I was Guest of Honor (GoH – pronounced “go”) at MillenniCon 29 this weekend, where a good time was had by all. And at the traditional GoH reception on Friday night, the convention unveiled a beautiful sheet cake which was the size of my car–and decorated with themes from my Esther Diamond fantasy series, which I found especially thoughtful. (Note the diamond, the comedy-tragedy dual-mask image that’s the traditional symbol of thespians like Esther, and the books. Also, the cake was yummy!)



MillenniCon is a science fiction/fantasy fannish convention in the Cincinnati/Dayton/Ohio Valley area, so it’s local to me (I’m a longtime Cincinnatian and now live in Northern Kentucky–so close to Cincinnati than I can easily walk to downtown Cinti, across the Ohio River, and can see parts of it from my back yard.) They like to feature local sf/f writers, and past GoHs include fellow Cincinnatians Mike Resnick (my dad) and Stephen Leigh aka S.L. Farrell, as well as Midwestern residents John Scalzi, Jim Hines, Eric Flint, and Tobias Buckell. Over the years, they’ve also brought in guests from farther afield, including Robert Sawyer, Connie Willis, Catherine Asaro, David Brin, Larry Niven, Lois McMaster Bujold, Joe Haldeman, and so on. As you can imagine, I am honored to be in such company.

Before opening ceremonies (generally pretty unceremonial in the sf/f world, but always fun and friendly), my fearless GoH liaison Cheryl, responsible all weekend for making sure I didn’t disappear down a manhole or get lost in the laundry, took me and several others out for dinner, including former MillenniCon GoH and friend-of-con David Drake. Later on, after the GoH reception back at the hotel and some evening programming (during which I confessed to enjoying Elvis Presley movies), there was the usual round of parties. (As I have said before, the sf/f world is mostly about the parties, not the books.)

I was settling down to sleep around 2am that night when I realized I had forgotten a bunch of essential things at home–such as something to read to the audience at my reading in the morning–so I made a middle-of-the-night trek back to my house across the river to get forgotten items. Upon arriving home, I surprised the Infamous Hector in the middle of constructing a catapult in the cellar by using–it seemed–pieces of a Scrabble game he had  liberated from the top shelf (9 feet high) in an upstairs closet. So it was a rather long night.

Like many others at MillenniCon, I was jailed the next day. (This is a fundraiser whereby people pay a few dollars to arrest and imprison anyone of their choice for 5-15 minutes in a temporary jail that’s constructed in the lobby. The jailer is a well-armed Klingon, so I went quietly, officer.) That evening, writer Stephen Leigh aka SL Farrell, who has been publicly performing in rock bands for decades, did a great job of entertaining the audience during the intermission at the masquerade while we waited for the judges to deliberate and make their decisions. Afterwards, on my way to the parties, I saw a giant blue sea monster in the hallway, and everyone said I’d had enough to drink. But I saw it again the next day, too, after all the effects of wine and questionable company had worn off. Hah!

Sunday wrapped up with some more programming, during which time I realized that I probably shouldn’t spend so much time at parties when I have a heavy programming schedule, since I am not quite the spring flower that I used to be.

Overall, I believe that being a good GoH means being polite and accessible, available to committee and attendees during most waking hours during the con, well-prepared on programming, and courteous to everyone who has shown up in hopes of having a nice time. So I tried hard to follow that example, since that’s all much easier than, oh, writing a book, and certainly not a lot to ask of an author in exchange for making her the honored guest of a convention.

And concoms make it a very positive experience for the GoH by running a good con where everyone has a good time, as well as extending warm hospitality to the GoH. All of which was the case at MillenniCon, which was a happy experience for me and, as far as I could tell, for everyone else, too.

Next year is MillenniCon’s 30th anniversary, for which they’re planning big festivities, including inviting back some former GoHs, such as my dad and my friend Jim Hines–so I’ll certainly be in attendance!

