All three of my written journal entries from the Con begin thusly:

Ex. Hausted.


splash_the_cat, riffalike, roane, iuliamentis and dsudis were my roomies. For semi-obvious reasons, I suppose, since we all know each other from back home. I think for the high percentage of introverts in our group, this is a good idea; rooming with home-folk is potentially less stressful on introverts than rooming with new people. Right? Sure. For my bizarre brand of introverted extraversion (extraverted introversion?), it was good--but there were points where I just had to come back to an empty room and sit really still by myself for a while before I snapped.

I spent a good deal of the first ten minutes of the Con kicking myself for not signing up under my pen-name; and then for the next 36 hours reminded myself that no one had heard of me under my pen-name anyway; and then did end up encountering people who had read my work (and who have rejected me, ie, editors) and came back around to kicking myself. Just a little.

Anyway, I made a pact with myself not to bug anyone, as much as it was feasible. 'papersky is over there! But papersky has plenty of friends and fans, and I Shall Not Bug Her." I went to her panels and looked adoringly at her, and pointed her out to anyone I was with ("OMG! That's Jo Walton!")--and largely, that's how I dealt with anyone else, except once I sort of bugged Lois McMaster Bujold, but very, very briefly. Basically, if I felt the urge to fan-girl, I restrained it. The exception being matociquala; I presumed a tiny bit on acquaintanceship.

I don't know why I made this pact with myself, exactly, but basically, as soon as I saw Elizabeth Moon at the first panel, I was thrown back into being a 13-year-old.

Somewhere along the way (in my life), I eschewed fandom. I think because I equated it with unrealistic expectations vis-a-vis authors, and I *knew* that. On a very childish level, when I was a child, I decided authors are magical creatures who understand the intracacies of my soul. Or something. And I also, at some point, decided to stop at least acting like I thought that. I guess? And, too, there were also a few off-putting interactions with fannier fans than me, too, which created a certain fear or disdain (or both). My mom actually counted a couple of fen amongst her friends for a while (she met them through... I don't even remember what) and then the husband in the couple had this semi-major psychotic break, and that's when I got leary of what seemed to be certain types of people. Unfair? Absolutely. Was I even conscious of it? No, not until this weekend.

In any case, that was thing. My plan: be restrained. Also, when you are where I am on the author hierarchy--ie, pre-first-pro-sale, and still even burgeoning semi-pro, but feel that you might be coming along Any Day Now as long as you keep working your ass off--I think you're doomed to feel like a duck out of water. I didn't want to take a professional face off and have unrestrained geekery, and at the same time, I haven't officially done anything that warrants a professional face. One foot on sea and on shore.

But, I think I navigated those waters just fine, and had a good time, anyway.

I had breakfast with mrissa and porphyrin on Sunday, and met a whole buncha OWW folks, and met them again later at the Sheraton bar, and seriously yeah, I think I'll join the OWW as soon as work-rush is over.

So, that was kind of the whole attitude schema, and there is way more I can say about specific hanging-out and random people I chatted with in random places, and so on, but I'm not sure that's particularly interesting. I wish I'd known to sign up for kaffeeklatches and beer-meets and autographings; I didn't try to attend any of these things because I assumed all of them would be full, and competition would be intense, but I found out that at least some of them were empty or nearly empty, and heck. I figure, next time (and oh, yes, there will be a next-time) I will pay more attention to such things.



These won't be super-detailed panel descriptions; I only made notes on things that particularly struck me, and fairly often, I ended up taking more notes on how it related to stories I'm writing than the general information itself. Apologies if you were expecting something objective or reliable.

Torturing Your Characters was really called something like "Shadow of the Torturer: Playing God with your Characters." I believe the panelists were Elizabeth Moon, Lois McMaster Bujold, Tamara Jones and Jim Gardener. I could go look it up, but well. I woke up at 3:30 this morning, and I'm Not Moving.

Elizabeth Moon said she tends to think she tests her characters, rather than tortures them, and is a firm believer in letting the consequences of their actions happen to her characters.

Lois said that she believes the theme of adult life is redemption; recovering from a blow and getting back up to face the test again is what it's all about. There's not much meat there if they don't have an adequate test.

Tamara Jones said that she thinks it's best to put your characters in impossible situations, where there's a wrong choice and a wrong choice; making it easy on the character makes it boring for the reader, and is also untrue.

Jim Gardiner emphasized that problems have to be serious--real problems with real consequences.

Elizabeth Moon briefly diverged into commentary about how it's not easy to write these seeming moments of torture; sometimes it forces you to look into parts of yourself that you don't quite like to admit or believe are there. She didn't really delve into that (like, what she doesn't like to believe), but I believe also that she was reacting at that point to a fan that stood up and objected quite vociferously to Paks' rape in one of the Deed books. Elizabeth was quick to point out that it's realistic for a woman in an untenable torture situation (especially in a medieval world, but really, many or most worlds) to be raped.

