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thanateI find that my mental allocation for writing has been sufficiently overrun by parenting and other more concrete tasks that I'm now having trouble with blog posts and e-mails. Bah.
Went to Fourth Street Fantasy. Was on panels. (madness!) I even appear to have managed reasonable coherence, despite unnecessarily small amounts of sleep. (Packing stress plus solstice insomnia, followed by one night's good sleep, followed by the Megatherium turning suddenly cold-symptomatic and needing to be picked up every hour or two to wipe her nose or just be held upright for a couple minutes.)
History as Trade Secret Fantasy has a long tradition of borrowing (and outright stealing) the best bits from history and remixing them to taste. Sometimes historicity is just an aesthetic gloss, but in others it serves as the foundation for rich, detailed, and complex works. What makes us admire an author bending history to their ends, and which excesses snap our suspension of disbelief?
Tim Cooper (m), Alec Austin, Ann Chatham, Dana Baird, Michael Merriam
----
Advice From New Writers Every generation of writers has a different perspective on composition, publication, and community. What advice, theories, or thoughts do our panelists have for others based on their experiences?
Alex Haist, Ann Chatham, Arun Jiwa, Miriam Krause, Merc Rustad, Ginger Weil(m), Fade Manley
The "Advice from New Writers" panel was particularly interesting to the participants, as we had an entire conversation about it beforehand that a few of us left feeling a little like we were going to end up repeating ourselves-- and then the actual panel was entirely different.
On the whole, I would recommend the con-- it's single track programming and I pretty much managed to get to everything, thanks to grauwulf's dedicated child-wrangling. It stayed pretty well in the range of interesting rather than done to death or cringe-worthy which puts it all in the top quarter or so of con panels I've been to overall.
(In notes to self, however, I think I have hit the point where further listening to other people talk about either revisions or co-writing constitutes cat waxing.)
There is also a long list of things I find I cannot recommend, beginning with the Dollar car rental at the Minneapolis airport and ending with taking a stuffy-nosed child who has already disgorged one set of half-digested pretzel and carrot bits upon her other parent onto an airplane at bedtime. (Note to other parents-- if your child sucks on fingers/thumb, this is a behavior to encourage through pressure changes. I have no idea why I didn't think of this until after she sorted it out for herself.)
Would do again, probably not until the child is a bit older and less Mommy-dependent. Not sure how WFC is going to go, but five months from now is another world, doesn't involve airplanes, and there wasn't any plan to take family along for that one.
Xposty from dreamwidth.
Went to Fourth Street Fantasy. Was on panels. (madness!) I even appear to have managed reasonable coherence, despite unnecessarily small amounts of sleep. (Packing stress plus solstice insomnia, followed by one night's good sleep, followed by the Megatherium turning suddenly cold-symptomatic and needing to be picked up every hour or two to wipe her nose or just be held upright for a couple minutes.)
History as Trade Secret Fantasy has a long tradition of borrowing (and outright stealing) the best bits from history and remixing them to taste. Sometimes historicity is just an aesthetic gloss, but in others it serves as the foundation for rich, detailed, and complex works. What makes us admire an author bending history to their ends, and which excesses snap our suspension of disbelief?
Tim Cooper (m), Alec Austin, Ann Chatham, Dana Baird, Michael Merriam
----
Advice From New Writers Every generation of writers has a different perspective on composition, publication, and community. What advice, theories, or thoughts do our panelists have for others based on their experiences?
Alex Haist, Ann Chatham, Arun Jiwa, Miriam Krause, Merc Rustad, Ginger Weil(m), Fade Manley
The "Advice from New Writers" panel was particularly interesting to the participants, as we had an entire conversation about it beforehand that a few of us left feeling a little like we were going to end up repeating ourselves-- and then the actual panel was entirely different.
On the whole, I would recommend the con-- it's single track programming and I pretty much managed to get to everything, thanks to grauwulf's dedicated child-wrangling. It stayed pretty well in the range of interesting rather than done to death or cringe-worthy which puts it all in the top quarter or so of con panels I've been to overall.
(In notes to self, however, I think I have hit the point where further listening to other people talk about either revisions or co-writing constitutes cat waxing.)
There is also a long list of things I find I cannot recommend, beginning with the Dollar car rental at the Minneapolis airport and ending with taking a stuffy-nosed child who has already disgorged one set of half-digested pretzel and carrot bits upon her other parent onto an airplane at bedtime. (Note to other parents-- if your child sucks on fingers/thumb, this is a behavior to encourage through pressure changes. I have no idea why I didn't think of this until after she sorted it out for herself.)
Would do again, probably not until the child is a bit older and less Mommy-dependent. Not sure how WFC is going to go, but five months from now is another world, doesn't involve airplanes, and there wasn't any plan to take family along for that one.
Xposty from dreamwidth.