Yeah, Write

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. [↩]