Lois also pointed out that since the writer is in control, that the writer can vary the tone to dampen down moments of violence (or sex, or pain) to keep them from overshadowing the rest of the work. Tonal control is important.

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Later, I went to a panel about "The Quest"--Madeleine E. Robins, James MacDonald, Mindy Klasky and Jeff VanderMeer presiding.

They discussed how quests are good structures for driving narrative (fast-paced). Classic quests include: "Who am I?" "How do I get home?" "Find the object!" --and, of course, there are allegorical quests (the search for Rhyme and Reason in The Phantom Tollbooth).

The drawbacks of the quest structure are that they're predictable, and frequently used; it's hard to "sell" the quest structure because the main character has to have something really at risk, and characterization is therefore paramount.

Discussion about anti-quests led to the suggestion that Lord of the Rings is actually a big anti-quest, since you're trying to get rid of your token, and you lose the wacky band of sidekicks along the way.

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I didn't write much down for the Seriousness or Humor in SF panel. The only panelist I wrote down was Gordon Van Gelder for some reason, but I could look up the other folks if anyone is interested. I mostly attended this because I don't quite know how to write without humor, so I was curious if that was going to seriously affect how people thought of my work.

Ultimately, though, the discussion came down to tone and length-- "The Lottery" was cited as an example of unrelentingly humorless, for obvious reasons--but it is brief. I did not stand up and point out that We Have Always Lived in the Castle (another work by Shirley Jackson) has it's fair share of humor, though it's kind of a sick humor, but other panelists certainly touched on how you've got to have a little bit of levity in a 120k word work.

"Comic relief" was never mentioned by name, which I found interesting; but most SF isn't exactly high tragedy, so maybe that's why.

The subjectivity of funny was discussed as well--GVG (and this is the only thing I actually wrote down) said that he thinks Jim Morrow(?) is a hysterically funny author. And that some people like the "hey, look at me, I'm funny" stories, and some don't. But in any case, it was agreed that funny has to be tonally proper, and has to come at the right moment. Wit can be used to undercut dramatic tension to good effect--and to bad. Specifically mentioned were the Lethal Weapon movies, with Danny Glover making one-liners during gun-fights. Most thought this was bad undercutting, though the one-liner during the gun-fight cliche was not thought to be universally bad...

I don't know. I essentially got out of that one: "I'll just keep doing what I'm doing, then. Oh, and maybe I'll go read some Jim Morrow."

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Archetypes in Fantasy: The Princess, Alone

panelists: Justine Larbalestier, Paul Witcover, Michelle West, Jo Walton and Diane Duane (see? This is where I got better about note-taking)

The first thing brought up was the Rapunzel-in-the-tower type of princess--versus the princess archetypes of say "the two or three princess sisters"--who have specific fail, fail, succeed or "one speaks diamonds, one speaks snails" arcs. I wasn't sure why the fail-fail-succeed princesses were brought up, actually--counterpoint? The Not-Princess-Alone?

Someone mentioned that an example of lone princesses that don't get mentioned much are Catholic saints.

There was much good stuff said, of course, but things really got rolling when the discussion turned to why it is that so frequently princess stories all end up the same way (the princess and the prince together in the end), and Jo Walton talked about "the weight of story"-- tradition, culture even, all work towards turning stories in a certain direction, and trying to turn that story in the other direction is a serious battle! We have cultural expectations that keep the weight of story rolling in one direction, and an author really, really has to work in order to be able to subvert all of that.

Jo Walton also pointed out that it's easier to go against the weight of story if you use humor. She also discussed how it is that women who go against the cultural expectations (ie, the princess who does not wait in the tower to be rescued) is usually an exceptional woman in some way--a woman who is unlike all the other women in society. She had to work very hard in her King's Peace books to create a world where her female characters didn't have to be exceptions to society in order to do great things--that doing great things and being a woman was something that happened in a backdrop of other women doing great things. We haven't really gotten anywhere until we have "extraordinary" women as a standard, not an exception.

Shoot, everything I wrote down is stuff she said, I think.

JW: "Women in fairy tales don't really have friends except dead mothers and animals."

This led to a flurry of discussion about E. Nesbit setting the standard for not having a princess alone, but rather as having a group of children (friends) off on an adventure together. Jo's son had also once asked why there were no books with a mum and a son off on an adventure together, and people could think of one, maybe two books where that happened, but the point was, there were almost none.

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By the time I'd attended these panels, I had six pages of notes on the whole Bitter Road/Brook story arc and half a dozen short stories.


More later...

Probably a bit later, sadly; work is going to be a giant mess this week, and probably of next week as well (probably the next three weeks, if I'd like to take a chance with realism). I'm making a pact with myself to not work more than one hour of overtime a day. We'll see how that goes.