I realize one is supposed to crawl back to one’s hotel room in the wee hours of the morning when one is attending an SF con, but that’s never been my style. It’s not even midnight yet, and here I am virtuously blogging before bed–although I did spend the last hour with Rob Sawyer and others gathered around the white Hyundai (!) piano singing. Rob insists on hearing me sing Old Man River every chance he gets, so I obliged, encoring with Me from Beauty and the Beast, an abbreviated (because I forgot one verse) version of Have Some Madeira M’Dear, and then an eclectic mixture of mostly incomplete renditions of everything from the original Star Trek theme (yes, it has lyrics–really bad ones–by Gene Roddenberry) to Bad Bad Leroy Brown. The gathering began to break up when someone with a whole book full of lyrics showed up and hijacked proceedings, even though she was the only one with the lyrics, which meant the singalong devolved into a her-singing-only concert, and she wasn’t very good.
There, glad I got THAT off my chest.
The day was a good one, jam-packed. I went down at 9 a.m. for the SF Canada breakfast; there were eight or nine members there. I had a $15 oatmeal breakfast, which reminded me why we don’t eat at the hotel restaurant for breakfast every morning when we’re here! Good conversation, in any event. Then on to my first con event, a reading by Dave Duncan and myself, which drew exactly two audience members. Add in the moderator and Dave (for me) and me (for Dave) and you had four listeners. But we gave it our best shot. Dave read from Jaguar Knights, his new King’s Blades tale, and I read the first chapter of Lost in Translation. It went over well with the limited audience. I really don’t know sometimes why I bother with readings at cons, except…well, hope springs eternal, I guess, that SOMEBODY will want to listen. And somebody usually does, but sometimes, like this morning, it’s almost literally some body.
Followed that with the first panel, on Finishing Your Novel, with fellow panelists Randy Schroeder and Minister Faust (no, that’s not his real name, but it’s a great pseudonym!). We agreed that to finish your novel, you have to write a lot of words–or something like that. OK, in more detail, we agreed that planning is essential, that stepping away from the writing process and using a different approach, whether it be additional outlining or free-form clay sculpting, is useful, and that ultimately, the source of all novelistic goodness is character–plot is built on the decisions of the characters.
Lunch–a donair at the Eau Claire Market–was followed by a panel on expanding a short story into a novel. Randy Schroeder was again on the panel, as was Andrew Weiner (whose new book, from Robert J. Sawyer books at Red Deer Press, was launched later this afternoon). We all agreed that to expand a short story into a novel, you have to write a lot of words. We also agreed that the best way to break writers block–the inability to write–is to write. Or something like that.
Seriously, we talked about many different approaches to turning short stories into novels, without really prescribing a single way that it must be done–it depends on the novelist and the short story.
Then it was 2 p.m., and time for Writers at the Improv. This is a very fun hour, run by IFWA, in which an audience member throws out a word, and six writers, divided into three teams of two each, write sentences using that word. Each team then decides which of the two sentences it generates is the “best,” and reads it out loud to the audience, who then decides which of those three sentences is the “best.” This becomes the first sentence of a “story,” which then proceeds in that matter until it is “complete,” or the world blows up, whichever comes first. (Often the two events occur simultaneously, since blowing up the world is a surefire way to end a SF story that otherwise has no ending–or no real beginning or middle, for that matter…)
I discovered I have a reputation for being very good at this, and it’s true that the past couple of years more of my sentences have made it into the final story than anyone else’s, but not this year! Only one sentence of mine made the cut, alas, although a couple of others were close. A Good Time Was Had By All, however, as the rural correspondents for the Weyburn Review used to like to say in their reports when I was a newspaper editor.
I should point out, though, that even though most of my sentences didn’t end up in the story, I was a character in the story, and a primary landmark of the “setting” was the “Tower of Willett.” So I was immortalized, in a way. (A very, very, very small way…)
That took me to my final panel of the day, at 3 p.m.; Making the Transition to Full Time. Paula Johanson, Andrew Weiner, Robert J. Sawyer and myself talked about the fright-fraught process of becoming a fulltime writer of whatever persuasion; Rob, of course, could also talk about the process of becoming a fulltime writer of SF, something none of the rest of us, alas, could speak to. Or about. (I’ve never understood that usage, “Would you like to speak to that?” No, I’d like to speak about that, thank you very much…but I digress.)
At four p.m. I came up to the room to dump my stuff, then went down to Andrew Weiner’s book launch, then came back up to collect wife and child and hie them and myself off to the Old Spaghetti Factory for a truly mediocre meal enlivened by good company. This is a ConVersion tradition. I didn’t watch Rob Sawyer to see what this newly skinny Atkinsizer chose to eat in a carb-laden house of pasta…
Then we wandered back over to the hotel briefly before heading out for a walk down to the river, which ended with coffee at an Eau Claire coffee house. We mosied back to the hotel to discover that the masquerade, which supposedly began some time before, really seemed to be not-very-far along, so we sat in on that. Alice loved it, and wanted to get close to the costumers afterward. Even the very-well-made up orcs didn’t alarm her; she knew they were simply wearing costumes. (Although personally I found their rendition of Putting on the Ritz quite…disturbing.)
And so we came back to the room, eventually settled our tired-but-still-happy child to bed, and I descended to the ConSuite, to unleash my vocal talents at Mr. Sawyer’s request.
Now to bed; BBB in the morning (Big Buffet Breakfast), followed by a 10 a.m. panel, Guest of Honor speeches (Spider Robinson, alas, though apparently doing better, is in the hospital with gastroenteritis and won’t be making an appearance at the con at all), and then two more panels to close out the day, one on The 10-Percent Solution (about editing) and one on Small Press.
After that, there’s a little girl who has been promised swimming I must attend to.
More conblogging tomorrow–or, um, later today, I guess, since the witching hour has come and gone.
G’night!
