Not Very Good Excuses For Sexual Harassment

So my friend Monica Byrne was sexually harassed by an (unnamed) high-profile blogger and science editor.  I could summarize it for you, but instead I’ll just take a big chunk of words from her post, which you really should read in full here:

A month ago I met with a prominent science editor and blogger. He’d friended me on Facebook, and given his high profile, I was delighted, thinking he was interested in my writing. I sent him a link to my latest piece in the Independent Weekly and invited him to coffee. We met at a cafe in Chapel Hill, where I gave him another clip, this one about science and playwriting.
From the beginning, it was a difficult interaction on my end. Thinking this was a business meeting, I tried to tell him about my background and interests, but he seemed mainly interested in telling me about himself, and my input was mostly reduced to reactive responses like “wow” and “that’s so cool” and “that’s so neat.” I managed to mention that I used to write a column for The MIT Tech called “I Did It For Science,” where I did weird activities like getting my tarot read, visiting a strip club on a Tuesday afternoon, and doing MRIs for the neuroscience department. He began describing his own experience of going to a strip club. Then he described himself as “a very sexual person.” Then he told me about his wife’s sexual and mental health history. Then he began telling me about his dissatisfaction with his current sex life with his wife. Then he reminded me that he was “a very sexual person.” Then he told me, in an awful lot of detail, about how he almost had an affair with a younger woman he’d been seeing at conferences—how they’d met, how it escalated, how “close they’d come.”
None of these topics were invited by me. I tried to listen politely and nod when he paused, but otherwise not engage or encourage him. He seemed not to notice how uncomfortable I was. I was trying to mitigate the situation as it was unfolding—which I later read is a common immediate response to trauma, trying to minimize it or pretend it didn’t happen. In my head, I told myself that I could still write for him, as long as I didn’t meet with him in person ever again. At the end of the meeting, I hugged him, which may seem bizarre; but earlier he’d identified himself as a “hugging person” and so do I, generally, and I was still in shock and trying to smooth over the incident.
Later that day, I received a casual message from him on Facebook, saying that it’d been “great” to meet me and that he had “no idea how the convo veered into sex, but heck, why not.” This made me furious. The conversation had gone that way because he’d very deliberately led it there, and kept it there, despite my non-response.

