Yeah, Write

There had to be some mis-communication somewhere; the signup sheet for the "Literary Bheer" with Justine and Scott had only 2 names on it, and one of them was mine. Was I really going to be lucky enough to sit around with a keg of beer and two of my favorite authors all to myself? When I got there (a bit early) it sure looked like it, but there were a dozen people in the room once things got started. Ah, well.

It was still one of the liveliest panels of the weekend, and not just because of the beer.¹

We talked about being teenagers: about what felt important and what you could and couldn't do and how fiction ties into those issues. It was an outright confessional at times, with people baring their souls about how soul-crushing the whole thing was.

Scott has a theory to explain it: high school is a real-life totalitarian dystopia. You sit in orderly rows, have to stay quiet unless you're spoken to, a bell rings and you move like cattle to another prescribed place... Some schools even make you dress the same. I was in high school in 1984 and nobody ever made that connection, but it certainly makes sense.

So how do you connect to that as a writer? By involving the themes of adolescence, then personifying them in your characters. Everyone's individual experience was different, but many of us dealt with the same broad issues: powerlessness, confusion, self-loathing, envy, claustrophobia. We wondered if there was something wrong with us because we didn't feel as happy as everyone else seemed to be. Our parents and teachers telling us these were the best times of our lives and "just wait 'til you get to the real world" didn't help, either.

Sometimes, just letting an outcast know that they're not the only one to ever feel this way is the greatest gift you can give them.

I was a wonderful, heart-felt experience for us all. Oprah has nothing on us for emotional content.

Got a couple other book recommendations to add to the ones from the "Golden Age of YA" panel, too:

HOLES - Louis Sachar
IRONSIDE - Holly Black (third in a series that starts with TITHE)

Next up, give me Shredded Mini-Wheats or give me death! 30% more fiber than your regular panel.

1. There was only a pitcher for the lot of us [↩]

Justine threw down the gauntlet for the "Golden Age of YASF" with this statement "The most exciting books being written in SF/F today are in the YA genre. Full stop."

YA is cross-genre. YA is more experimental and risk-taking, because teenagers are more willing to experiment than their parents are. YA publishers are more willing to take a chance, allowing a wild confluence of styles to exist in a relatively concentrated section of the bookstore. In fact, Scott believes one of YA's strongest points is that its readers don't restrict themselves to genre. You never run across teenagers who say "I only read Dan Brown."

For decades, what used to be called the "teen" section was limited to what Scott refers to as "problem" books: thinly-disguised lessons on how to live your life. The Harry Potter books broke that dam open and alerted publishers that teenagers loved story as much or more than their parents, and they'd buy books of pure story by the truckload. Justine also pointed out that YA can contain both sex and swearing, it's just marketed to ages 14-17 instead of 12-17 and Scholastic Books¹ won't stock you.

They also enlightened us to the power brokers of the new century: young, heavily-networked librarians. These are usually the ones staffing the YA section of the larger libraries and they pride themselves on keeping current on everything that's going on in their genre, so they can "sell" effectively to their YA clientele. Forget promoting yourself to bookstores, Scott said, promote yourself to librarians. He and Justine have been guests of both the TLA² and the ALA³ and been welcomed with open arms. One thing the Internet has made clear is that people trust their friends recommendations a lot more than advertising and these young, hip librarians⁴ are a lot more credible than parents or teachers.

Most of the panel was devoted to reminiscing about the panelists' favorite YASF/F, so we got a flood of suggestions from the people who should know. So many, in fact, that several of us had to compare notes afterward to make sure we'd gotten them all.

And here it is... Your "to-do" list for 2008, organized by whichever panelist suggested them first:

Scott Westerfeld

• SWEETBLOOD - Pete Hautman
• SKIN HUNGER - Kathleen Duey
• FLORA SEGUNDA - Ysabeau S. Wilce
• EMMA JEAN LAZARUS FELL OUT OF A TREE - Lauren Tarshis

Suzanne Church

• THE GIVER - Lois Lowry
• BUD, NOT BUDDY - Christopher Paul Curtis
• DRAGON KEEPER - Carole Wilkinson
• PENDRAGON series - D.J. MacHale