I did a radio interview today on Cincinnati Edition, hosted by Mark Heyne on WVXU, in tandem with MillenniCon Chair, Christy Johnson. Here’s the recorded feed, which runs about 25 minutes:

http://wvxu.org/post/author-laura-resnick-will-be-special-guest-weekends-millenicon-29-cincinnati

 I’m GoH (guest of honor) at MillenniCon this weekend. Here’s a link to the con:
http://www.millennicon.org/


And here’s my schedule:

FRIDAY

 7pm:    Opening Ceremonies        (Harrison/Garfield)

 8pm:    GoH Reception        (Con Suite)

 10pm: Guilty Secrets           (Taft/Grant)
Things we’ve written that we didn’t tell anyone about; movies and books we love that we secretly love but keep a secret. What happens at this panel stays at this panel.
Resnick (m), C. Hartwell, C. Matthews, S. Rechtin

 SATURDAY

 11am: GoH Reading (Harrison/Garfield)

 12pm: GoH Autographs (Lobby)

 2pm:    Women and the Future (Taft/Grant)
Will women become the new men in the 21st century?” Women are attaining the majority of college degrees, and are the more numerous sex in our country. Women are often the head of the household and bread winner today. Single motherhood is almost a norm today. How will this affect society and relationships in 20, 40, 60 years?
Sax (M), D. Waltz, L. Resnick, C. Matthews, H. Davis, S. Rechtin

 4pm:    Make ‘Em Laugh (Taft/Grant)
Writing comedy and humor in SFF
Resnick (M), C. Stasheff, A. Matthews, C. Matthews

SUNDAY

 11am: Authors & Pets (Harrison/Garfield)
Pets are often incorporated into SFF writing. Come learn how some authors are challenged and inspired by their pets.
Waltz, L. Resnick, S. Leigh, M. Resnick

12pm: GoH Autographs (Lobby)

2pm:    GoH Q&Q      (Harrison/Garfield)

3pm:    Closing Ceremonies (Harisson/Garfield)

Years ago, I was a recovering romance writer looking for a new genre, and I wrote a proposal for an urban fantasy series that I felt was exactly what I should be writing: A comedy series set in New York City and featuring Esther Diamond, a struggling actress (I was also a recovering aspiring actress) who gets involved in supernatural misadventures via her career. The proposal included a brief description of the series, synopses for the first three books, and the first three chapters of book one, Disappearing Nightly.

As readers of the series already know, in Disappearing Nightly, Esther is performing in an off-Broadway flop called Sorcerer! when the leading lady really vanishes during the disappearing act. After several more performers around the city mysteriously disappear during their magic acts, Esther joins forces with Dr. Maximillian Zadok, an elderly mage who specializes in unraveling mystical mayhem. She also butts heads with Detective Connor Lopez, a skeptical NYPD cop who finds Esther attractive in green body paint—or anything else.

Max and Esther would become partners in paranormal crime-solving as the series continued, and Esther’s relationship with Lopez would become more serious and more conflicted. Structured like a mystery series, the books would mostly (though not always) be stand-alone stories, and the series would be open-ended. That is, the characters confront Evil as a day-to-day job that someone’s always got to do; there is no specific entity or master-enemy who can ultimately be defeated or destroyed to remove all Evil from the world (or from New York City).

However, neither urban fantasy nor comedy was popular in the fantasy genre when I wrote the Esther Diamond proposal. This meant that selling the series would take some persistence. But, alas, I was letting my work be represented by literary agents at the time, and too many agents (including all four of my former agents) approach selling books with all the enthusiasm and commitment that I bring to thinking about cleaning my oven. In a pattern that typifies my experiences with literary agents, my then-agent sent the Esther Diamond proposal to three editors, they all rejected it, and the agent promptly declared the series unsaleable, refused to send it out ever again, and thereafter bit my head off whenever I raised the subject.

 A few years later I fired the agent, and then I sent out Esther Diamond on my own. Within weeks, I got a good multi-book offer for her.