Now, the critical bit here is that Monica obviously thought this was a professional opportunity, while the blogger-in-question obviously thought it was a hot date.  There are doubtlessly some people who will go, “Well, that’s an honest mistake that anyone could make,” but really, it isn’t.  As someone who blogs reasonably prominently himself,  and often about intensely sexual matters, I can tell you that I meet a lot of new online friends for coffee at places, and I view none of them as hot dates unless the person specifically tells me it is in advance. (Which – and I’ll vouch for Monica personally here – she most certainly did not, either explicitly or through implication.)
So what we have here is a guy meeting up with fellow writers he met on his blog, and assuming that they’re all bangable until told otherwise.  That’s a problem, approaching a pattern.
There will also doubtlessly be people who will say, “Well, why didn’t she just get up and leave?  That’s what she should have done.  She even hugged the guy!”  And I agree, in a perfect world, that in fact the best reaction on the spot would have been to coldly say, “I’m finding this very unprofessional, can we stop talking about this?” and handle the situation right there.
But – and this is an important but – assuming that people should all handle unexpected shocks in a perfect, scripted manner is in itself fostering sexual harassment.
I remember getting gypped out of five pounds in England – and you may take issues with the word “gypped,” but I was in fact bamboozled out of a fiver by what I was later told was a gypsy.  I was fresh off the plane, still amazed by the fact that I was in another country, and as we viewed the London Eye in amazement, a woman came up to me to welcome me wholeheartedly to her country, slapping a flower on me, offering to welcome me around, speaking so fast I didn’t have much of a chance to think or speak – plus, in this new place, I wasn’t quite sure what to say.  And I don’t remember quite how things went, but she wound up talking me into donating a five-pound note for some useless set of poppies for, and I quote, “war veterans.”
The shameful thing is that I’ve also fallen for a similar line of patter in the Cayman Islands.  It’s a quite common thing to do to fresh-off-the-boat tourists, and it works because people feel too flummoxed by this friendly, fast-talking person to say “No, that’s too much money.”
I know perfectly well what I should have done.  I should have said, “These poppies aren’t worth that much, and I don’t want them anyway.”  But baffled – I don’t even remember what I was thinking – I got jarred off course by what I’d normally do.
So when someone you admire, someone who you think may offer you some writing work or at least a friendly discussion on writing, starts telling you in-depth about their affairs, it throws you off-balance.  This isn’t how things are supposed to go.  And you keep trying to be polite, to steer the course back on track without being so rude as to alienate this person, since you’re not thinking, “Oh, this guy’s scum, fire the cannons,” you’re thinking, “What am I doing wrong that I’m encouraging this?  What’s wrong with me?” And to expect a perfect reaction to a jarring and discomforting situation on the spot is to side with the harasser.  Because the emphasis is not on “That guy should not be doing that,” but rather “How stupid you were for being thrown off-balance by a completely unexpected event!  You should endlessly be on your guard against too-friendly people in foreign lands!”
Which, yes, you probably should be, which is why that line of advice sticks so much.  But putting the emphasis on the victim helps harassers to gain social cover – they’re not scummy, they’re just an environmental hazard, like hurricanes! You can’t expect them to act any different. Except you can, and should, and berating someone for a non-perfect reaction to this fails to take into account that people who do this often plan to take people by surprise, springing unreasonable requests and counting on folks to trust to their good nature.
So yes, there’s that.
But what I find deeply shaming for me personally is how I reacted when I first saw this guy’s response – for I was part of a group Monica asked for advice, and when I saw his excuse, I went, “Oh, poor guy.  He’s been having personal issues, no wonder he went off the beam.  These kinds of things are hard on people.”
Then I went: Wait a minute.  That’s exactly what any harasser would say.
That’s the problem with lying in general: maybe this is a one-off issue, a man deeply wounded by marital strife or something, and he had one deeply embarrassing evening before getting back on the train.  But it’s the exact same thing a serial harasser would make up to get out of trouble, the kind of excuse designed to evoke pity and cause people to walk away believing it was an isolated incident.
And I had bought it.
Is there a way to tell what this particular dude is like without corroborating evidence?  No.  So we have to put these things out in public, to see whether others have had the same problem. Which involves Monica putting herself, rather bravely, in the line of fire.  (And even if it was a one-off incident, again, I’m a polyamorous and reasonably slutty dude who meets up with a wide variety of women from the Internet, and I don’t try to lead them into lines of sexual exposure.  I know how seduction works.  You try to get people to mirror your behaviors.  When you mention affairs that explicitly, and later unabashedly, you’re trying to get your target to reveal some hot affair she had in an attempt to make affairs seem like a Not So Bad Thing To Do.  If it was sporadic, it’s the sort of thing that seems to have a firm grasp on the mechanisms of having affairs.)
So yeah.  Monica went through that, and I’m sorry she did.  And I feel shamed that for a moment, I was ready to let this guy just go.
To be fair, the guy seems to have known he was out of line, which is a credit we should extent however reluctantly.  Many don’t.  Many see women as just a sort of global bank to be drawn upon for sex, and feel no shame whatsoever in using them that way.  Even if it’s just a fear of social harm, we have here a man who at least acknowledges that Bad Things Were Done.  And credit should definitely be given to his superiors, who seemed to take it seriously.
I don’t think I have much more to say than that.

