Worldcon participants

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

SATURDAY:

Saturday 9:30am: Christian Apocalyptic Fiction and SF

Saturday 11:00am: Sweat and Blisters: How Much Reality Can We Stand in, Fantasy Quests?
Why do people on quests in fantasy literature never sweat? How do you handle all the inconveniences like potty breaks, rain, bugs, rocks under your blanket, carrying enough food and water, etc.? Does it matter?

Saturday 12:00 n: What New Writers Need to Know
Having sold a few short stories or a first novel, a writer often enters that awkward age between being and nothingness. What are the best ways to approach a nascent career, and learn the ropes about promotion, copyrights, the IRS, etc. How do you move orward into the realm of name recognition? And how do you capitalize on that shiny-new SFWA membership, anyhow?

Saturday 1:00pm: What the Writer Needs to Know...
…that doesn't get in the published story. A published story has a beginning, middle, and end. But, there are events that occur before the story starts, the characters haves lives [well, not always, if the story starts with the birth of the character or before then] before and after and story, and the writer needs to know more information about people, events, geography, and history of the characters and settings, that the reader is ever going to see. Just how much does the writer need to know, and what happens when the writer doesn't know? Can it be faked, and/or what can be left out? And when it is time to trim out events and plots and themes that might be interesting to the writer and have been part of the impetus to write a story, but which turn out to be extraneous to what the publishable story is about?
OR
Saturday 1:00pm: Reinventing Genre Fantasy
With so much genre fantasy being published,, what can be done to refresh our jaded palates?
OR
Saturday 1:30pm: Breaking In
OR
Saturday 1:30pm: How to Write a Fight Scene
OR
Saturday 2:00pm: Writing the Young Female Protagonist

Saturday 3:00pm: Creativity on Demand
Your first novel took five years to craft. Now you've got a deadline and an editor breathing down your neck. How do published authors cope with the pressure of deadlines and editor/reader expectations? What tips can they share for coping with the times when your muse won't cooperate and you still need to produce ten thousand words by Friday?

Saturday 4:30pm: Clothing & Costume in Literary SF/Fantasy
What you wear determines how you move, what you can and cannot do, and where you can go. What other issues can be affected by your dress? An examination of the field.

Saturday 8:00pm: The Hugo Awards

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

SUNDAY:

Sunday 9:30am: Medieval Fantasy Literature
OR
Sunday 10:00am: How to Proof Your Own Writing: A Mini-Workshop
OR
Sunday 10:00am: Too Many Ideas?
How much stuff can you stuff in one book? Can there be too many gosh-wow-what-a-keen-thing ideas, under any circumstances? How can the trade-offs between difficult material and transparency be balanced? Can readers be given more than they can handle? How can the reluctant reader be coaxed along?
OR
Sunday 10:00am: Hiking the Enchanted Forest: Setting in Fantasy
Enchanted forests…lonely isles…magic mountains What is the importance of setting and landscape in fantasy?
OR
Sunday 10:00am: Grow Old Along With Me: Aging Your Characters
Why get stuck in adolescence? Middle age is another quest/rite of passage, and so is old age/death. How do you help your characters grow old (gracefully, or not)? How do you work with those parts of the voyage through life in your work? Or, are we being merely mercenary—to sell to an aging market segment? (Or, because we grow old, we grow old...?)

Sunday 10:30am: How to Write Cover Letters
Brevity is the key to short fiction and novel cover letters. Learn what to put in these letters, and (more importantly!) what not to put in them.
OR
Sunday 11:00am: Writers' Tools (and Desk Fetishes!)
What do writers keep on their desks? How do these objects help their writing? Professionals show-and-tell what their compositional touchstones are all about, and five hints on how to find your own particular desk fetishes.
OR
Sunday 11:00am: Achilles Needs a Heel!—The Problem With Power
Would Achilles have been interesting if he'd been truly invulnerable, or, instead or dying a tragic here would he still have been acting like a psychopathic adolescent thirty years after the Trojan War ended? Can power without vulnerabilities make an interesting story? (Has anyone succeeded?) What sorts of vulnerabilities are needed? How do you avoid the search for the armor's chink turning a story into a puzzle?

