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Con Etiquette: Approaching Authors (Subtitle: I remember no one)

by

Mur

I get asked this a lot, and I’m very glad that this year someone has written a great blog post about interacting with authors, including at cons. So I send you there, to Delilah S Dawson’s post about How To Approach Writers in the Wild.

I wanted to underscore one part she mentioned:

[At a convention] Start off the conversation by telling them your Twitter name and mentioning a conversation you had; our memories are full of lies and plots, but we want to know we know you.

This. God, this. It is horrible to say, but attending lots of cons and being generally forgetful causes me to need a memory jolt when I see someone. If they just say hi or want to shake my hand or hug me, and I can’t see their name tag (or if I know them by their online name or Twitter handle and not their full name) I feel horribly awkward and spend all my time talking to them going through the “oh shit where do I know you from???” panic in my head while I’m smiling and nodding.

And I promise- it’s NOT YOU. In my life I have done the very classy moves of:

  1. …not recognizing my neighbor at the coffee house.
  2. …greeted an old boss at a pool hall because I remembered I knew her, but not from where, and also, oops, forgot we parted on bad terms.
  3. …didn’t recognize a guy I went to Russia (then USSR) with – we were  a small group of 17 year olds traveling for three weeks. Saw him at a party a year later and didn’t recognize him at all.

I am NOT GOOD at this.

If you approach this scatterbrained author at a con, and I look confused, please be kind and introduce yourself and remember- scatterbrained author, not you.