World Fantasy: Can Haz Lucidity?

First of all, let's put up the super fun link to Chris Cornell's pictures. It was great to see him and Sean again, and to expand our knowledge of VPers past. Our t-shirt is the best one. I'm just sayin'.

So, I'm back, and for the first time in like, four days, I'm not sleep depped. I never did make a reasonable transfer to Pacific time, and we threw daylight savings into the mix, and, well, big time yawn! The latest I stayed up any night was to hang out with VP Peeps Friday, and that was 2:30 am Iowa time.

I didn't go to any other parties. I couldn't do it. I was bumping into furniture as it was. Okay, I made it to Jay Lake's cheese party, but it was 4 in the afternoon, so that helped.

What did I think? In a nutshell, if you have business connections, or it's the only place where you can see some of your buddies, World Fantasy will be useful to you. As far as conventions go, the panels were not gripping (perhaps because the program came out late, there was little time to organize. I also have a high level of expectation, coming from academia, where panels are usually well organized.). The dealers room was fine. The readings were truly fine.

If you are a beginning writer, looking for a way to get included in the community, this is probably not for you. It's not the place to make a casual writing acquaintance, so I think a newbie might be uncomfortable there. There also isn't a great deal of writing instruction on the panels, and the topics are kind of generic. For such a large con, there's only two tracks of programming as well.

What's a newbie to do? I'd recommend Wiscon, and although I haven't tried it, I hear Readercon is also pretty good. I may well try Readercon next year as I seek out other places to meet new writers.

I think I expected World Fantasy to be more expo-ey, and it was not. I imagine it's a stop I'll make again as my writing career expands, but I'm not sure I don't do more networking on the Internet than I did there, and of course, it costs boatloads less to do it from behind this screen.

It also doesn't help that Viable Paradise was a close bonding experience, because it set the bar higher than World Fantasy could have delivered at this point.

That said, the experience was not without its merits, and I am happy to detail them. But you may not wish to read my personal adventures, so I will judiciously use the cut.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from Writer Tamago.

TrollNoWriMo: Day 2

Day One of TrollNoWriMo was all about planes.

Day Two, however, has been all about organization.

Now I know. Ten chapters. I know which characters to whack, which of the written scenes to revise, and which new scenes I have to write.

I'll spend tomorrow and Thursday working on current scenes. Then we'll start adding the new ones.

Direction. Awesome.

How are your projects going?

Catherine

Mirrored from Writer Tamago.