First off, for housekeeping, I wanted to let everyone know I’ll be at Orycon next weekend, November 11-13. If you’re around Portland, drop by! Here’s my schedule:
Fri Nov 11 4:00:pm Gender and Writing
Gender free? Gender neutral? Stereotyping? How gender affects our writing. What writers do to write effectively in the opposite gender’s point of view, and whether they really do get away with it.
J. A. Pitts, (*)Cat Rambo, Rhiannon Held, Theresa “Darklady” Reed
Fri Nov 11 5:00:pm Designing believable archaeology and anthropology
How archaeology and anthropology can make a fictional culture more credible
(*)Rhiannon Held, Rhiannon Louve, Pat MacEwen, Patty Wells
Sat Nov 12 12:00:pm The Tolkien effect: does every rock and tree need its own language?
Constructing Technobabble – How do writers come up with all these new words? Are there tricks to inventing new names for civilizations, monetary systems, religions, etc? Why do some new words look and sound real and others sound silly?
(*)Petrea Mitchell, Alma Alexander, Rhiannon Held
Sun Nov 13 12:00:pm The unique challenges of urban fantasy
Increasingly, stories are being placed in modern times or locales but with fantasy elements to them. Whether it is wizards in Walla Walla or vampires in Vancouver, how does one effectively blend these very different elements? Alternatively, what are some examples of how NOT to accomplish this?
J. A. Pitts, (*)Devon Monk, Adrian Phoenix, Mary Robinette Kowal, Rhiannon Held
The archaeology one especially looks like it will be a ton of fun!
Now, as promised, a Con Networking for Introverts tip. It’s a short one, since the subject has been covered in detail elsewhere (for example: Kay Kenyon gets it exactly right, as it comes to my own experience). In conversation with another introvert in San Diego, she really liked a mental trick I’ve been using for myself, so I thought I’d share it around.
So assume you’re a semi-serious writer. (You can insert any skill that you’ve put effort into here, I just happen to be a serious writer myself) At the beginning, there was probably a part of writing that came easily to you. For me, it was dialogue. Dialogue just flowed, and I didn’t trip over getting the voice right or making it sound natural. It was fun! Of course, my first workshop pointed out that my chapter read like a screenplay because I had the whitest of white rooms. To start putting in setting details, I had to study and sweat, and bang out something that felt unnatural, get it workshopped, and bang out something new that was only slightly better. It was a pain in the freaking ass. But now my novels have both decent dialogue and decent setting, it’s just I had to put a lot more work into teaching myself the latter.
So? you say. That’s pretty common. But here’s how it made things easier for me when networking: if you had listened to me talk about dialogue at the beginning, and you sucked at it, I might have said I just sit down and it comes. If you then sat down and waited for it to come, nothing would have happened. That’s like listening to extroverts talk about networking. They just “flip a switch!” and “go make friends!”. Trying to flip a switch probably isn’t going to help you, fellow introverts. What is going to help you is cutting yourself the same slack you would when learning a skill people realize is incremental. You don’t run a marathon the first day. You don’t introduce yourself to every editor in the hotel at your first con. You do a little, you rest, and then the next con you do a little more. And you don’t get down on yourself in your head, because you’re working on the skill, just like others before.
That helped me immensely, simply not being down on myself for having no switch to flip. Maybe it can help you!
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