Justine Larbalestier

• BUCKING THE SARGE - Christopher Paul Curtis
• DISREPUTABLE HISTORY OF FRANKIE LANDAU-BANKS - E. Lockhart
• THE ASTONISHING LIFE OF OCTAVIA NOTHING - M.T. Anderson
• GOSSIP GIRL series - Cecily Von Ziegesar
• Anything by Garth Nix
• A GREAT AND TERRIBLE BEAUTY / THE SWEET FAR THING - Libba Bray
• Anything by Sonya Hartnett
• HELLSING (graphic novel) - hirano/johnson/lacuna
• NARUTO (graphic novel) - Masashi Kishimoto

Peter Halasz

• HIS DARK MATERIALS (THE GOLDEN COMPASS, etc) - Philip Pullman
• DARKWING - Kenneth Oppel

Of course, Scott and Justine's books all come highly recommended. I just finished Justine's MAGIC OR MADNESS for the second time. My favorite of Scott's books is PEEPS, immediately followed by the MIDNIGHTERS series, but the UGLIES series is the most popular. Go into any YA section in the country and you'll find it staring you in the face. Lucky you.

Next up, beer with your heroes and high school as totalitarian dystopia.

1. A publishing powerhouse that sells in the schools themselves [↩]
2. Texas Library Association [↩]
3. American Library Association [↩]
4. Not an oxymoron [↩]

Is it possible for SF to be both dead and doing better than it ever has before? Apparently, yes. This panel broke new ground for the convention in that it contained a dissenting voice, in the form of Peter Halasz,¹ who stated that what is left of SF is so different from what was originally called SF, we might as well call it dead. It used to be a specific sub-culture, but now it's so mainstream there's hardly anything left of its origins. Halasz quoted legendary author/editor Lester Del Rey, saying we should take SF out of the classroom and put it back in the gutter. Del Rey believed that critiquing SF as you would mainstream literature would kill the experimenting that made it such a vital field in the early days.

As you might imagine, there were several dissenting opinions on the topic.

Justine, who did her PhD thesis on the history of gender in SF, said the earliest reference to the "death" of SF was in 1946, just after WWII ushered in an avalanche of technology. The opinion-makers of that time believed their trade was becoming passe because we were now living in the future. Jim Frenkel² says he's been hearing "the book is dead" since at least the Seventies, and points out that even if book sales decline, it's partly because how we consume our SF is changing.

Justine pointed out how many teenagers she talks to that say "I don't read" but light up when she talks about manga.³ Series like HELLSING and NARUTO are absolutely SF/F stories, but their teachers tell them "manga doesn't count" because it has pictures.

Scott pointed out that adult SF novel sales have been declining for years, but YA SF is booming. His UGLIES series alone has sold over 2 million copies, a large percentage of those to girls, never considered a large audience for SF. The old saw that "boys like rockets, girls like horses" doesn't seem to hold true in the 21st century world of SF.

In order to discuss why girls are suddenly picking up SF requires a bit of stereotyping. In the late Seventies and early Eighties, I was a prototypical SF reader: early teens, male, above-average intelligence, socially awkward and fascinated by machines. I consumed Larry Niven's "Known Space" books like manna.

But UGLIES doesn't involve socially-awkward teenage boys. Most of the main characters are girls and there's not a damsel in distress among them. They are bold, strong, opinionated women with intricate social structures based more on power than "social norms". They ride hoverboards, speak their minds and fight the system from the center of a crowd. This ain't your father's SF.

Going even further down the road, a con-goer pointed out that high-tech movies are so popular, the "SF movie" isn't even a genre anymore. Everything has visual effects and wild technology. It's become mainstream. People don't equate I, Robot or I am Legend with the SF section at their bookstores, even though both of them are based⁴ on classic works of SF.

There are problems facing the genre, no doubt. Bookstores are disappearing from malls, meaning there are fewer impulse buys because the bookstore is now a destination you have to seek out. A large share of the money kids used to spend on novels is now being spent on manga and graphic novels, which means that traditional authors feel marginalized. I've got about a dozen graphic novels in my own collection, from Alan Moore's WATCHMEN and Jeff Smith's BONE to Terry Moores's STRANGERS IN PARADISE.

But there are upsides, as well. The YA market is booming, a tsunami started by J.K. Rowling, and many SF classics that appeal to teens are being re-released in "YA" editions that are stocked in the YA section, not in SF. Orson Scott Card's ENDER'S GAME is a prime example. And those movie versions do have a positive effect on the book they're based on; at 81, Richard Matheson became a bestselling novelist for the first time when the new Will Smith movie hit the theaters, over 50 years after the novel was first published.