"You Have To Write Every Day"

That’s the most critical piece of writing advice, amiright?  Write every damn day.  If your mother died?  Write at the funeral.  Boyfriend dumped you?  Splash those tears on your keyboard, missy.  Lost both arms in a wrestling match with an alligator?  You can type with your toes!
Just write!  Write!  Write, until you uncork that best-seller from within!
But let’s get serious.  I do write pretty much every day, and I attribute that dedication to the success I’ve had as a fiction writer.  Neil Gaiman once famously told me, “Ferrett, you just need to write,” and after blowing through fifty wretched stories I started to get to some decent ones. I treat my writing career as if my boss were Ebeneezer Scrooge; I show up every day, no vacations, and toil well past the time I’d scheduled.
That’s what works for me, but every writer uses a different method to harness the muse.  Some people must plot in advance; I have to make it up with each sentence.  My friend Kat has to write it all down in longhand; I need a keyboard.  I have to revise a story five times minimum before it’s ready for publication, whereas redrafting for others is like shoveling ashes on top of a burning fire, damping all the energy of that first burst of creativity.
Some people, no, they can’t write every day.  They need to take a week off from fiction to refresh their creativity, wandering and dreaming before returning to the Land Of Difficult Words, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They’re not slackers; this is part of their creative process, and they know this is how they make their best work.
Still, the reason this “Write every day” schtick is so schticky is because every professional writer I know has one talent in common: they write when they don’t really want to.  Because as a writer, while it feels better to write while inspired, most of us soon discover that there’s not much of a difference in terms of what you actually create.  Some of my best writing has come from days where I felt like I was trudging through broken glass, and some of my worst writing has flown effortlessly from my fingertips to land on the page like fresh cat droppings.  For most – not all, but most – what we create has little to do with how we feel about it while creating it.  So most of us learn not to wait for inspiration, but rather to squeeze it out of ourselves like toothpaste from a wrung tube.
You may not write every day, but the world is busy and does not care if you’re a writer.  If you do not make time for the act of creation, then laundry and children and lovers and work will swallow your ambitions whole.  So you need to create time. The more often, the better. Because the number-one enemy that eats talented writers for breakfast, devouring millions of words of beautiful prose that we’ll never get to see, is Real Life.
…And yes, revising stories and critiquing stories all counts for this time.  If you’re thoroughly analyzing fiction, this counts.  You’ve set your brain to work on the big question, which is “How can I make this better?”
Which is the other problem with the “write every day” thinking: it assumes that merely writing is enough.  I know people who churn out 10,000 words every day, and they’re just as terrible when they began.  It’s not enough to just vomit words onto the screen – it has to be a focused writing, thinking about the details, bolstering your strengths, asking, “How can I do this better?” If you’re endlessly enamored of your own work, convinced it’s beautiful and not a word could be improved, you’re not writing, you’re masturbating.  And there is absolutely nothing wrong with masturbation, but it’s not improving anything except your ability to pleasure yourself.
When you sit down to write, do so in a focused manner.  Think, “How am I going to make this the best story in the damn world?”  You probably won’t, but asking the question and analyzing will lead you to better and better techniques.  And one day – even if that’s a day you did not necessarily write – you’ll find that you’ve become the sort of writer you’d hoped to be.
Good luck.

Don't Go Breaking My Heart

So as a brief medical update:
When I started my seventh run in an endless series of “Couch to 5K” programs, as I get in shape and then fall off the wagon, this time I felt a sharpish pain in the left side of my chest when I got up to “OMG I’M BREATHING VERY HARD” territory.  This wasn’t a usual pain, but it wasn’t enough to bring me to my knees, either.  Still, I’m fastidious about my health when it comes to everything but teeth.
Then I was in the tub, reading in hot water as I do, and when I stood up my heart started pounding like a gorilla trying to get out of the cage. Gini didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary, nor did I turn gray as supposedly heart attack victims to, but I take this shit seriously.
So I went to the doctor, who took an EKG that showed I had potential Q waves.  (If you wanna look at the EKG, here ya go.  Don’t say I never shared anything with you.)  The Q waves mean not that my heart is beating to the rhythm of John Delancie, but rather that there’s an outside shot that I’ve had some sort of heart event in the past.  Might.  Maybe. But my cholesterol levels are high, even as my blood pressure is low.
So I went to the cardiologist today, who did what doctors do when you show up with mild symptoms that sound dangerous, which is to throw EVERY TEST IN THE BOOK at you.  So in the next two weeks I’ll be taking a stress test, an echocardiogram, a sleep test, and wear a fucking harness for two days straight.  All for what will, in most likelihood, be not much at all.  But that’s medicine for you.  Rule it out.
For this, I’ll probably pay in excess of a thousand dollars.  But we don’t need any socialized health care.  That’s crazy talk.  (And yes, having talked to friends abroad who’ve had similar issues, their doctors also recommended such ridiculous workups.  They then waited for seventeen months and died.  Ha ha!  Just kidding, they got workups within a few weeks and went on about their lives. THE HORROR THEY LIVED.)
 
