Yeah, Write

To inaugurate this blog, I did a 12-post recap of the 2008 High-Voltage ConFusion F/SF convention. To make it easier to find the tasty bits, I’ve assembled a table of contents with teasers for each of the posts. Enjoy!

• Thank You, John Scalzi Intro post explaining how I came to go and what I liked best.
• The Dynamic Trio “Why people who live in cold climates need their heads examined and Somerset Mall doesn’t stand a chance in the pending zombie apocalypse.” John Scalzi interviews his good friends, wife-and-husband YASF¹ authors Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld.
• That Second Cup of Coffee “The Opening Ceremonies gets short shrift and why the second cup of coffee is almost always a mistake.” My caffeine-fueled chat with my favorite YA author, Scott Westerfeld.
• Originality is Overrated “Stealing Shakespeare blind and ‘the best 50’s SF of the 21st century.’” A string of publishing luminaries point out that no one creates in a vacuum and that we all stand on the shoulders of giants.
• Auteurs Starve, Performers Thrive “John Scalzi: The Good Parts Version” In which we discover that he’s not kidding about the Coke Zero, as well as many other “good parts”.
• The Sun Kisses Karl Schroeder’s Cheek “Somebody finally mentions Joss Whedon on a panel and the story behind this blog’s subtitle” A discussion of setting and how it fits in SF/F.
• Money Flows Toward The Mouse “Why Shakespeare is in the public domain but Steamboat Willie isn’t, and the eighth deadly sin: pissing off your fans.” The Piracy of Fiction on the Internet and why Walt Disney’s money machine needs “protecting” but Romeo and Juliet doesn’t.
• The Reports are Highly Exaggerated “SF is not dead, but does it smell funny? Plus, the long shadow of Will Smith.” Why SF as a genre is dead if you define it narrowly enough, but thriving if you’re willing to squint a bit.
• Your Reading List for 2008 “Your reading list for 2008 and the power brokers of the 21st century: librarians.” Justine Larbalestier 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.” And then commenced a huge list of “must-read” examples.
• Winston Smith, You’re Late for Homeroom “Beer with your heroes and high school as totalitarian dystopia.” A chat with Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld where we decide that 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.
• ...And the Horse You Rode In On “Give me Shredded Mini-Wheats or give me death! 30% more fiber than your regular panel.” A hilarious, and apparently cathartic, discussion of the question: why is it, with all the histories available to build a fantasy, all we ever get is medieval Europe with dragons?

• Dinosaurs, Mammals and Cockroaches “Only the cockroaches – and John Scalzi – will survive.” Is is possible to evolve as a writer without ruining your career? Plus, John Scalzi refers to himself as a cockroach.

A number of these panels (as well as a few I missed) are now immortalized as mp3’s over at Time Traveler Show so you can go check out how well my notes stand up to the truth. Thank you, Time Traveler!

1. Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy [↩]

"Evolving as a Writer" was the second panel in a row to debate the merits of doing the same thing versus doing something different. "Gluten-Free Fantasy" talked about breaking away from an entire sub-genre -- call it "Suburbs of Middle-Earth" -- and this panel discussed breaking away from whatever you have been doing in order to grow as a writer.

First off, let me say that all four authors -- Scalzi, Sarah Zettel, Paul Melko and Jim Hines -- all agreed that it's imperative to challenge yourself and make each book better than the last. On that one aspect the answer was an undisputed "yes" in favor of evolution.

From there, it got murky.

In a certain sense, evolving means not writing variations on the same story over and over, trying new subject matter, new settings, new character types. At the same time, Scalzi and Hines are both known primarily for a single series each: Scalzi for OLD MAN'S WAR and its sequels, Hines for his goblin books. Series almost always outsell individual novels, partly because of the "contract with the reader" Scott discussed at the previous panel. When a reader picks up a book set in a continuing universe, it's because they want to spend more time with old friends, indulging in a particular kind of derring-do. It would be foolish to pretend they don't.