Next up, your reading list for 2008 and the power brokers of the 21st century: librarians.

1. Administrator for the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic [↩]
2. Senior editor at Tor Books [↩]
3. Japanese comic books [↩]
4. Very loosely; don't get me started [↩]

Piracy of Fiction on the Internet was a large question mark on my calendar. On the one hand, I didn't want to miss it, but it's such a common topic online I wasn't sure what else they could say about it in a fifty-minute panel.

Scalzi was moderating, with Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Paul Melko¹ filling the "voice of the industry" roles: Patrick for the publishers, Paul for the writers.

Paul set the tone for the panel by saying that most SF/F writers dream of being popular enough to be pirated. Patrick added Tim O'Reilly's comment about "an author's biggest threat is obscurity, not piracy." The consensus was that nobody is terribly concerned about what's happening on the Net unless a third party is profiting.

With that out of the way, we still had forty-seven minutes of a fifty-minute panel to fill.

Patrick, who has obviously done a great deal of thinking/talking about this topic, pointed out that when you're a kid and perfectly positioned to become the sort of voracious reader the publishing industry is built to serve, you're too poor to take a chance on a new book. The only way to read widely and discover all the things you find fascinating is through libraries and used bookstores. Attacking these readers like the RIAA has their listeners is long-term financial suicide. Paul quoted author Charlie Stross's two rules: 1) money flows toward the writer, and 2) don't piss off your fans.

Then they got into the copyright rant that I think we all lined up to hear...

One argument used to defend copyright is that the words making up a book are "intellectual property" and if you write a book you own that combination of words the same way you own a building you've built. When you die, your "intellectual property" should be inheritable the same way your physical property is.

Patrick offered a different view: copyright is not the same as physical property because it is technically a licensing monopoly. Someone owns the right to publish -- and profit from -- a certain creative work for a fixed period of time. Monopolies should not be inherited.

He also pointed out that copyright itself went crazy when Disney got involved. When Walt Disney died, his heirs were terrified that the money machine that was Mickey Mouse, Snow White and Cinderella² would eventually pass into the public domain, allowing anyone to sell Mickey t-shirts or make Snow White: Part Deux without giving them a kickback. Unfortunately for his heirs,³ William Shakespeare did not have the benefit of the American legal system and his works are now free to be reproduced by anyone with a dagger, a skull, and a few friends who can say "forsooth" convincingly. The greatest writer in the history of Western Civilization is in the public domain, but "Steamboat Willie" isn't. Ah, lawyers.

I then opened another can of worms which they ran out of time dealing with. My real job is computer programming, as a contractor for an international corporation. I write software that allows that company to track, control and analyze their product flow in new ways, enabling them to increase their profit. I pointed out that I do not get a percentage of that new profit; I get a weekly paycheck.

Patrick immediately jumped on this. Waitresses don't get a cut of the restaurant's profit. Computer programmers don't get a cut. Hardly anybody in the world gets a cut unless they run the company. Writers think they're really special. Merry Haskell coined an evocative phrase: the "fetishization" of the artist.

Patrick and Scalzi agreed writers should have a say "for awhile" just not forever. Scalzi dropped the final bomb when he said "When I die, I want my wife and my daughter to benefit from my work, but I don't give a shit about my grandkids."

Next up, SF is not dead, but does it smell funny? Plus, the long shadow of Will Smith.

1. author and South/Central Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America [↩]
2. The last two stolen directly from folk tales, not even invented by the Disney creative team [↩]
3. Whoever they might be; let's not open that can of worms [↩]

Some people are fascinated by the world around them. They care what kind of car you drive, where that blouse came from, how many carats that ring is. I can read LORD OF THE RINGS in about 6 hours because my eyes naturally glide by all that stuff about brooks and hollows and cloud formations. Whether Strider's boots are doeskin or dragon's hide makes absolutely no difference to my enjoyment of the story.

In fiction -- and to a large degree in life -- I'm focused on two things: people and what they're doing. Where they do it is not of much importance to me. I have no problems watching a high school play where the entire "world" is a card table and two chairs. Tell me who these people are and show me what they care about; the rest can wait to fill in those awkward pauses in conversation.