 

New Story! By Me! "Dead Merchandise," At Kaleidotrope!

I was talking to Ted Chiang at World Fantasy, and we were discussing The Singularity – or, as I call it, the Nerd Rapture.
If you’re not familiar with The Singularity, it’s the point where computers become ZOMG SO POWERFUL that it ushers us into a new paradise, where super-powerful AIs will tend to our every whim.  Ted was skeptical of The Singularity, as was I, and I said, “When the Singularity comes, it’s going to be a fucking madhouse of advertisement-bots enslaving us to their whim.  Mark my words.  I even wrote a story about that.”
I felt a little bad about mentioning my story in front of Ted fucking Chiang, master of the sci-fi form – but I also thought it was a good story, and thankfully Kaleidotrope agreed.  So today, you can wander into the world of struggling Sheryl Winstead, as she fights for her sanity:

The ad-faeries danced around Sheryl, flickering cartoon holograms with fluoride-white smiles. They told her the gasoline that sloshed in the red plastic canister she held was high-octane, perfect for any vehicle, did she want to go for a drive?
She did not. That gasoline was for burning. Sheryl patted her pockets to make sure the matches were still there and kept moving forward, blinking away the videostreams. Her legs ached.
She squinted past a flurry of hair-coloring ads (“Sheryl, wash your gray away today!”), scanning the neon roads to find the breast-shaped marble dome of River Edge’s central collation unit. River’s Edge had been a sleepy Midwestern town when she was a girl, a place just big enough for a diner and a department store. Now River’s Edge had been given a mall-over like every other town — every wall lit up with billboards, colorful buildings topped with projectors to burn logos into the clouds. She was grateful for the dark patches that marked where garish shop-fronts had been bombed into ash-streaked metal tangles.
The smoke gave her hope. Others were trying to bring it all down — and if they were succeeding, maybe no one was left to stop her.

I also note that my critique-mate Mary Turzillo has a story in the same issue, “Someone Is Eating America’s Chess Masters,” which I intend to devour at lunch.