Unfortunately, though, that publisher did a poor job of publishing the first book, including a terrible cover, bad pricing decisions, and no marketing. This happens a lot. (And lest you think, “Ah! A literary agent would have known not to sell there!” Actually, the agent I’d recently fired placed other writers with that same publisher while refusing to send Esther Diamond anywhere.) As you’d expect, the book sank like a stone (which also happens a lot). Responding exactly the way most publishers usually respond to their own publishing mistakes, the publisher canceled my contract. So this series, which it had taken me years to get aloft, was shot down and lying dead in the water once again.

Meanwhile, in a fit of “conventional wisdom” idiocy, I had hired my new/fourth literary agent to “represent” me after I got that book deal on the table by myself. This was a very expensive mistake on my part. She collected 15% of that deal and never took the slightest interest in my career again. From then on, it became progressively harder to get my calls returned or my emails answered. And now that I had been dumped by the publisher and my career was in trouble, she made it clear that I was as welcome at that agency as a corpse at a vegan banquet.

Technically, I fired that agent; but that’s a lot like saying, “I filed for divorce after discovering my spouse had left me.” Then I (foolishly) queried some other agents. They were all negative about my plan to find a new publisher for Esther Diamond and even more negative about my writing. (If you were thinking that 20 book sales protects you from agents telling you that you can’t write–hah!–then think again.) Before long, I realized that it was well past time to give up on agents and concentrate on getting another publishing contract. So I once again researched the market and submitted Esther on my own… And, once again, within a few weeks, I got a good multi-book offer for her.

(Sidebar: Giving up on literary agents proved to be one of the very best business decisions I’ve ever made. I’ll talk about this more in future posts (and I’ve talked about it often in my Nink column and on other people’s blogs), but my career has improved so much since I quit working with agents that I regret not making the decision years before I did, and it’s difficult to think of a scenario in which I’d choose to go back to working with one.)

The editor who took a chance on this canceled series was the inimitable Betsy Wollheim, publisher of DAW Books—who won a well-deserved Hugo Award for Best Editor in sf/f in 2012. (Her co-publisher, Sheila Gilbert, got a long-overdue nomination for the same award in 2014.)  DAW Books, which is a small independently owned house (distributed by the Random Penguin empire), is very different from any other publishing house I’ve ever worked with, in that they treat me like a respected professional associate and treat my work as a valued asset. My experience with other publishers for many years was consistently that I was typically treated as something between a necessary nuisance and a crack whore, and my work was treated as anything from filler for holes in the schedule to street garbage. So, needless to say, I have been very happy at DAW Books and hope to keep writing for them for a long time.

I could tell I was finally at the right house with this book early on, when DAW (in an example of how differently they work than all my previous publishers) asked me what cover artists I was thinking of for this series–and it turned out we both had the same top pick: the brilliant Dan Dos Santos, who has done all but one of the the DAW Esther Diamond releases to date. (Dan was not available to do the reissue of Disappearing Nightly, which dropped into the schedule on short notice after I got the rights back. The DAW cover for DN was done by the talented David Palumbo, who was very professional and great to work with.) I also worked well together with DAW editorially and on production, and this is a better series as a result of being at that house instead of any other. So things have really worked out for the best, despite the long hard road that Esther Diamond traveled to get here.

The first book we did together was Doppelgangster, Esther #2, followed by Unsympathetic Magic and Vamparazzi. By then, I had rights back to Disappearing Nightly and the original, doomed edition was no longer in print; so I did a few minor revisions to the manuscript (it’s a luxury to be able to do some continuity fixes on book #1 of a series after you’ve written book #4). DAW repackaged it with the Palumbo cover and released this reissue the same year it released Esther #5, Polterheist, which was followed by The Misfortune Cookie a year later, and then Abracadaver in November 2014.