Of course, I'm not writing these books so I can read them, I'm writing them so you can read them, and you likely care whether a forest is filled with alders or spruces or sequoias. So in the spirit of doing my best to figure out how to write things that please us both, I went to the Creating Setting panel.

OK, I lied; I went to hear Karl Schroeder.

Schroeder¹ co-wrote a terrific book with Cory Doctorow called COMPLETE IDIOT'S GUIDE TO PUBLISHING SCIENCE FICTION that I've read at least a dozen times. He also writes books set in amazing locales that give me the heebie-jeebies just to think about. The "Virga" series he's working on now² takes place inside a planet-sized balloon. Where do you even start crafting a story that takes place in a zero-gee shirt-sleeve environment without a ground?

As the panel got rolling, they brought up some interesting angles on setting I hadn't considered. The first was that "setting" wasn't just the buildings and landscape, but the psychological and social milieu the story relies on for tension and conflict. In a world of telepaths, telepathy is setting the same way gravity is setting in ours.

The second was an observation by William Jones that "The sun can either kiss your cheek or glare at you. That's character talking." He expanded on it by saying if the viewpoint character tells you about "my New York" you get setting interlaced with character based on what they include/exclude and what personality they assign to it: the damn subway, these cold, hard streets... In the movie Se7en, we see the city as Morgan Freeman's character sees it, and it's not a pretty picture because the inside of Morgan Freeman's head is no longer a pretty picture.

The panelists went into an extended riff about "rigor" and internal consistency, concluding that even in hard SF it didn't have to be scientifically accurate as long as it created a believable world in the mind of the reader. Schroeder said the experience of the reader is all that matters, not how it is produced. He also said that in SF, we build worlds so people can live in them, but we build them as "backless ladies",³ giving our reader enough details to imply an entire world that the reader creates in their head.

That's when I jotted the subtitle of this blog on the next page in my notebook: the writer strikes the sparks, the reader does the burning. Books are merely tinder that set the reader on fire with story.

It doesn't matter a damn whether you've written a novel. That's just sticking signs in the ground with arrows pointing in certain directions. It doesn't become real until someone decides to start walking the path and it doesn't become complete until they reach the end. We nudge them onto a path, but they have to do all the walking. We give them signposts to show them the way toward they goal we've set for them, but if they stop walking, put the book down and don't pick it up again, the rest of the story doesn't really exist, like that hypothetical tree falling in the forest.

Of alders. Or cypress. Or whatever.

Next, why Shakespeare is in the public domain but "Steamboat Willie" isn't, and the eighth deadly sin: pissing off your fans.

1. pronounced shray-der [↩]
2. SUN OF SUNS, QUEEN OF CANDESCE [↩]
3. An Arthurian legend where a questing knight meets what looks like a real woman, until she turns her back and there's nothing inside her: she's just a shell [↩]

Does it still count as "Coffee with Toastmaster John Scalzi" if nobody drinks any? Scalzi himself is repulsed by the stuff, because any beverage you have to load with sugar and creamer just to gag down has to be evil. He guzzles Coke Zero instead, even at 10 AM.

It was an intimate gathering of about a dozen people, set around a long conference table with very comfy chairs and Scalzi in the William Randolph Hearst seat.

Scalzi's current project -- which he was playing hooky from writing to come to the convention at all -- is ZOE'S TALE, set in his OLD MAN'S WAR universe. His deadline loomed and he confessed to being a bit stressed-out about it. His editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, was actually at the convention as well, which meant he couldn't harangue Scalzi about not working on it, because obviously he wouldn't be editing it anyway. I'm sure there were meaningful looks exchanged.

It does my soul good to hear experienced writers talking about how deadlines still plague them -- Scalzi, Justine and Scott all have "I'm just trying to finish the damn book" threads on their blogs, Scott's involving a hard-drive crash in the closing moments of EXTRAS -- and not just amateurs find their muse not returning calls in the eleventh hour.

He did have a lot of things to say about being a "performer". There are and always have been two kinds of creative people: auteurs and performers. Auteurs create something, polish it for twenty years, then release it into the world as a shining, perfect pearl. Performers show up at the club every night for those twenty years and perform: trying out new material, bringing back stuff that's worked in the past, bombing, and killing.