How To Tell If You're Cheating On Someone

You can’t cheat on someone using the Internet, everyone knows that – that was just cybersex. You can’t cheat on someone who’s polyamorous, they fuck everyone anyway. You can’t cheat on someone if you’re a girl dating a guy, and you slept with a girl, because we all know girlsex doesn’t count. Oh, hey, that was just a blowjob, baby, that’s different.
There are fifty ways to leave your lover, and about five hundred ways of justifying cheating in a world full of crazy poly swinger leather-whipping cuckolds. Once you step into non-traditional sexual area, you’ll find whole relationships devoted to guys sending their wives out to be serviced by strange black men with huge cocks, humiliated daily, all in the context of a loving committed relationship…
…and yet cheating can still happen, even within those boundaries.
Look, folks, cheating isn’t about sex . Cheating is about breaking fidelity.
And fidelity is “Whatever you’ve agreed to do as a couple, either explicitly or tacitly.”
That doesn’t necessarily involve sex. If you’re a swinger couple and your rules are “You can fuck anyone you like, but don’t fall in love,” then in many cases “Going out for espresso and holding hands at Starbucks” is more of a violation than “Sucking his dick on camera.”
This fidelity applies to all relationships, but non-sexual cheating becomes of more import in open relationships – when exclusive sex no longer is the thing that defines you, then the non-sexual things become much more critical. Poly is rife with weird corner cases like that. Did you promise to see that movie with me? Did you go see it with her instead on a date?
Son, you just cheatamated.
The reason cheating is so toxic that it erodes trust. If you’ve broken your word once, then suddenly every other thing you say gets called into question. You say you love them, but is that true? You say you were at work, but is that true? It’s exhausting, and eventually you can’t date a cheater, because life is just too busy to independently verify every fact your lover presents. Eventually, you gotta sleep.
So why people so intent on telling you this wasn’t cheating? Simple: because if you’re a cheater, then everyone agrees you’re an asshole. But if you can redefine the rules of cheating so that you didn’t quite understand that this was off-limits, well, then! You can hold your head high! And, more importantly, you can keep getting your rocks off and enjoying yourself!
…right up until your partner finds out.
That’s the thing. It’s possible to accidentally cheat. Maybe you genuinely didn’t understand how much that movie meant to your partner. And those are hurtful, but contain such aspects of genuine misunderstanding to the point where you can almost – almost – not call it cheating, even though it’s still an act that wounds your partner deeply.
(Still. If your partner cheats a whole lot by constantly not understanding your emotional needs and forgetting all the promises that meant so much to you? Well, then maybe it’s a series of genuine mistakes – but damn, you can’t keep that shit in your life. You have to have someone who knows what’s important to you.)
But you wanna know how you can always, always tell if you’re cheating?
You don’t want to tell your partner.
Cheating is breaking an emotional bond, and if your first reaction is “This is something so special it’s just for the two of us, why should I have to tell him about it?” or “Oh, he’s not ready to hear that right now” or “I just don’t want to deal with the fallout” or “This is hot, and I’m completely fine with him knowing, but I’m just gonna erase my chat history and password-lock my phone and not actually get around to mentioning it ever,” then 99.9% guaranteed you’re cheating. Regardless of what you’re doing.
Hey, you don’t have to share every detail with your partner – Gini has some wondrously hot sex with her boyfriend, but the fine details would make me jealous, so she doesn’t share. And I know she loves him, without having to know every sweet whisper and promise between the sheets.
Likewise, Gini and Angie both know that I sext women periodically. I don’t tell her the fine details of what I got some beautiful woman in Florida to imagine me licking. But if there was a point where I’d promised, “Some day we’ll be together” or I got actually jealous when someone I was sexting was seeing someone else, then that would be something I should mention.
Because that’s outside the boundaries of what we personally have negotiated. I can sext, but not fall in love. I can kiss, but not penetrate. That’s all a unique negotiation between us, and what’s cheating for any single set of people is not necessarily cheating for another set.
There’s also a fine line to be drawn here, because if I suddenly realized I deeply loved someone I was sexting with, I know this discussion with Gini and my girlfriend Angie would be uncomfortable. But I’d also know that it had to be done, and would make sure that it got done.
If I didn’t do it, kept putting it off, then every day I’d be stepping deeper into cheating territory.
There’s a lot of debate about whether cybersex is sex, or casual sex is sex, or whipping someone is sex. That’s not the question. The question is, “Would you be okay telling your partner about what happened?”
If there’s something you’re hiding, then chances are extremely good you’re breaking some kind of fidelity.

A Thought On Female Friends And Crushes

If I have a female friend, usually there’s some mild attraction, since the reasons I would want someone as a friend have a lot of overlap with the reasons I’d want them as a lover.
Not always.  But the thing is, I’m intensely sapiosexual – which is to say I value people’s thoughts over their bodies.  (I have attractions to women who I literally do not know what they look like, but hoo boy can they express themselves.)  So for me, friendship is in a very real way a form of attraction.  I don’t necessarily share the fundamentals of that attraction with them (most of my female friends don’t want to know), but it’s there, a constant backbeat of desire.
And yes, it gets tiring on occasion, all these silly crushes fulminating in my mind.  I don’t know how to turn it off.  Attraction is as attraction does; the most I can do is not follow up.

