Doing just fine.

The news of the AO3's Hugo hit this weekend during the inaugural Fanworks convention. It was the Con where it happened. When the news was announced in the con suite, we all burst into cheers and applause.

Fanworks con wore me out and I'll absolutely be doing it next year. The extra day in Detroit was well worth it: I stayed in an urban farmhouse with ducks and geese, and borrowed a bike to avoid using rideshares all day. I sped around the flat glacial flood basin, enjoying the art museum with its Diego Rivera murals, all four stories of the used bookstore, the soft air and feral leaves next to the river. The farmhouse was right near a lot of empty lots, most of which were full-on lawns, and I biked around them a while my first night, too hopped up to sleep, and it felt like biking around my hometown at night when I was a kid. Even if I did fall over after getting a wheel caught in a tram's tracks and earned myself a bruise on my ankle which still hasn't gone away.

I was afraid that'd keep me from dancing, but by the time Sparkle Motion rolled around, and after I calmed myself down after hyperventilating in the bathroom, I scream-sang to a bunch of vids and used my feet as a percussion instrument on the dance floor for a whole lot more.

I didn't take notes; I just floated around to which panels amused me. I really should have, because I'd have been able to remember who I talked to. There wasn't much talk about individual, specific fandoms at the panels. It was about fandom as a whole. Live fic readings, some of the vid shows, a cosplay showcase, but only one of the craft panels - next year I'll see about going to more of those. Mostly fic and writing, only one of which started out slow, the rest of which started fast and went on faster. We talked why eroticizing kinks allows a distancing effect from trauma, allowing the writers to explore them safely. We talked ongoing developments of tropes and how some specific ones can be traced back to individual comments and then be so developed as to be recontextualized outside of fandom. We talked why we read fics outside of any canon we've ever experienced because their take on a world is so rich you've got no choice but to enjoy. We talked how to turn characters into tea blends and recipes.

I met people I'd known personally for years and hugged people I'd only known from their work. I bought snarky buttons and a vidshow DVD. I nearly put someone to sleep with a back massage. I commented to the staff that I'd never been to a con with so few room parties and that was absolutely an endorsement because it meant we were all enjoying each other's shared company and we were all too tired at the end of the night to think about keeping on partying. I ate a single epic cupcake and many pieces of cheese, and got all my drinking done Friday night. All my drinking. I got painkillers for the hangover from one of the staff members, and was reminded once again how thankful I am that fans come prepared and ready to share. A few times, I plopped myself down on the floor or a couch or at a table and began talking MCU or Star Trek or whatever the topic happened to be. Fandom is a place meant for talking, and fandom conventions are a place where it's easy to talk.

Two blocks from the hotel, the urban development shorted out and everything turned into creek-beds and empty fields. Two and a half blocks to get to a creek-bed with tiny frogs, big grasshoppers, a turkey vulture circling away and a grand heron flying past. One of the fields had been left alone long enough for grasses to grow up into thin, tall bushes. Cousins to amaranth. Heavy enough to support a sparrow, light enough to bend under the sparrow, birds which are already almost air. In the Golden Hour as the sunlight shifts, I watched them hang and sway together. I took a picture of a small caterpillar on a leaf just at the edge of the hotel property: that was how undisturbed the sidewalk was.

A few comments were memorable enough to stick with me:

"The internet is fine until you want to do something ambitious with it" - said by someone standing next to me at the button booth. I said she was correct, she said she was referring to hotel WiFi, then we both laughed for how right she'd been.

"I'll take your cherry" - said by me at the hotel bar to someone else sitting there. (She'd ordered a drink with a cherry and I wanted to tie the stem into a knot for her. Yes, I immediately followed it up with, "That's what she said!")

But by far, the best exchange was at a panel where I said, "I love how someone told me Starsky and Hutch is the most equal pairing because the blond one is taller, and the brunet one is shorter."

"But how do they decide who tops?!" Someone shouted.

"Maybe," the mod cut in, "Maybe - they switch!"

And the entire room went, "Oooooooooooooh!"

Now, finally: to go add everyone to the appropriate social networks to keep in touch. Until next year.