I’m now working on Esther Diamond #8, Goldzilla, set on Wall Street, and ED #9 & #10 are under contract with DAW. (That doesn’t mean the series ends with #10; it just means that’s how far we’re contracted at this time.)

Deep into writing this series now, after years of trying to get it off the ground, I still feel that this is exactly what I should be writing (though not the only thing that’s exactly what I should be writing), so I’m in this for the long haul. And I hope that readers will be, too!

No, Snap is not a feline, but he falls within a general TGIF-and-animals theme, so here goes. This piece first appeared a year ago, in March 2014, in my monthly Nink column for Novelists, Inc., when Snap, my first foster puppy, was living here.

***

“You can never go wrong adding a dog to the story.”

 —Jim Butcher, White Knight

Snap, 4 months old, on his first day here.

Since I work at home and since this house has a (small) fenced yard, I recently decided to try something I’d been thinking about for a while—fostering a service puppy.

Snap is a golden retriever who moved in with me in the autumn, when he was four months old. He’ll return to the foundation that owns him, 4 Paws For Ability, sometime this spring, when he’s ready to start his adult training to become a service dog for a disabled child. (The specific type of work he’ll do will be determined when he’s evaluated at the start of his skills training.) If all goes as expected, he will graduate from the program after intensive training, be successfully paired with his permanent family, and spend the rest of his life as some lucky kid’s best friend and working partner.

The goal for Snap, while he lives with me, is for him to become a confident, courteous companion in the world where he’ll eventually accompany his permanent human partner 24/7. Therefore, in addition to learning to be a good house dog and attending obedience classes, Snap goes virtually everywhere with me: post office, library, supermarket, retail stores, the bank, coffee shops, my mechanic’s garage, waiting rooms, public lectures, and so on.

Snap at 6 months, invited to a friend’s holiday brunch with me.

This month, he’ll attend a local sf/f convention (Millennicon) with me, where he’ll be at my side the whole time I’m doing all the usual stuff I do at conferences. And I fervently hope that while I’m speaking to audiences, Snap won’t suddenly start gagging, hiccuping, or vomiting—all of which things he, like many puppies, tends to do when you least expect it.

When he’s invited (which is often), Snap also accompanies me to parties and dinners at my friends’ homes. (Actually, invitations these days tend to read, “We haven’t seen Snap in too long! … Oh, and of course, you’re welcome to come here with him.”) There’s also a checklist in my foster handbook of things I am asked to expose Snap to, so they’ll be familiar to him as an adult, such as: elevators, sliding doors, cars, public transportation, the zoo, museums, live music, etc.

So, obviously, there’s a lot I’m supposed to teach Snap in the months that he’s here. But I had not realized until after his arrival that Snap would also teach me a great deal.

For example, the standard best case scenario in my working life is that I write a book, the editor tells me it’s okay (or tells me a few things need to be fixed; or says nothing at all to me), the book then goes into production, and I start writing the next book. Apart from that, in my experience, writing is mostly a life of being rejected and reviled.

So I was skeptical about 4 Paws’ strict insistence on positive reinforcement training, wherein I reward Snap’s good behavior with praise and dog treats, and I ignore his unsatisfactory behavior (or, if it’s problematic behavior, like dirtying the carpet or eating a chair, I tell him “no” and show him the right thing to do—such as go outside or chew on a bone).

This made no sense to me. It would never work! Surely, I thought, when Snap wants to chase his squeaky-toy instead of doing his obedience drills, I should tell him that there are a thousand puppies lined up at his back, eager to take his place if he doesn’t do what I tell him to do—and those puppies will gladly train for half the treats he’s getting! That’s how I was taught to be a working writer, after all. Shouldn’t a working dog also be inspired by similar motivators?