Sunday 12:00 n: Promoting a First Novel
OR
Sunday  12:00 noonAngels and Aliens, Magic and Marvels?

Sunday 1:00pm: Writers' Blocks
All about Writer's Block: writer's block is a simple concept, that the writer is stuck. Getting past it, though, can be less simple—there are lots of different possible causes—stress at work or at home, a story that the plot is getting stuck on, characters that the writer is getting bored with, etc. The ways to address writers' block differ, too. Some people talk a long walk, some garden, some go shopping, some go on-line, some work on a different story, some read a favorite book. There's no one cure—but different writers have different strategies, or sets of strategies, and those can work for other people, too.
Working through Blockages: What techniques can writers use when they hit problems with the plot, the setting, and the characters? How can a writer persuade a character to "tell" them what's bothering the character, or why the character won't cross that river the writer thinks the character needs to cross, what does a writer do after having gathered the armies to have a war, and the characters are so unobliging as to refuse to fight? How do writers write themselves out of boxes? And what other things can a writer do when stuck, besides cat vacuuming?

Sunday 2:00pm: What Fans Demand of the Writer
OR
Sunday 2:00pm: The Writer and Moral Responsibility
So, you write a book about a serial-killer-vampire, and find out that a disturbed 14-year-old kid has decided to play out that fantasy….Arrgh!!!? Talk about this and related issues. Where does the buck stop?

Sunday 3:00pm: The Catharsis of Myth, The Shock of Invention
Readercon: In writing or reading fiction, we place a high degree of value on the degree to which the plot unfolds in unexpected ways. But much of the power of myth and fairy tales derives from the way it fulfills our expectations. How do the best works of fantasy reconcile these seeming opposites?
OR
Sunday 3:00pm: Creating Gods
Gods are important characters in fantasy works from mythology to the Silmarillion to Saberhagen's Swords novels to Discworld. How does one introduce superbeings into a work without pushing the human characters into insignificance? Gods are often gigantic projections of human characteristics. Can they serve other functions as well? Additionally, why are polytheistic settings so common in fantasy? What are the sources that authors are using, and why? And why do readers find them so compelling?
OR
Sunday 3:00pm: Defending the Writing Life
or. "You're not busy, are you?" What to say when your parent, neighbor, or the mom besides you at playgroup asks, "So, are you still doing that writing stuff?" Why do writers have to defend their occupation to others? Why do our relatives and neighbors all think that because we're home we aren't really working? What great responses can you give them?

Sunday 4:30pm: Tricking Yourself Into Actually Writing

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

MONDAY:

Monday 10:00am: Writerly Friendship
What's it like to start and maintain a friendship with another writer? How about rivalry? Collaboration? What part is played by professional admiration? How about by alcohol? Can only another ink-stained wretch really understand?
OR
Monday 10:00am: Curses!
Profanity for fantasy and SF—what makes made-up profanity either work or fail. Panelists can bring in examples of both, and share their own techniques for creating profanity that has the same emotional weight that real profanity does.

Monday 11:00am: How to Create Fictionalized Characters from Historical Figures

Monday 12:00 n: What's in a Name?
How do you name your characters? This is a sweeping generalization, but naming conventions in SF tend to be conservative, at least for human characters. How many stories do we read set in distant futures or other worlds in which people have names that sound like my neighbors (two names to a customer, family name last)? This is not realistic because it assumes the continued cultural dominance of a US or Western-centered world indefinitely. The way an author handles handles says something about the assumptions underlying a story (including the root assumption that sentient creatures are individuals), while the very sound of a character's name may add to the sense of the milieu, as fantasy writers well know. How could names also include such alien possibilities as clan, hive, guild, chemicals, colors…and what else?