Surviving Cons: A Guide For Socially Anxious Writers

On the way back from cons, some people play music.  I replay the most awkward conversations I had at the con.
Over and over again.  I think about what I could have said instead, and remember the startled look on their face as they realized what an oaf they were talking to and moved on, and slowly become convinced that the entire publishing industry has silently vowed never to publish any story from me because of that stupid thing I said to Paul Cornell.
This is what it’s like to be socially anxious.  At the con, literally every word I say has me convinced I’m making a fool of myself.  Am I?  No.  People have called me an extrovert, envying my ability to make friends, and my readings are well-attended… so clearly I’m not alienating everybody.
But how do you function at a convention when your brain is screaming at you to shut up?
Step #1: Ignore Your Brain and Go Loud.
Your brain is telling you to shut up – but for writers, cons are about getting attention.  You’re supposed to insert yourself into conversations, talk with strangers, go out of your way to be heard.  This is the only way to make friends.  If you wait silently for someone to ask, “What’s your opinion?” you will be waiting until well past the end of the con.
So you need to remember that a con is a performance.  You are not you.  You are playing a version of you, slightly amplified for public consumption. This version of you will do more than hover around the edges of conversations, smiling jovially – this you will volunteer opinions, for her whole goal during the con is to make friends with other people, and you can’t do that through silence. Even if you think what you have to say is stupid, throw it out there.  The nice thing about cons is that the weirder the opinion, the more conversation it generates.
Me?  I actually have a con outfit I wear to trick my brain into being more social.  When I put on my con hat and badge, I am Con Ferrett – it’s much like Con Air, though full of Con Hot Air – and this helps me socialize.
You may be afraid you will dominate conversations and make people hate you.  This will not happen, because you are socially anxious.  What you are actually doing is making your way past the people who are actually dominating the conversations. To be heard in a crowd you’ll have to be aggressive, so go aggro.  (And it often helps, if you get into an interesting conversation, to splinter off so you’re talking one-on-one, which is so less stressful than group gabs.)
Step #2: Recognize Nobody Cares That Much
It’s a con, and that dumb thing you said?  People forgot it.  They do that.  As a socially anxious person, you’re conditioned to believe that everyone spends as much time analyzing your words as you do… but they really aren’t.  They’re caught up in the conversation, and that joke you made that fell flat isn’t something they’re obsessing over – they’ve moved on.  So should you.
You’re going to say stupid things at cons, make statements that get ignored, sometimes get talked over.  Keep in there.  This happens to other people too, they just don’t let it stop them.
The only truly dumb thing you can do is to only talk about your book.  Don’t market to people.  Just interact.
Step #3: Prepare the Con Via Twitter
It’s hard for the socially anxious to talk to strangers.  But you can use social media to prime the pump, as it were.
See, if you can make a Twitter-friend, and have a couple of @-exchanges with some cool authors who are going to be at the con, then you have a built-in excuse to talk to them.  At best, they’ll remember your clever exchange; at worst, you’ll at least know what’s up with them.  A lot of the reason I do well at cons is that I’m active on Twitter, and Facebook, and various writer bulletin boards, and when I run into people they go, “Hey, we debated whether short stories were a viable way to break into novels!  Hi!”
This will not always go well.  Sometimes, you’ll meet someone who you’ve had grand discussions with online and they’ll just wave “hey” and move off.  It’s not a guaranteed thing.  But being active on social media means gives you a built-in network of people you sort-of know, who can then be catapulted into people you do know.
Also: don’t be afraid to check nametags.  Everyone does it.
Step #4: Recognize the Cycle of Cons
If it’s your first time at this convention, it’s going to be awkward.  You don’t know many people, so you’ll spend more time alone than you’d like. First times at cons are always like this.
But your goal is to pretend to be extroverted enough to make some friends.  Then, the next time you go to that con, you’ll have more people who you know, and those awkward silences will be shorter.  Generally, by the third time I attend a convention, I’ve met enough people that I can’t check into the hotel without running into someone who’s happy to see me.