Before the advent of copyright law early in the 20th century, auteurs starved. With nothing to prevent somebody from copying your masterwork and selling their own cheaper "version", there were no guarantees the author would even sell off all their first run copies. Songwriters didn't earn royalties when their songs were performed, unless they performed them. Shakespeare had to have plays constantly in production to keep food on the table. Dickens serialized his novels in the newspaper so he'd get a weekly paycheck.

Scalzi's blog was a topic of interest, since most of us were as familiar with it as we were with his published work. He started it several years before beginning his fiction career, mainly to get himself accustomed to daily writing. He's well-known for being the first guy to serialize a novel on his blog, then have it picked up by a traditional publisher.¹

Over the course of years the blog built a following until today it has roughly 40,000 unique visitors a day. Which is a ton to us regular folks but nothing compared to pop stars or movie stars recognized by millions. Fame for "the rest of us" has evolved beyond even Andy Warhol's 15 minutes. Nowadays, Scalzi says, everyone is famous to 15 people. Neal Stephenson² likens himself to the mayor of Des Moines, Iowa: big fish in a little pond.

Scalzi considers his blog a public performance. He keeps in mind that he's writing for an audience, not just personal entertainment. He's working, in other words.

At the same time, people meet him in person and are surprised he's "not like you are on the blog."³ People tell him they wished their children were as well-behaved as his daughter is on his blog. He says he does, too.

To steal a line from William Goldman,⁴ Scalzi's blog is "The Good Parts Version." He leaves the boring stuff, the dreary stuff out. Goldman also said⁵ "movies are about compression." You leave the blah, blah, blah out. That's why you see a cop say to his partner "I don't know, let's go ask him" and then cut immediately to them knocking on the guy's front door instead of showing them sitting in traffic or circling the block looking for a parking space.

Next up, somebody finally mentions Joss Whedon on a panel and the story behind this blog's subtitle.

1. OLD MAN'S WAR, by the aforementioned Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Tor Books [↩]
2. SNOW CRASH, CRYPTONOMICON, QUICKSILVER [↩]
3. Sometimes this is even expressed as a compliment. [↩]
4. THE PRINCESS BRIDE [↩]
5. I think it was Goldman; Google is letting me down [↩]

The goal of the panel topics seemed to be to shake things up, be controversial and have fun. Check, check, and check. The panelists themselves came up with some topics, which will likely become a tradition considering how great they were.

The first was "Originality is Overrated",¹ devoted to the concept that no one creates in a vacuum and that we all stand on the shoulders of giants. Justine pointed out that truly "original" work would be unreadable, or at least impossible for the reader to identify with. Picasso said "Bad artists copy. Great artists steal."

This panel featured the first appearance of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, editor of the SF line at Tor Books. He and his wife Teresa also run the Making Light blog/hive mind, which I read for years until embarking on my Low-Information Diet.

Patrick got things off to a rousing start by suggesting that a completely reliable tactic for getting a new project going is by stealing from Shakespeare, which is brilliant for two reasons. First, he's in the public domain.² Second, his plays are full of the themes, plots and character types that are now considered standards across the fiction world, but the actual situations are alien enough nowadays that you're unlikely to steal note-for-note and instead use the concepts to organize your own ideas.

Scott confessed that the UGLIES series is essentially a four-book, 350,000-word reworking of a Twilight Zone episode called "Number 12 Looks Just Like You". This demonstrates one of the concepts the whole panel seemed to agree on: take a familiar idea and then use it as a springboard to leap beyond. Scalzi referred to using an SF trope as "throwing the reader a lifeline." Of course, if the lifeline constitutes your entire story, you're not adding much value, are you?

Take pride in your heritage, as well; Patrick sells Scalzi's OLD MAN'S WAR as "the best 50's SF of the 21st century." Take pride even if you do it terribly: Scott believes the original Dracula story becomes better through contrast with the hundreds of hack jobs that have come since, and occasionally someone will take it to a new level. Justine submitted Scott's own PEEPS, where vampirism is due to a parasite, as a prime example; I would add Christopher Moore's BLOODSUCKING FIENDS, which I believe is the first book to use electroplating as a vampire defense.

Patrick pointed out an example where someone got it half-right and half-wrong: the movie Shaun of the Dead. The first half, where the world is being overrun by zombies and nobody notices because the zombies are urban drones who acted essentially the same when they were alive, is brilliant because of all the things it pokes fun at, while the second half is just another zombie movie.

