Report of the last day:
I was late to my 9am panel.
Sorry. Dave Wolverton was sick, so he didn't come at all. But I made it, and it went well, I think. EUOL and L.E. Modesitt did most of the talking, which was just as well, because half the time I didn't know what they were talking about. I come from a completely different world (children's and YA as opposed to adult fantasy/SF). My noon panel was so much better, because we were all talking on the same level. And Shannon Hale was on the panel with me! Yay! She's absolutely cute. She made every panel she was on funny. Paul N. Hyde was on the panel with us, who is an expert in Tolkien, and we got to go off academically on folk and fairy tales and then Shannon brought in the writerly side of it. I enjoyed it much.
EUOL's 2:00 panel on characterization was the best panel of the weekend, I think. Very funny--Shannon Hale, Dan Willis (who writes for WotC), and Howard Taylor (who does a webcomic) were also on it. Dave Wolverton was supposed to, but was sick. Good banter back and forth, stayed on topic well. Oh, and the room was packed.
The YA panel was pretty basic, nothing I hadn't heard before. I just wish I could have been on it.
My 4:00 panel meandered, and I didn't feel like I had the ability to bring it back. They focused more on censorship than on the idea of darkness in the Harry Potter and Tolkien books, but I really didn't have a whole lot to say on the subject anyway except use good judgement when choosing books for your child, and that you have to have a certain amount of darkness to be able to have the contrasting light. I wish I had remembered to mention what Orson Scott Card said about the difference between *depicting* evil and *endorsing* it.
Anyway, that's it. My first con as a participant. It was kind of hard to disagree with people who had more experience than me, especially when it was people like L.E. Modesitt, because it was like talking apples to oranges. I was more able to disagree with Michael Collings by the end (such a very nice man) because I'd been on three panels with him, and because I was able to feel sure about what I was saying when I disagreed.
Jerry Pournell made fun of my grammar in my first panel, I forgot to mention. I misspoke and said "less" when I meant "fewer." It was an editing panel. When I speak, I'm much less careful about my grammar, but I guess it made his point. On the other hand, he said that my opinion was the only opinion that mattered about his manuscripts.
(Meaning, of course, that it's the editor who has the power to buy it, so no one else's opinion on the manuscript matters. Which I and pretty much everyone else disagreed with.)
He also took writing groups to task in every panel I saw him in--he doesn't believe they're useful. Personally, I like them when I have time to devote to writing, because it gives me a deadline to shoot for. I think there are all different kinds of writers, though. Some do better without writer's groups. Jerry's point was that sometimes writing groups are an excuse not to be writing, because the time you spend critiquing would be better spent on your own material. Michael Collings, who teaches creative writing (and children's lit, which is, I think, why he liked me so much
), said in our Friday editing for beginners panel, and I agree, that the reason why writing groups and creative writing classes work is that they teach you to write by writing and teach you to edit by editing. You learn to write by writing your own stuff, but you learn to edit your own stuff by critiquing other people's work. I think that's very true.
