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A newbie’s report on the World Fantasy Convention 2010

01 Nov 2010 21:40 EDT

I’ve not yet written a work of fiction that’s been published. Unless you count a shaggy-dog tale in a 1982 Grenadier Models catalog. Which you should. But over the last couple years I’ve found myself with the proverbial “lots of free time”, so I’m writing. Speculative stuff, like what I read.  Now, every industry has its community and its conventions, and this year the World Fantasy Convention took place in my home town of Columbus, Ohio. It’s a professional convention for authors, editors, publishers, artists, and the lot; not a costume-ball playing-card party. I took a plunge and attended. Good choice. Great time.

Panels and readings made up most of the con. I couldn’t attend all I that I wanted to because of local family conflicts (the one disadvantage of a con in your home town), but standouts that I saw included: “Fantasy Gun Control”, Michael Stackpole’s interview of Dennis McKiernan, the well-attended “Tension Between Art and Commerce”, “What We Swiped from Borges” (I’ve a special place in my brain for Borges, you know), “The Continued Viability of Epic Fantasy” and its sequel “Swords & Sorcery”, and the panel on the year’s best in Fantasy and Science Fiction (with Ellen Datlow, whose insights formed my reading list in the 1980′s). I also thought Mary Robinette Kowal put on a good too-short tutorial on “How to Give an Effective Reading”. With my own background in public speaking and theater, I didn’t learn anything new as such, but she does such a good job it was fun to be in the audience.

I quite enjoyed the World Fantasy Awards banquet on Sunday afternoon. The salad was great, the “CHICKEN ENTREE” was good, and the desserts were phantastick. And plentful. And rich. I had the good fortune to share my table with  James Enge, Latin geek and WFA Best Novel nominee for Blood of Ambrose; and the gang from Black Gate, John O’Neill, Howard A. Jones, and Ryan Harvey. Lotsa laffs at the table contrasted with heartfelt acceptances at the podium. These awards really matter to people: even the incomparable Gene Wolfe was overcome with emotion on accepting his Life Achievement award. Peter Straub was overcome too, but with touching silliness, or perhaps merry lunacy (after all, it was Hallowe’en).

I hung around after the banquet for the judges’ panel where they shared perspectives on the years’ awards. The real treat for me, though, was right before the panel, when I had a delightful discussion about Peter Jackson’s LOTR movies—with Dennis McKiernan. (FWIW, we agreed that Jackson’s decision to emphasize Éowyn’s story, and Miranda Otto’s portayal of the shieldmaiden, were brilliant.)

I also came away with the following books, mags, and samplers from the con. It’s likely I’ll read most, not all, and review some.

There was a juried art show featuring the works of Darrel K. Sweet, although I took a liking to Laura Reynolds‘ mixed-media pieces. The dealer’s room was tempting—and oh! the earthy scent of the old pages—but I resisted making any significant purchase. By Sunday I was exhausted and glad I had only 5 miles to drive, not a continent to traverse.  I’s so geeked that I got to go: a top-notch event at a top-notch venue and a whole lot of top two-to-three-notches folks all around me.

I suspect it’s motivated me, too, if that little itch in the back of my head means anything. Anything good, that is.

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Posted by mark beadles in Uncategorized, writing | 2 Comments » Bookmark and Share
 

Flash Fantasy

21 Sep 2010 10:47 EDT

If you enjoy flash fiction you might want to read this thing I wrote.

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Posted by derek balsam in writing | No Comments » Bookmark and Share
 

Apps I love: yWriter 5

23 Dec 2009 00:19 EDT

I started writing fiction in earnest early this spring. All authors have their own medium of choice for the creative act of writing — some longhand with fountain pen, some on legal pads, some dictating into a machine, some use a  good old typewriter, and of course, many on computer. The choice seems usually to be personal and quirky, not unlike a musician’s choice of axe. I use the computer myself since that’s what I’m most comfortable with and find it the quickest method to flow words from my brain to “paper”. 


For umpteen years, or actually more like twenty-ump years, I’ve been writing with Microsoft Word as a tool for technical documents, reports, whitepapers, standards docs, etc. I started writing fiction using Word as well; it’s fine for research, character creation, backstory, etc., but I found that it’s not really the best tool for the actual act of writing novels. It’s rather too generic and doesn’t have any awareness of the building blocks of novels: chapters, characters, scenes, and so forth.