But that first con’s a slog.  Doesn’t mean you’re a loser.  Just means you’re starting out fresh.
Step #5: Walk The Floors, Walk The Floors, Walk The Floors.
The nature of cons is that they’re composed of many brief conversations.  You talk to a group of four people, then two of them have to go to a panel and the third goes to dinner.  Then you’re alone again. If you are unused to cons, you may feel like this is specific to you, and give up and go back to the hotel room.
Do not do this.  This isolation is normal.  Though you will feel like the biggest loser in the whole damn world when, for the fifth time that day, you’re alone again.
Yet this is how cons operate.  When you find yourself alone, walk a circuit through the con, trying to run into somebody you know.  The thing about talking to someone you know is that it’s an agglomerative process; standing in the hallway, some third person will show up, and hey!  You’re talking to them!  And if that conversation goes well, you now know someone else at the con to talk to the next time you’re walking around. (See also: the cycle of cons.)
Every con usually has one bar where everyone meets, one lobby where people have to walk through to get to their panels, and a con suite where people stock up on food.  If you walk between those three areas, your chances of running into someone is good. (And remember, by “running into someone” we mean “finding someone you know and striking up a conversation.”  Start conversations, don’t wait for them.)
(Also: get people’s phone numbers, when possible.  It’s nice to be able to text con-friends to say, “Hey, what are you up to?”)
If you run into no one, hang out in the con suite and take a trick from my lovely wife: find the loneliest person in the room, the one who’s sitting looking as forlorn as you are, and strike up a conversation.  They’ll usually be thrilled to make a friend, and you’ll find yourself less lonely.
And when I say “walk the floors, I mean it.”  Panels are wonderfully fun to watch, but they’re static; you watch people interact.  You will make very few acquaintances attending panels, though they do provide great conversational grist if an author makes an ass out of themselves.
Step#6: Find An Outgoing Friend.
There are extroverts at cons who love to introduce people to each other.  If you can become friendly with one of those people, they will introduce you around, serving as your social lubricant, making your life far easier.  I myself recommend the services of one Nayad Monroe, but she may be booked.
Do not abuse your outgoing friend.  You don’t want to latch onto them like a leech.  If they wander away, don’t follow, just talk to the people left behind in their wake.
A note to those of you lucky enough to be friended to best-selling authors: if you have one of those, don’t expect them to be your in.  Once an author gets sufficiently large, he will mean well, but he will be so overloaded with obligations that even though you’re good pals, you’ll be mostly ignored at the con.  Cons are work for them, and it’s nothing personal that they can’t hang with you as much as they’d like.
Step #7: Plan Your Meals In Advance.
Dining is a social event at cons, and “Who is dining with who” becomes a matter of great import.  While you can luck out at conventions, sometimes glomming onto great groups (“I had dinner with George Martin!”), usually you’ll wind up casting about for people to eat with and feel pathetic. It’s stressful and sad, asking people repeatedly, “So, you got dinner plans?” and having them all say no.
So plan who you’re eating with before you get there.
Again, this is where social media helps, especially if you’ve Twitter-friended people you’ve met at past cons and can put out the call in advance.  But the effort of trying to find people to dine with often exhausts a slender store of energy.  And speaking of that….
Step #8: Recharge.  Relax.  Withdraw. 
As a socially anxious person, you’re probably saying, “This seems like a great deal of energy.”  It is.  I’m often wrecked for two or three days after a convention.
So guard your energy levels.  If you’re getting tired, go back to your room and read a book.  Sleep in in the mornings.  Carry snacks to keep your blood sugar levels up.  Yes, a con is a performance to some extent, but there’s a very real and very tender you behind this slightly more-outgoing person, and you need to protect that lovely you.  Some people are going to be talking 24/7, staying up until 4 a.m. every morning yammering on to vast audiences – that’s not you.
This is a lot of effort you’re going to, and a brave thing you’re doing.  Respect the work.  Respect yourself.
Step #9: Read The Comments. 
I’m throwing this open to other socially anxious writers to ask: what do you do to get past your neuroses at cons?  What helps you out?  I’m open to all suggestions.