Panelist and comic book writer Doselle Young³ described the difficulties working on existing characters with enormous folklore. His epiphany that "you can't punch everything" led him to consciously craft stories that turned familiar super-hero situations on their heads. One of his stories had a suspect dying as a result of being interrogated with Wonder Woman's magic lasso, bringing into question the morality of forced confessions.

Scalzi summed up the Prime Directive this way: steal well, don't steal thoughtlessly. Don't do what I did in college: write a 300-page apocalypse novel and have your First Reader describe it as "Just like THE STAND,⁴ only not as good." Oops.

Pick some familiar trope and consciously do something different with it: turn it on its head, contradict the central tenet, reduce it to absurdity. Attach it to a situation where the standard "story" won't work, then find a new one that does.

There were some great non-originality-related comments on this panel, as well. Justine's observation that "SF literalizes metaphors" particularly hit home for me, since my current project involves a character who literally bursts into flames when she gets angry. Doselle described his interest as "a collision between the fantastic and the personal," which to me says it all. Mainstream fiction is missing the former and lots of bad SF/F is missing the latter, but the good stuff has to have both.

Next up, John Scalzi: The Good Parts Version.

1. Applies to blog post titles, too [↩]
2. While Steamboat Willie isn't, which is a topic we'll get back to on a later panel [↩]
3. Wonder Woman, Superman, and many others [↩]
4. My favorite Stephen King book BTW [↩]

Trying to recap the Opening Ceremonies would be a disservice to the Guests of Honor and the ToastMaster. Mr. Scalzi was very entertaining and a living example why you should never be introduced by someone who knows where the bodies are buried. He did tell a story on himself that involved being licked from the nape of the neck to the forehead by a grown man in a kilt that was worth the price of admission, but you pretty much had to be there. Suffice it to say, just about all of the honorees killed.

What I can talk about is the "Dessert" that followed. All the Guests of Honor were turned loose with pastries and non-alcoholic beverages to mix with the con-goers in an informal environment.

A short aside to explain my coffee habit. I drank exactly zero cups of coffee during the first 38 years of my life, excluding the "toy coffees" from Starbucks,¹ but to fuel my recent habit of getting up at 5:45 AM to write, I started exploring the utility of "the other caffeine source".² In my experimenting, I discovered that one cup of regular coffee no more than two hours after a meal makes me essentially invulnerable to indigestion,³ allowing me to make really stupid eating decisions and get away scot-free. Imagine digging for diamonds and striking oil. End of aside.

Since I'd eaten at Burger King on the drive across the state, I drank a cup with two sugars immediately, avoiding eye-contact and reviewing my notes while I waited for my targets to appear. My cup was empty before they'd even been corralled into the meeting room; I'm not what you'd call a sipper.

There were plenty of stupid⁴ meal decisions on the pastry tables, but I resisted them to avoid the embarrassment of spraying a literary giant with tiramisu while I interrogated him/her about daily page counts.

Eventually the honorees had procured what my wife calls "a little something-something" and been descended upon by their loyal fans.

A confession: I can, with a bit of effort, be the most extroverted, outwardly-confident fellow in the room. I've given presentations to packed rooms at technical conferences and competed in Toastmasters speech competitions. One-on-one, I will talk until one of us loses consciousness.⁵ But I am by nature a high-functioning introvert.

Therefore, there was no way I was elbowing my way into a crowd to ask how much of the manuscript was "there" in first draft and how much had to be excavated during rewrites. I also wasn't going in empty-handed, so I got another cup of coffee while the crowd around Scott thinned.

Mistake #2 of the conference, right there.⁶

By the time I did finally get a chance to talk with Scott,⁷ I felt decidedly... weird. The way the crocodile in Peter Pan feels when the alarm clock it swallowed goes off: my ribcage started vibrating.

