve been doing.

Other shit I’ve been doing this month/last month:

• I started a Couch to 5k in April and I’m on week 7 now. I do not love running any more than when I started. I hated it then and I hate it now. But I said I was gonna do it, and I’m doing it. I’m running anywhere between an eleven- and thirteen-minute mile. It is what it is.

• Took one day off with no work. It was tough, but I did it. I was jumpy and nervous the whole day. My husband is trying to encourage more days off. We shall see.

• Taught Dalcroze at Reinhardt University the first week of June and will be teaching Dalcroze for the ASO in July. Imagine how much I flipped out when I got an email asking about teaching at the ASO! Cold emailed, out of nowhere! I’m trying not to let my brain run away with possibilities. Also, one of the counselors at Reinhardt told me I was way better than the other guy last year. Thanks, Nico! I do practice a lot. I’ll be back in Pittsburgh again this year and I’m looking forward to at least one day where I log four or five hours on the bench.

• Finished my solfège course with my Dalcroze teacher and kept a log of compliments so that I can’t memory-hole them and pretend I suck at this. I learned how to improvise Bach chorales. I’m not as dire at voice leading as I think. I’d like to work on improvising more complicated counterpoint next.

• Got tagged in on a special copyedit. That’s my reputation at Macmillan now, I guess—I can handle clients who need a gentler yet firm hand. The director of production editorial is in my inbox. I feel like Sally Field.

• Wrote two IP samples. IP’s about speed, so I had both of them done in two days each.

• Turned in a crap draft for K&V 2. Hey, it’s turned in. That’s better than a good but late draft.

• Won a scholarship for further Dalcroze education. The pool of applicants was small, so my chances were good.

• Made it to round two at Creative Capital, a grant for artists.

• ConCurrent made enough of a splash to get a writeup at File770 and Jason Sanford’s Genre Grapevine. Ma, I made it! I’m in the news!

• Got a nice (but not a starred) review from Publisher’s Weekly and lovely comments from Jenn Lyons, Malka Older, and Elizabeth Everett on the book. I did not ask any of those three to blurb, so those comments are truly genuine and I cherish them.

And that’s it. At least, that’s all I can remember right now. Here’s what I’ve been listening to, in brief; I’ll see you on the B-side, and please donate to ConCurrent! That money helps me more immediately than buying my book. And by “more immediately” I mean “I’m footing the bill for ConCurrent and fundraising means I get reimbursed so please make it so I’m not quietly trying to figure out how many jobs I need to take to defray the personal cost of running this con.”

What I’ve been listening to:

• Sly and the Family Stone, greatest hits. Last week was a bad week for music. We didn’t just lose Sly, but

• Brian Wilson/The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds. “God Only Knows” remains an incredibly well-written song. No notes.

• Mississippi Delta blues. I went to the record exchange and found a bunch of CDs of American folk music, and there happened to be a CD, like volume 17 or something, of Mississippi Delta blues. Naturally, I grabbed it, not only because of Sinners but because Key & Vale 2’s sonic landscape would benefit from a heavier blues presence.

• The Silkroad Ensemble, Silk Road Journeys: When Strangers Meet. I found this CD at the store too, but it was a special format my car couldn’t play, so I ended up listening to it on Spotify. Enjoyed it a lot. And it led me down the path to

• Osvaldo Golijov, Falling Out of Time. I used Tenebrae for The Memory Hunters, so I thought I’d add some Golijov to K&V 2.

Enough! Enough!