But I was wrong. To my astonishment, this whole “praise and rewards” system is effective. As soon as Snap realizes he’ll get a bacon-flavored goody for sitting when I say “sit,” he’s eager to comply. When he’s off-leash at my local park, he makes a game of running 30 yards ahead of me, then waiting for me to say, “Come,” so he can get showered with praise when he returns to me. Around the house, he increasingly repeats behavior I tell him is good (such as playing with his own toys, lying on his bed, and staying out of my way when I’m cooking) and seldom repeats behavior that goes unrewarded (such as stealing used tissues from the waste bin, which I refuse to play with or let him shred).

Imagine if  editors praised us for writing a good story, delivering a clean manuscript, and conducting ourselves professionally. And now imagine if they did it every time we wrote, delivered, and conducted!

Wow. What a wonderful world it would be.

On the other hand, Snap has also taught me that good looks matter more than I want to admit. Snap is a beautiful dog—and this attracts people to him. I know, because everywhere I go, people comment on how beautiful he is—then ask if they can pet him, what his name is, how old he is, etc., etc.

Snap has a service vest he wears whenever we leave the house, which outfit enables him to accompany me everywhere, since there are very few places that service dogs aren’t allowed. The vest engenders a lot (a lot) of conversation with total strangers wherever we go. This amuses all my friends, since—brace yourself for a shock—I am not a people person, and I now typically find myself, as ambassador for my 4 Paws foster puppy, obliged to engage in friendly chat with strangers a dozen times a day. I’d honestly rather be subjected to a Vulcan mind probe, but whaddya gonna do?

Snap at 10 months, looking so grown up.

Once in a while, though, the service vest is in the laundry after getting muddy and we go for a walk without it. And I still get stopped constantly by people who exclaim on Snap’s beauty and want to interact with him. (In fact, whenever Snap is in the car with me, pedestrians wave and shout to me as we drive past, “What a beautiful dog!” On a day when the windows are open, people in other cars in traffic ask me questions about Snap.)

So, yeah, the reality is that looks make a difference. There’s a good reason that so many protagonists in commercial fiction are good-looking, and we shouldn’t feel we’re pandering or “selling out” when we write characters with enviable looks. People are attracted to another being’s beauty. I currently encounter empirical evidence of that every single day.

Nonetheless, Snap has also taught me that, while beauty may attract, character and personality are genuinely where it’s at. I have friends who get choked up at the thought of Snap leaving our lives this spring when he moves on to his next phase—not because he’s physically beautiful, but because Snap has a beautiful soul. And for all that total strangers are attracted by his beauty, it’s Snap’s sunny, gentle personality that makes busy people halt their day to spend five minutes petting a stranger’s dog at the supermarket or computer store. Like any good protagonist, Snap is someone you start caring about within moments of meeting him.

Snap begging me not to make him wear his Xmas costume in public.

Snap’s effect on strangers is also always a good reminder that, even though I’m not a people person, there are valid reasons for pretending to be one when I’m in public. This is particularly true in my professional capacity, since I don’t ever want to become one of those writers of whom readers say, “I used to like her books. But then I met her.”

Above all, Snap has reminded me that every story focuses on its protagonist—and, in this case, that’s not me. The question I am most commonly asked is always some variation of, “But don’t you get attached? Won’t it be hard to give him up?”

Well, yes, and yes. But so what?

This story isn’t about me; it’s Snap tale. It’s also about the disabled child whose life Snap will enrich and enliven–and quite possibly save, as these dogs often do. I’m not a humble person, but it strikes me as self-evident that, in this narrative, Snap and his eventual partner are the spine of the story, and I’m just a secondary character who’ll feel bereft for a while after Snap returns to 4 Paws for his adult training.

Meanwhile, I’m teaching him how to live in the world—a skill we’re all a little shaky on, including me, yet we nonetheless manage to muddle through. Missing someone we love and who is no longer around is one of the things we all have to learn to do—and, after all, I think Snap will miss me, too.

This puppy has a challenging, rewarding, and important life ahead of him, and that’s what I focus on when I think about saying goodbye to him.

I also keep in mind that after he moves on, I will no longer be goosed out of a sound sleep or interrupted mid-paragraph by Snap vomiting on me.