I effortlessly developed a split personality: half having a conversation with my favorite YA author, half analyzing what the hell was going on inside my chest. Our exchanges over the next five minutes went something like this:

ME: How did you manage to write, what, nine books in two years? How many hours a day do you spend writing?
MY BRAIN: What is the matter with you? Get a grip. You're acting like you're on a first date with the prom queen or something.
SCOTT: They actually came out over four years, but I wrote them over a more extended period. A thousand words a day is two-and-a-half books a year. I'm taking a year to write Leviathan.
MY BRAIN: Are your hands shaking? No. Good. Maybe he won't notice. Just don't pass out.
[...memory discontinuity...]
SCOTT: The Warrior series by Erin Hunter is great. It's for slightly younger readers, but really good. They're cats, but they have a society, they go to war...
MY BRAIN: Did you just give him your empty coffee cup to hold while you wrote that down? Are you out of your mind? Put it on the floor, you fool! What is he, your valet?

He said Leviathan, his current project, will be a trilogy with a companion guide, but I'll be buggered if I can remember what it's about, or if I even possessed the presence of mind to ask...

(From an SFFworld.com interview, 2006-09-02)

I'm working on an alternative history set in a world of advanced Edwardian biotechnology, during the first days of World War I. There are living airships and diesel-powered walkers, and the romantic leads are the son of Archduke Ferdinand and a cross-dressing young Scottish girl. It's called Leviathan and is, obviously, the first of a trilogy.

Awesome. Thank you, Google. I could have asked about steampunk and whether he gets bound up in the physics-and-math possibilities of his creations, which would be a dumb question because most of the technology in UGLIES is based around levitation, but it would have been something.

At some point, the bouncers dragged me into the corner, stuck a dunce cap on my head and gave me noogies while his handlers whisked him off to safety.⁸

Sigh. Have I mentioned yet that it was my first time being a con-goer? It's also my first time being a human being; I'm sure upon reincarnation I will always be flawless, amusing and well-scrubbed.

Next up, stealing Shakespeare blind and "the best 50's SF of the 21st century."

1. I'm always up for a Grande White Chocolate Cafe Mocha [↩]
2. The first, as any computer programmer can tell you, is Mountain Dew [↩]
3. though not
   heartburn [↩]
4. i.e., luscious [↩]
5. A fact my insomniac wife regularly uses to her advantage [↩]
6. For those of you keeping score at home, the first was not bringing cash to the sign-in [↩]
7. I did have to elbow one guy out of the way to do it; I'm not that introverted [↩]
8. OK, that's not precisely the way it happened, but he probably wished it was. [↩]

Here's a guarantee for first-time Con-goers who show up five minutes before the first panel on Friday night without registering in advance: they won't take plastic at the sign-in. Fortunately the ATM in the lobby hadn't been run dry yet, and I made the opening panel "The Dynamic Duo - Revealed!" just as Scalzi said, "OK, let's get started."

I mentioned in my first post how I found out about the event on John's blog and this panel was the primary reason I decided to go: to see John, Justine and Scott try and crack each other up. Kind of strange to lead with the main event, but I was not disappointed.

A disclaimer at this point: I chose to go mainly by first names in these posts not because "I'm on a first-name basis with these famous writer-folks cuz me and 400 other total strangers saw them at a Con once and they were really nice"¹, but because they have short, difficult-to-misspell first names. Attach no further significance to it. I also refer to John as "Scalzi" a lot because it sounds like an Italian motorcycle brand: Ducati, Bimota, Scalllllziii. You could get a speeding ticket just saying the name.

Within the first 30 seconds it's clear these three enjoy each others' company and have done this sort of thing in the past, because they start out talking about Scott's zombie obsession. Apparently one of Scott's pass-times is to examine any building he's in to see whether it would be a good stronghold in the event of a zombie apocalypse. Somerset Mall, just down the road, apparently would suck because it doesn't have a gun store. However, there are several thousand-pound "Feng Shui" balls in the atrium he decided could be ferried via elevator to the second floor and rolled down the escalators for some primo zombie-smashing entertainment.

We were (and are) in the midst of a cold snap of epic proportions in Michigan; temps down into the high single-digits with a wind chill below zero gave Justine ample excuse to declare that people who live in cold climates need their heads examined. After I made a few round-trips to my car sans coat, it was difficult to argue with her.

Eventually they got around to talking about books. If you're not familiar with their respective street-cred, here's the ADHD version. Scalzi's first published
novel was the completely-great OLD MAN'S WAR, which I believe has made Robert Heinlein sigh happily in his grave. Justine's MAGIC OR MADNESS series largely takes place in a made-up world she calls "Australia", full of strange magic, beautiful landscapes and utterly improbable language. Scott is best known for his UGLIES trilogy, which is about the Republican Party.