But does evolving require shooting the cash cow? Is Terry Pratchett -- over two dozen Discworld books and counting -- milking the cash cow and prostituting his talent for the almighty dollar? Scalzi says emphatically "no" because of how much the stories have changed over the years. Pratchett is one of my favorite writers precisely because he manages to keep the spirit of the characters intact while pushing them onward through their lives; the progression of Sam Vines being a prime example. He also uses the tropes he himself has created to deal with increasingly larger themes in recent years: communications and money and their respective roles in the evolution of society. Scalzi hit a pure note when he said "I can't criticize anybody for paying their mortgage."¹

In another sense, evolution is the process not of going different places, but going deeper into the known. Deeper and better characterization, truer and more powerful dialogue, a finer control over the reader's emotions. All of these are noble aspirations that don't require throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

So how do we do it, at a nuts-and-bolts level? The answers were as varied an idiosyncratic as the writers themselves. In fact, Sarah Zettel's advice centered around finding your own idiosyncrasies: your best method of working, your preferred topics and narrative style. Ignore the how-to books, she says, the only real way to learn to write is by doing it your way and doing it a lot. She also emphasized finding the love of the daily craft; there's a lot of mythology about legendary writers who profess to hate the act of writing, but perhaps if those writers spent a few months working in a factory they'd realize that joy is relative. It may not be rainbows and lingerie every single moment, but it sure beats driving a cab. At the same time, if you really do hate the daily process, you're going to go crazy in short order.

Paul Melko concurs. You can't live for the milestones: completed drafts, publication dates, royalty checks. They are too few and far between to sustain a life.

It's possible to lose yourself in your and other people's expectations, too. Jim Hines talked about completely missing the point when his first book was published. He thought that style -- happy, sarcastic sword-and-sorcery fantasy -- was a fluke and went back to what he thought he "should" be writing: serious, deep, moody high fantasy. When he couldn't sell it, he began to wonder if happy fantasy was actually his calling after all.

Scalzi had moderating advice on that subject. After establishing over the course of a couple books that he was "good at dialogue, smartassery and action scenes" he decided to experiment with THE SAGAN DIARIES, which had none of that but was set in the same universe as his other books. He believes it's the best thing he's every written.

Scalzi introduced a metaphor to think about evolution on a grand scale: dinosaurs, mammals and cockroaches. Dinosaurs rule the world. They are the dominant predators of the age and all the old success stories are about them. But they're going extinct because the world they were created to dominate is disappearing. Mammals are newcomers, poised to take advantage of the new climate and tools. All the new success stories are about mammals, because they're taking over the dinosaur spot at the top of the food change.

But consider the lowly cockroach. They've been here forever, and as we know they'll be the only survivors if "the big one" hits. They're disdained by both dinosaurs and mammals alike, because they're not the prettiest things around. They may do media tie-ins, work-for-hire. They may publish non-fiction because frankly, non-fiction pays. They may continue to crank out mortgage-paying works that will never make it into the hall of fame. And cockroaches do evolve, contrary to popular opinion. They shift from one food source to another with lightning speed. They're a species that will never need to read WHO MOVED MY CHEESE? On survivability alone, the cockroach is worth thinking about.

But being a cockroach -- or keeping your day job, as Sarah pointed out -- means never having to worry about keeping food on the table, which allows you to do things that ignore the market, the prevailing wisdom and the trade winds. The things that put a smile on your face when you lay your head down at night and again when you sit down at your computer.

Now it's your turn. Go write.

1. Though I doubt this applies to Pratchett much these days [↩]

"Why is it, with all the histories available to build a fantasy, all we ever get is medieval Europe with dragons?"

"Gluten-Free Fantasy" was a panel about a panel.¹ In the course of the original panel, Scott Westerfeld -- who asked the question above -- mentioned that so many of the things considered standard in modern fantasy² are not really necessary: swords, horses, a "hearty stew" bubbling in the fireplace, even bread. His final words were something along the lines of "Wheat is not necessary for fantasy."