***

Snap returned to 4 Paws about 3 months later and commenced his adult skills training. He was very successful, as I expected, and now works as a seizure-alert dog with a child who will be his constant companion that rest of his life.  Giving him up was indeed very hard, but it was made easier by seeing how much he is loved and valued by his permanent family–who I got to meet at his graduation (the children and their families go to 4 Paws to train together with the dog throughout the final 2 weeks of the course, during which time they become a team). I have asked 4 Paws about Snap several times since I last saw him, since they keep in touch with the families, and they tell me he is doing well and is cherished. (My mom correctly predicted that whoever Snap was placed with, he would promptly have them eating out of his paw.)

If you’d like to read more about 4 Paws For Ability, I first learned about them via this interesting article. If you’d like more information about fostering for them (they’re in Xenia, Ohio, and fosters need to live within 2-3 hours of there by car), you can find it here, including information about their university fostering program (students foster for a semester). Also worth reading even if you live in another region but would like to learn more about fostering service puppies, in general. You can also follow 4 Paws on Twitter or Facebook.

There’s an internet meme going around, Seven Things You Might Not Know About Me. So here goes.
 
1. I was baptized Catholic and then sent to Hebrew nursery school. (This wasn’t irrational whimsy. I was born to a Catholic-Jewish marriage.) Sticking with that theme, I subsequently attended a Jesuit university and then volunteered on a kibbutz in Israel.

2. Learning to read was hard for me. I’ve since learned that this was probably in part because I was about 6 months younger, on average, than my classmates, so they were a little ahead of me in terms of brain development. But it was also because rather than reading to me, my dad usually told me stories—in which I rescued Tarzan, I was Batman’s crime-fighting partner, I teamed up with John Carter of Mars, and so on. This, as you may imagine, made it very hard for me to get interested in reading lessons where the most exciting thing that happens is, “Sally sees Jane run.”

3. I never wanted to be a writer. I wrote my first few manuscripts in hopes of selling one and thereby paying off a bank overdraft, after which I had no intention of pursuing this as a career. After getting hooked on writing, then selling my first book (a romance novel called One Sultry Summer; Silhouette Books, 1989), then selling more books, I made at least two serious attempts to quit writing fiction, first in 1993 and again in 2003. It didn’t work either time, and by 2006, I resigned myself to my fate and have no serious plans to quit again.

4. I grew up at a kennel. After my parents bought their first house when I was about 5 years old, they started raising show collies, a pursuit they continued for about 15 years. As a little girl, I cleaned the kennels for $1/day. When I was 14, we left Illinois and moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where my parents bought a large boarding kennel, and I worked there (for better pay) throughout my teenage years, and on-and-off in my twenties (whenever I was residing in Cincinnati).

5. I was horse-crazy as a girl and even had my own horse for a few years, when we lived out in the country on 5 acres. He was an orphaned pinto with an odd name, Beauhank, who–because he lived among all our collies–apparently thought he was a dog. He played with them, hung out with them, preferred to drink from their water buckets, and often tried to eat their food. When I later boarded him at a nearby stable, the staff asked me why he preferred dogs to other horses.

6. Places I’ve lived include: Palermo, Italy; London, England; Jerusalem, Israel; New York, New York; Chicago, Illinois; and Washington, D.C.. I’ve also lived short-term (1-3 months) in southwestern France, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and on a kibbutz (Kfar Blum) in northern Israel. I’ve backpacked twice through Western Europe, and I spent most of 1993 crossing Africa, end-to-end.

7. My lesser-known vices include: books about the British royal family; Elvis Presley movies; taramasalata (a pink salty-oily dip made with cod roe, which I wouldn’t dream of trying to convince anyone else to eat); music from The Archies, The Monkees, and The Partridge Family; and fashion photos of barrister Amal Alamuddin (whose wardrobe has been photographed a lot ever since teaming up with actor George Clooney).