Norwescon Day 2: Friday

This was the first real day of the con, since I arrived so late on Thursday. It was also the busiest day since they had me on 6 panels, plus I had to attend another as a DAW author. But again, I had a great time. All of the panels were well-attended, the audience was enthusiastic and participated, and in the end made each one different and fun. If you missed my previous entry, I highly recommend Norwescon if you're looking for a con to go to in the northwest.

But now, the day:

First panel was at 10am. Even though I went to bed at midnight (3am my time), my body insisted at 6am that it was actually 9am and that I'D SLEPT LATE! I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep. *sigh* So I got up, placed all the promo material (including the first of the Skewed Throne magnets I'd made), wandered to the green room, and generally checked everything out and oriented myself. The dealer's room didn't open until 11am, so I couldn't shop.

First panel: Getting That Novel Finished This panel was with CJ Cherryh, Jane Fancher, and Kat Richardson (a new author whose first urban fantasy is out in October from Roc). Pretty much we said that getting the novel finished required lots of dedication and organization. And of course writing. Lots and lots of writing. We all agreed that you had to treat it like a job or a workout and try to set up a schedule that you follow, whether you're writing good or not. If you wait for the "right moment" to write, you may never get the novel finished. This diverged into talk about being blocked and how you get around that. The best suggestion was to read what you've already written out loud, either to yourself if you have to, but preferrably to someone else, because that someone else will most likely ask you the obvious question you haven't asked yourself and that will get you around the block. In other words, they point out where the novel (or character or chapter or whatever) is going wrong because you're trying to force it into a preconceived direction, when in fact it doesn't want to go there because it shouldn't. It should go over here instead. Ice skating was also suggested (by Cherryh and Fancher) as a block breaker . . . and well as a good way to lose weight. Some other things were not to continuously revise along the way, because then you'll never get to the end. Figure out what the end IS first, then go back and revise with that ending in mind. Good panel and I think the audience enjoyed it. Most were there for Cherryh and Fancher, but I could pretend that a few were there to see me. *grin*

Second panel: DAW Books Traveling Show I wasn't really ON this panel. The editors of DAW--Betsy Wolheim and Sheila Gilbert--presented the DAW releases for 2006, starting with January and ME!! So they asked me to stand up and say something about The Skewed Throne since I was there, so I stood up and said, "It's a good book." That got a big laugh. Sheila explained about the book, then I said a few words, and then we moved on to the rest. I had to stay because they were going to hit the release of The Cracked Throne in November, but of course we started to run out of time so they blitzed through the end. They mentioned the second book, but since they'd already talked about me they moved on to some of the other authors with releases at the end of the year.

I had an hour break, in which I grabbed a quick snack in the green room and checked the promo stuff . . . only to discover that all the magnets I'd put out and vanished. So I put out new ones, did a quick run through the green room and discovered that there were only 2 booksellers. And only one of them had one of my books! And they only had one copy! So I asked if they'd want me to bring down some of the extra copies I'd brought with me, and they said fine. We worked out the pesky money details and I said I'd bring them down after my next few panels. Then I rushed to the next panel.

Third panel: Order From Chaos This was the world-building panel. Overall, it ran along the usual lines of the world-building panels: the author needs to know MUCH more about their world than actually gets to be seen in the book. The reader needs to feel that if they step off the street to the left instead of the right, there will be something there. In order to get that feeling, the writer needs to know what's there, even if what's there never gets mentioned at all. If the writer doesn't know what's there, then the reader will sense this somehow (we didn't know how) and then the suspension of disbelief is destroyed. So we talked about things the writer should think about--economy, political situations, sewers (or lack thereof), culture, religion (and the fact that it's extremely important for fantasy in particular), etc. We didn't really go indepth of any of these in particular and focused more on what I mentioned above. Irene Radford was supposed to be on this panel, but it was discovered that she was scheduled for two panels at the same time, so she went to the other panel.

Fourth panel: Whose Story Is It, Anyway? This panel was about POV--not what it is and whether you can use it correctly, but with the idea that you've already mastered POV as a writing technique and now you know why you should use one POV over another. I was of course talking about first person POV mostly, since The Skewed Throne is first person. I have written in third (the next series will be third person), but there were plenty of third person POV people on the panel already. The most interesting thing on this panel was the discussion about mixed first and third person books. I think they're really just third person POV in disguise and I don't think I'd write one (or can't see a reason why I would). The biggest outcome of the entire discussion was that there are no real rules and if you do it right, you can get away with anything. First person is good for very personal plots and character involvement, but has the restriction of only one viewpoint, which can be extremely limiting. Third person is not limited in such a way, but is much harder to make so personal. There was also some discussion of when a secondary character should be given his own viewpoint scene and to be extremely careful because the moment you give a secondary character a viewpoint scene YOU HAVE TO BRING IN ALL HIS/HER BAGGAGE. There's the threat that this secondary character may take over. So introduce as few viewpoint characters as possible.

Fifth panel: What Should Good Fantasy Do? The last panel ran over slightly so I was late getting to this one, which was bad because I was the moderator. But I recovered. The most interesting thing discussed here was the idea that good fantasy came with a "promise" made between the author and the reader in the first few chapters. This promise is not that there will be a happy ending, but that a certain thing will be resolved in some satisfying way, and that the rest of the book is about that resolution. If the author does not pull off their promise is a satisfying way, then the reader will feel the book is bad. The audience was intensly interested in this idea and how the author goes about making this promise and what it entailed, etc. I'm not sure we got any real answers for anyone, because the promise can be any of a million different things (regarding character or plot or both), could be something personal or something about the society or the world. An interesting sideline that came up was that the ever expanding "trilogy" syndrome has a problem because often the multiple books don't have their own promise, that the promise is lost. Each book in a series should have it's own smaller arc (promise) that is satisfied by the end of the book, WHILE AT THE SAME TIME furthering the promise of the larger arc of the series. The problem with alot of the (unnamed) neverending series currently out there is that one or the other of these two is lost, which is why people don't like the book or the series in the end. The author hasn't made the promise or satisfied the stated promise (either the small arc or the large one).

And then I had a small break. During this time I managed to find out that all the new magnets were gone. I put out new ones. Got the books and handed them over to the dealers in the dealers room (3 each to either bookseller; which was a mistake as I found out later). I made a few calls to let my partner and family know I had made it there alright, and to make plans with my brother who lives in Seattle for the next day.

And at this point, I'll cut this post and finish off Friday's events (still 2 more panels to go!) in the next post. Plus, I got to talk to my editor about the revisions and the next project. Look for that tomorrow (I hope).

And I hope this is informative for you guys and not just a bore. Let me know if you'd like me to focus on certain aspects more, or others less.