Newsletter #101 — Panel Selections
March 1, 2025
Newsletter #101 — Panel Selections
Fourth Blog Series Book — You may be familiar with one or more of my three "blog series" books: Xenia Steered the Boat, 2017; Scrape, Rattle, and Roll, 2018; and Adventures in Self-Publishing, 2020. I offer these books for free on Kindle on selected promo dates, and I sell them for $5 at events, or give them away free when a reader purchases Exit Velocity or The F Words at one of my vendor tables.
I'm now working on a fourth such book, which will address the ever-present, paramount question of social justice for all. The book will contain 25 of my blog posts on various aspects of The F Words. I wrote 40 such posts, but I want to keep the book to a size I can afford to self-publish. I'm not revealing the title yet, and I don't have a pub date yet — but I'm aiming for late May, so that I'll have the book ready to take to CONvergence.
Podcast Interview — I was contacted by a podcaster for the YouTube channel, The Ringer. He's interested in women in baseball and has searched for information on a woman sports reporter of the 1890s. He interviewed me earlier this week, about my research on women who played hardball. I don't want to give away something I shouldn't regarding the topic of his March podcast, honoring Women's History Month, but I'm looking forward to learning more about the person he'll be talking about. When I have info on when the podcast will air, I'll post it here.
CONvergence 2025 — In December I (and many others) replied to a request from CONvergence asking participants to suggest panel ideas. I suggested close to ten topics. In February I received an email stating that if I wanted to participate as a panelist I should log in and choose no more than eight panels to participate in. And, I should prioritize the panels from first to last in the order I desired to participate.
When I attended Windycon50 back in November, I also went through the panel selection process, and that took quite a while. CONvergence is about eight times the size of Windycon50, so, as you can imagine, the selection process took even more of my time.
However, I was pleased to see that CONvergence had accepted six of the panel-topic ideas I had suggested earlier, in December! So, naturally, I requested that I be a panelist on those six. Plus two others that weren't my suggestions.
Here's how I prioritized my eight selections. (The two that weren't my idea are choices 4 and 5.)
- Saving the Human Race
- Crafting Characters Readers Care About
- Sci-Fi vs. Other Genres
- Do We Really Need that Backstory?
- These Stories Survive for a Reason
- The Value of 19th Century Sci-Fi
- The Realities of Self-Publishing
- Series vs. Stand-Alones
In mid-May CONvergence will send out an announcement of who is on which panel. That will give us about six weeks to prepare our observations and remarks!
Video — My most recent video is on Research Notes for Women at Play, Volume 2. It's titled "Wrong Guess, Right Results."
Setting — "The F Words, More Than Ever" is my March 1 blog post.