Monday 1:00pm: Do It Again!
The pains and pleasures, whys, wherefores, and (occasional) rewards of re-writes
OR
Monday 1:00pm: Hard Fantasy
Even in genre circles, fantasy is often dismissed by saying that we can just make it all up. The fact is that many fantasy writers go to a good deal of trouble to research and extrapolate their worlds everything from finding period maps of London to checking the etymology of period words or delving into other belief systems to give their magic a sense of reality. It is the factual underpinnings which give a good fantasy the solidity it needs. How is this best done?
OR
Monday 1:00pm: Dealing with Job/Family/Life!
Many artists and writers hold a full time job of one sort or another; learn about methods for squeezing time out for SF work. And how do you pursue "the loneliest profession" and have time for your family too?
OR
Monday 1:00pm: How Stories End
Happily ever after? Well, perhaps not always. But—what makes a satisfying ending? In fact, does a story really need to have an ending anyway? And does it need to have a "happy" ending to leave the reader feeling good? Discuss favorite endings and why they work so well.

Monday 2:00pm: What's Your Agenda?
How do you get your agendas in, and keep the story going strong? Do you really have to be a Mason to understand which character in the Magic Flute is the Catholic Church? How obvious should it be (or, does it matter?) before the story's believability is shot? How can writers (or readers?) avoid taking their preconceptions with them? Their backgrounds (life, beliefs, prejudices, obsessions) shape the tale after all, don't they?

Monday 3:00pm: Closing Ceremonies

[House of Mustard]

Man alive that sounds cool.  I wish I could afford it.  You guys will have to take a lot of notes for me!

[Gemm: Rock & Roll Star; Born to Rock]

You and me both Homsar. You and me both brother.

[EUOL]

I'll note that I've officially changed my solo panel to include myself, my agent, and my editor.  So, those who go to that will get a discussion about how to break into the market from a recently published author, the agent who handled his deal, and the editor who picked him up.  (It's the one called 'breaking in' on Saturday.)

[stacer]

That sounds nicely balanced. Good thinking.

[fuzzyoctopus]

I also am envious of those of you going.

[Master Xaio]

Would it be possible to perhaps get some of the notes you take posted up here on TWG? That could be very interesting for those of us who can't travel.

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

I intend to have a con report. in fact, the week of Sep 6 will probably be a con report each day, depending on how much interesting stuff happens. If not enough, then i'll edit it down to one day.

[Master Xaio]

Ok, thanks a heap SE

[EUOL]

Got my flight.

In BOS 8:47 am
Out BOS 2:00 pm

I tried to get times as close to yours as possible, Ookla.  We can share a cab, if you want.  I'm about an hour and a half off of you in both cases, though.

Of course, the hotel might have a shuttle.  

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

...

Man, it's pissing me off and depressing me all over again to have to post this.

But if I don't get a surge of donations from unknown sources, I can't go. So, reality being what it is. I can't go. My financial situation has taken a  major turn for the worse, and I CANNOT find the money to pay for lodging, transportation, or even food. Not to mention a lot of other things in my regular life that I need to take care of before I go.

This means I'm officially giving up my room spot. Chris and Kristy can have it and fill you up.

Yes, I know that I've already lost $180 buying the con membership. Yes I know that it would be better for my future career to go now. But my kids need to eat. I can't go.

[EUOL]

SE, that's terrible news!  I was looking forward to having you there at the con to hang out.  

I think you can transfer memberships, can't you?  Want me to email my editor and agent and see if there's someone they know who can buy yours?  Or, is there still an outside chance that you might be able to make it?

[stacer]

That's really bad SE! I hope you'll be able to work it out, or if nothing else, recoup your $180. I was also looking forward to hanging out with you again, having the first writer's group meeting in person in four years. :-) You remember, don't you, that you and I and 42 were all in the same writing group for a while?

EUOL, just so you know, cabs round here are pretty expensive. It's really not that big a deal to take public transportation.  It probably wouldn't take that much longer, either, in Boston traffic. Of course, there's dealing with suitcases without an elevator in the Blue Line station, so maybe you're better off with the cab.

Oh, and by the way, if you were in Hartford visiting your dad on Saturday night, I drove past you. Shoulda waved. We passed through Hartford on our way back to Boston from Illinois.