At that point, the original con-goers rose up as one and smote the entire panel, leaving nary a soul alive. They sheathed their swords, mounted their horses and rode into the sunset in search of dragons, chomping loaves of whole-wheat bread.

My words will not express how funny this panel was; you really had to be there. What I'll try to address is the very real problem of cookie-cutter fantasy. Everybody wants to be Tolkien. Or rather, everybody wants to read Tolkien.

Karl Schroeder said, "As China Mieville will point out at virtually every dinner party, fiction is about consolation. It's about feeling good at the end of the day." Jim Frenkel called it the Fear of the New. At a certain level, fiction is comfort food. If we buy a gallon of milk that turns out to be full of California Merlot, we feel ripped off and betrayed even if we like Merlot, because that's not what we wanted when we bought it.

Scott noted that the writers with the biggest followings are not the best writers, they are the ones with the strongest "contract" with their readers. When you pick up a John Grisham book, you know you are getting a lawyer drama with lots of moral angst.³ When you pick up a Stephen King novel, you know you're getting expertly-drawn regular folks beset by malevolent evil forces with gruesome consequences.

Scott suggests that fantasy is actually more conservative than SF. We don't see dogsled fantasy or China fantasy or archipelago fantasy. What we do get is more medieval Europe with dragons.

Is this really because what fantasy readers want is "the same as last time, only different" as Patrick Nielsen Hayden put it? He quotes his wife Teresa as saying "Nobody ever walked into a bookstore looking for a 'sensitive new voice'." Patrick thinks the disconnect stems from the fact that writers are neophilic⁴ but most readers are not.

So how do we get Gluten-Free Fantasy? How do we draw from a sourcebook like A STORY AS SHARP AS A KNIFE , tapping into the wild dream-world of Native American culture, or do what Lian Hearn did with his TALES OF THE OTORI series and base a fictional world on feudal Japan?

Jim Frenkel pointed out that it's hard to sell an editor on a radically-different kind of book, and once you've gotten them on board, it's hard to sell to the public. However, once you've gotten a book "like that" out there, it becomes much easier to pitch something similar. He himself has published what he calls "some very whacked out books" because he believed so strongly in them and some of them become perennials, but it's a risky endeavor.

I brought up a concept I read in Malcolm Gladwell's fantastic THE TIPPING POINT that there are different sorts of people involved in spreading something new and helping it catch fire. You've got your early adopters, who are often socially-isolated but very tuned-in to new things. They can't spread the idea, because they don't have very many friends. The second group is what Seth Godin called "promiscuous sneezers",⁵ who don't discover new things except through their friends who are early adopters, but they evangelize what they like to gobs of people because they are the sort of people who know everybody. They are the ones who "unleash the ideavirus" as Godin phrases it. I wondered aloud whether the problem is that fantasy lacks these promiscuous sneezers.

Scott was adamant that at least in the YA genre, exactly the opposite was true. His fans are constantly online and exchanging opinions, spreading the word about new books and authors they like. The Net has given them the opportunity to be both early adopters who prefer to hang out in their room alone as well as the sneezers who have dozens or hundreds of friends: online.

Karl Schroeder says he has a list of 3 blogs he uses to find out what's cool in the world: Cory Doctorow, Tobias Buckell, and John Scalzi. He knows that if he has the three of them out there looking, he's not going to miss much.

This gives me hope for the future of Gluten-Free Fantasy. The only growth area in SF/F right now is among the young, and they're the ones who've taken their opinions into their own hands. They've taken it upon themselves to be rainmakers for their favorite books, their favorite authors. We can only hope that some of them are getting tired of Europe with dragons.

Last but not least, only the cockroaches -- and John Scalzi -- will survive.

1. I believe it was from back in 2004 [↩]
2. ie, post-Tolkien [↩]
3. With a few poor-selling exceptions [↩]
4. They actively seek out new things [↩]
5. Which got a huge laugh from the assembled [↩]

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 [↩]