Then in the run-up to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, where I’m Derek Balsam), I learned about yWriter. In particular, I discovered yWriter 5 (older versions are still available, but I wanted the latest) from SpaceJock Software. It’s FREE (as in beer) software written by a single developer who is also a published novelist. He wrote the tool that he wanted for writing novels.


It has a great philosophy behind it: it’s free (though I did make a donation to its author), it’s quick, it’s light. Its interface is minimalist and uncluttered, and you can customize fonts and colors to suit your preferences. What it does is provide tools to organize scenes, chapters, characters, points of view, locations, and key items; for outlining, drafting, scheduling/tracking/repoting. and storyboarding.. It also has global and local search/replace and (very important!) word counting and usage statistics. A great set of features for writing stories.


What’s almost more impressive are the features it doesn’t have. It doesn’t have an interface full of icons; it doesn’t provide complex formatting, page layout, or publishing features. It doesn’t check you grammar or try to reformat things as you type. In short, it doesn’t try to be a word processor. If you want, you can import and export stories or chunks to and from your favorite such program, but yWriter itself concentrates on the craft of writing, not of printing and display.


Two other awesome features are its text-to-speech capability (it will read you story to you) and context-sensitive highlighting of characters, locations, and items — this latter feature includes the ability to click any of these building blocks, which will bring up your own notes on each of them. Last, I’ll just mention that the program has real auto-save — it automatically saves your work so you can’t accidentally quit without saving.


Thanks to yWriter, I was able to write the first 35,000 words of my first novel in just 30 days. It’s a useful tool that does only what it needs to do and no more.

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Getting ready for NaNoWriMo

04 Oct 2009 18:52 EDT

Well, I’ve committed to the public, to my family, and to myself that this year I’ll be participating in National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo. To participate, I signed up at the web site and agreed to start writing a novel on November 1st. Every day I’ll upload my current word count, which is posted for all to see. The goal is to have at least 50,000 words written by November 30th. This is serious stuff, if you want to take it seriously.

I’ve actually been working on the background to some stories since the early summer. Finding myself with an excessive amount of free time this spring, I plunged into creation. Many people start from characters, but I’m not a character-driven person. The maxim is “write what you know:, and I don’t know much about people. Other than being one, and perhaps about being a father. I do know linguistics and astrophysics; mathematics and computing. I know music and little about poetry, some chemistry, some philosophy, and a lot about being lost. I know soldiers and cooking and evolution. So my novel will be about these things, and probably some others.

Genre comes from the Old French gendre, in turn from Latin gener- (a root of genus), finally from Classical Greek γενος, a term which Aristotle was the first to apply to writing. It still means “kind”, or “type”. The original Indo-european root form is ǵenh-, which meant “to give birth”. So what kind or type of novel am I to give birth to? Again “write what you know”. The genres of fiction to which I continually return are science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mystery. Mystery seems to me — I may be wrong here — to be a particularly tricky genre and I’m loath to try it as a starting point. So again, my novel will be somewhere in the science-fiction/fantasy/horror spectrum.

I don’t think we can avoid being influenced by our influencers; all we can hope for is to avoid plagiarizing them, I suppose. I may as well admit my influences right up front and get the comparisons out of the way. I’ve really enjoyed the following authors; observe that not all are authors of fiction.

  • JRR Tolkien
  • CS Lewis
  • Roger Zelazny
  • Larry Niven
  • Jerry Pournelle
  • Fred Saberhagen
  • HP Lovecraft
  • Arthur Conan Doyle
  • Wm Shakespeare
  • Douglas Hofstadter
  • Umberto Eco
  • Jorge Luis Borges
  • JK Rowling
  • Stephen King
  • Douglas Adams
  • Ayn Rand
  • Adam Smith
  • L Frank Baum
  • Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket)
  • Philip Pullman
  • Oliver Sacks
  • Orson Scott Card
  • Michael Crichton
  • Philip K Dick
  • Stephen J Gould
  • Richard Dawkins
  • Stephen R Donaldson
  • Frank Herbert
  • Dante Alighieri
  • Piers Anthony
  • Rex Stout
  • EE ‘Doc’ Smith
  • Kurt Vonnegut

I imagine I will be influenced by some to all of the above, and will probably outright steal from at least one. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and stealing is the sincerest form of imitation. QED.

So, gentle and not-so-gentle readers, I’ve shown you the blank, ungessoed canvas upon which I’ll be splashing words come November. I have no idea what will come out the other side.

Excelsior et citior!

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