I had a new and unexpected experience this past Friday at the Nebula Award Weekend.
Someone recognized me from the internet.
A few months back, looking for feedback on short stories, I joined Codex, a forum for “neo-pro” spec-fic writers. After joining, I decided I should do what a normal, sociable human being would do, and post in the “Introduce Yourself” thread. As usual, I had to work against my inherent reserved nature to put myself out there like that, and also as usual, it seems like it paid off. At the Nebulas, fellow Codexian S.B. Divya recognized me, and introduced me to a number of other Codexians in attendance, and my time there was much enriched for it. (Thanks, Divya!)
I’d expected that I’d spend the Nebulas shuffling around by myself, maybe run into and chat with some folks I knew from Gumbo Fiction Salon. I did do those things, but also ended up meeting a lot of awesome new people. Which was kind of the point of going – I just thought it would be much harder, or that I’d fail miserably to capitalize on the opportunity.
I spent most of the weekend hanging out with Gary Kloster and his wife Brin (Gary is the writer of the two, but Brin shared some fascinating insights into the world of medicine), and Elizabeth Shack, all of whom were incredibly nice and friendly (as was everyone I met, really). Between standing around awkwardly in larger groups and then talking Elizabeth’s ear off later at the signing event, I realized something else about my aforementioned reserved nature. It’s something I’d known for ages on some level, but the weekend helped crystallize it in my mind: among the gregarious, I’m always the quiet one, and among the quiet, I’m always the gregarious one. In some (purely imagined) statistical model of loquaciousness, I seem to fall in a kind of valley between the natural bell curves of talkative people and quiet people. In the valley of the mute, the babbling fool is king – or something like that.
It amazed me how many of the Nebula-goers knew each other, seemingly quite well. Perhaps if I don the skin of the writer and exhibit its habits, the herd (pack?) will come to accept me as one of their own.