That One Guy . . .

At any writer-heavy convention you can almost always find that one breakfast table where a bunch of authors congregate and bullshit together. Ah . . . tell stories together. There are typically a few older writers of varied genres that draw the rest like fascinated moths to a bug zapper, a bunch of younger urban fantasy or fae romance writers who sit uncertainly and wish they knew anyone else there to talk to, and one or two very loud individuals who insist on speaking on every topic brought up, at length, and typically without any great depth of knowledge.

Those are almost always sci-fi guys.

Now sci-fi authors in general are no different from any other brand of writer. They are as well-mannered as anyone and are no more likely to be boorish than any other. Hell, I just finished writing a sci-fi novel. But for whatever reason, that “one guy” at the table is almost always among their number.

(The guy who swears the most is also a fantasy writer, and likely me.)

For the longest time I was one of those who sat quietly and listened, and merely wished that One Guy would shut up long enough for someone—anyone—else to speak. Then I got to know the community a little better and could almost always cadge a side-conversation with someone interesting beneath the notice of whoever was holding the floor.

Gradually, I became someone that other writers asked questions of. I’m still not used to that, but I got a lot of help on the way here, and I’m happy to pay that forward whenever I can.

And that put me in direct competition with One Guy. As anyone else who wanted to talk at all would naturally be.

At first I would try politely asking him not to interrupt. “Oh yeah, sure. I’m not trying to cut you off, I just didn’t know if you knew blah, blah, blah . . .”

This was my Taylor Swift phase.

At another con I tried turning away from the One Guy and toward the person I was talking to, but that one just got louder as soon as he perceived someone at the table wasn’t listening, until no one could hear anything but him. This led me to wondering if I could throw a strawberry across the table directly into his wide-open mouth, which would have been funny as hell if I succeeded, and a legally actionable attack if I missed.

I never found out if I was accurate enough to hit a flapping target with small fruit, as it occurred to me that it was still assault either way.

But my favorite incident was when I got asked a question by a nervous young man across the table on the third and final day of yet another convention. I tried to answer, and this One Guy immediately doubled his volume. (I swear, it’s like there’s a class somewhere in obnoxiousness. They’re all the fucking same.) So I nod to the kid, he nods back, and we both get up and go sit at another table a comfortable distance away.

Then, unprompted by me, the rest of the authors trickle across the restaurant in ones and twos to the new seating, dragging nearby tables over as needed, and ultimately leaving One Guy sitting by himself. Not to be deterred, he gets up, grabs his backpack, and ambles over.

“We sitting over here now?”

But as they drifted over, the other writers had, with great care and precision, cut off any possibility for anyone else to add themselves to the cluster of tables. It was seating by exclusionary engineering committee, with tight tolerances for space between them. Now no one had figured him to follow, and there was a bit of an anxious looking around of the “What do we do now?” variety.

Until the previously nervous kid who asked me the question looks up and says firmly, “Fuck off.”

Immediately the rest of the table bursts into unexpected laughter. One Guy shrugs and goes back to his original seat. I watched him eat alone for a few minutes before I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I went and sat next to him.

This time, no one else followed.

I told him why everyone left, asked him a few questions about his life and quietly listened to the answers, and we ended up being FB friends. 

But the next year when I saw him again, that motherfucker kept his goddamn strawberry hole shut.