Drab Makyo - Madison Scott-Clary

Convention and Conference Panels

As I attend more and more conventions and conferences, I’ve started accruing ideas for panels, and now have several prepared panels, as well as a list of topics I know about and would be willing to present.

Prepared panels

Exploring the Fandom Through Data: Join [adjective][species] to explore the ins and outs of the furry subculture through data, prowling through seven years of the furry survey and additional surveys and data sets besides, investigating what makes up the fandom and exploring why.
The Love - Sex - Fur Guide to Safer Sex: Interested in what all goes into having a happy, healthy, sex-positive relationship with your partners? Curious on how to stay safe while playing? Safer sex is important for staying healthy, both physically and emotionally. Join Makyo from Love - Sex - Fur in exploring ways to enjoy intimacy safely.
Healthy Relationships in Furry: Interested in what all goes into having a happy, healthy, positive relationship with you and your partners? Curious on how to make long-distance and in-person relationships work? Come join Makyo from Love - Sex - Fur in an open panel discussing safe and healthy relationships.
Gender and Furry: Both gender and furry touch on very important aspects of identity, and the fandom often provides a space in which to explore one’s gender in a safe manner. Join Makyo from Love - Sex - Fur to talk about what gender is and how it interacts with the furry subculture.
Book Layout and Design: For the self- and small-publishers out there, you have a lot on your plate, from writing and submissions to distribution and marketing. Don’t leave layout and design behind, though! The last thing you want to do is leave a barrier between you story and your reader. Learn about how to make reading pleasurable in a tool-agnostic lecture.
Writing and Mental Health: Mental health plays an important role in ~~just about~~ everything we do, and writing is no exception. Learn about how to keep yourself safe and healthy as well as how to improve your velocity, fluidity of ideas, and confidence in your writing.
Using Story Beats: The last thing that we want is to get bogged down in the process of structuring our stories. There are tools to help you out, however, whether it be a simple three-act structure to the hero’s journey and the relationship caduceus! Come build a story and learn how to adapt existing tools to your own needs.

Presentation topics

Furry: Furry is a subculture focused on the appreciation of and identification with anthropomorphized animals. I have been working with and studying furry since 2011, and have considered myself a part of the subculture since 2000. Over this time, I have amassed tens of thousands of results from a dozen or so surveys, and have been writing about the data and the experiences of both myself and others through several outlets, published online and in print.
Being trans in tech: Tech and gender have a long and storied history, and this is complicated by transgender folks. I have written and thought about my experiences in tech as a trans woman extensively, with work appearing on a blog and on the tech site The New Stack. I love talking about the process of coming out, the things that work and don’t work for trans folks in tech, and ways to improve for both employers and employees.
Telling stories with technology: In what ways can the technology that surrounds us help us tell stories? Is it utilizing the ‘chat’ feature on Tumblr to tell a story through instant messages? Is running Augmented Reality Games using physical and digital tokens? Can the presentation of the story be a part of the story itself? I enjoy talking about technology and how it interacts with a story it’s being used to tell, from ARGs to Tumblr to Twine.
Creative non-fiction: Non-fiction has a reputation for being dry. Research materials, textbooks, and newspapers immediately come to mind. However, there are many instances of true stories being told in creative ways, from emotionally touching memoirs to gripping works of investigative journalism, from photoessays presented on slick websites to interactive data visualizations that let the reader explore interactions. All of these are things that I enjoy thinking writing, and talking about.
Writiing technologies: There are many different bits of technology that we use for writing. For some, it’s as simple as pen and paper. Then there’s the typewriter. And computers. And laptops and tablets and phones and speech-to-text and OCR. There are dozens and dozens of pieces of software used in writing, from Scrivener to Word to LibreOffice to vi and emacs. There’s hundreds of presentation formats for sharing one’s work online, and there are perhaps just as many ways of preparing one’s work for print. I’ve focused the techie’s obsession over tooling into specifically tooling for writing, and have lots to say about it.