Gold, gold, gold. I learned more about writing in that first hour than I had in the previous year.²

Scalzi proposed that YA (fiction aimed at 12-17 year-olds) is the prime driver of SF/F in general. He points out that almost anytime you ask someone "what was the first SF you ever read?" they name one of the classic Heinlein juveniles.³ Scott phrased it as "the hand the rocks the cradle rules the world."

There was some discussion about how and why to do this thing called YA. Scott and Justine put it down to the emphasis on pure story, Harry Potter being a prime example. Justine emphasized that "We love J.K. Rowling" not just for the story, but as Scott puts it "she made it cool to be seen carrying around a big honkin' book."

And it's easier to sell books when you're dealing with teens, too. They talk to each other -- face to face and online -- about the stuff they like. They push books on each other the way no adult can. The swarms of responses on their author blogs is a testament to it. When I asked if they spent a lot of time around teens to stay in touch with their audience, Scott said it would be harder to about teenage rebellion if they had teenagers, because the rebellion would be against him! At the same time, whenever he does need to "touch base" he can go on the forums at scottwesterfeld.com and say, "hey, anybody out there know about...?"

As an aside, Justine referred several times during the panel to posts on her blog aimed at beginning writers, which I made a note to check out. She wrote them after being awed at how many members of her fan club were writing books of their own -- some as young as ten -- and they're terrific. How to write a novel and How to rewrite are perfect places to start. Thanks for paying it forward, Justine.

Next up, the Opening Ceremonies gets short shrift and why the second cup of coffee is almost always a mistake.

1. Which they were, without exception [↩]
2. This was true of almost every panel I sat in on, as you'll see [↩]
3. Tunnel in the Sky, in my case. [↩]

Everything that follows is in some sense John Scalzi's fault. From what I understand, many conversations in SF/F start with those words, but in this case it's not a condemnation, it's a thank you.

I stumbled across his post detailing his schedule for High Voltage ConFusion while I was deciding whether or not to subscribe to his blog.¹ I'd never been to a con, didn't know much about them, and had always assumed they took place in locales more glamorous (and warm) than Grand Rapids, where I live, or Detroit, where I travel regularly.

But I was wrong, it was soon, and it was within my budget, especially when I elected to swallow my pride and crash in my parents' spare room. Since I'm pushing forty, this took several gulps, but I'm committed to my craft. So thank you, John Scalzi (or John Scalvi, for reasons I'll clarify later).

I told myself to keep my expectations low. I had no idea what to expect, except that Scalzi and other luminaries in the field (to wit, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Justine Larbalestier, Scott Westerfeld, and Karl Schroeder) would be attending and I was dying hear what they all had to say about SF/F, in particular YA (young adult) SF/F.²

The panel topics themselves (some suggested by the authors themselves) were worth the price of admission. The drool-worthy ones included:

• The Dynamic Duo Revealed! (Justine Larbalestier & Scott Westerfeld, hosted by John Scalzi)
• Originality is Overrated (Scalzi, Larbalestier, Westerfeld, Patrick Nielsen Hayden)
• SF isn't Dead (all of the above)
• The Golden Age of YA SF (also all of the above)
• Piracy on the Internet (Scalzi, Nielsen Hayden)
• Gluten-Free Fantasy (Scalzi, Larbalestier, Westerfeld, Karl Schroeder)
• Evolving as a Writer (Scalzi)

I also missed Sending Clear Signals featuring Krissy Scalzi (damn you, scheduling gods) which focused on how to tell whether or not another geek finds you attractive/repulsive in a social setting, which is academic to me as a happily-married father of two, but I'm sure was hilarious.

In the end, I took 25 pages of notes and learned such an unbelievable amount it seemed a crime to keep it to myself. This is the first in a series of posts detailing the arguments, epiphanies and inside jokes from my time at the con, in the order I experienced them.³

First up, why people who live in cold climates need their heads examined and Somerset Mall doesn't stand a chance in the pending zombie apocalypse.

1. I did subscribe: so much for keeping the reader in suspense [↩]
2. The author pauses to scrub his lips with a Wet Wipe... they seem to have accumulated a layer of pungent brown matter from somewhere [↩]
3. I'm not a digital recorder, so there aren't many direct quotes, but I will do my best to express my understanding of the panelist's intent at the time. [↩]