Brief Notes from Chessiecon Part 3
Nov. 30th, 2014 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjAs before, an asterisk indicates a panel I was on.
Sunday's Panels
Promotion/Connecting with Readers -- A panel discussion that seemed to be aimed mostly at self-published authors. Fairly basic tips and suggestions. A plea from the audience: "Please tell me the magic formula for how to promote without being obnoxious." General agreement that there is none.
*S/he and Other Inadequate Solutions: Solving Gender Neutrality -- This was a very lively panel (if I do say so myself) covering the gamut from the many ways in which natural languages handle grammatical gender, to various approaches to creating or adapting gender-neutral pronouns and other reference, to linguistic issues in fictional gender systems, to the difficulties of trying to do top-down social engineering via language.
Creating Magic "Systems" in Fantasy -- I found this panel to be a fascinating study in how attached many fantasy writers are to a mechanistic "scientific" view of magic in worldbuilding. There was a great deal of emphasis on how your magical system must adhere to the laws of thermodynamics and that it's essential to build in unshakable cost-benefit relationships in order to avoid having "just anything" be possible. There are certainly story-structure issues if magic can accomplish enormous tasks easily, but I felt that the "rules" being promulgated would lead to a very narrow range of flavors.
Misc. -- I hadn't been able to verify in advance whether any booksellers at the con would be carrying Daughter of Mystery, so I brought a bunch of copies with the intention of hand-selling them if necessary. Friday evening I checked in with Larry Smith Books, who noted that he was out of stock at the moment and would be happy to carry them on consignment for the weekend and possible take some for stock as well. I left him eight copies and by Sunday afternoon he'd sold five of them (which, for comparison, is only one less than I sold at the Golden Crown Literary Conference back in July) and wanted to keep the remaining three as well. So that was a solid success.
The flavor of the convention is perceptibly shifting as Chessiecon, although much of the shift had started years ago. It still has that feel that Darkovercon had developed in recent years of being a cluster of not-entirely-overlapping micro-conventions all held in the same space. I'm looking forward to next year to see if the combination of Seanan McGuire and Ursula Vernon as guests of honor can bring more of a unified "center of gravity" to the various layers.
Sunday's Panels
Promotion/Connecting with Readers -- A panel discussion that seemed to be aimed mostly at self-published authors. Fairly basic tips and suggestions. A plea from the audience: "Please tell me the magic formula for how to promote without being obnoxious." General agreement that there is none.
*S/he and Other Inadequate Solutions: Solving Gender Neutrality -- This was a very lively panel (if I do say so myself) covering the gamut from the many ways in which natural languages handle grammatical gender, to various approaches to creating or adapting gender-neutral pronouns and other reference, to linguistic issues in fictional gender systems, to the difficulties of trying to do top-down social engineering via language.
Creating Magic "Systems" in Fantasy -- I found this panel to be a fascinating study in how attached many fantasy writers are to a mechanistic "scientific" view of magic in worldbuilding. There was a great deal of emphasis on how your magical system must adhere to the laws of thermodynamics and that it's essential to build in unshakable cost-benefit relationships in order to avoid having "just anything" be possible. There are certainly story-structure issues if magic can accomplish enormous tasks easily, but I felt that the "rules" being promulgated would lead to a very narrow range of flavors.
Misc. -- I hadn't been able to verify in advance whether any booksellers at the con would be carrying Daughter of Mystery, so I brought a bunch of copies with the intention of hand-selling them if necessary. Friday evening I checked in with Larry Smith Books, who noted that he was out of stock at the moment and would be happy to carry them on consignment for the weekend and possible take some for stock as well. I left him eight copies and by Sunday afternoon he'd sold five of them (which, for comparison, is only one less than I sold at the Golden Crown Literary Conference back in July) and wanted to keep the remaining three as well. So that was a solid success.
The flavor of the convention is perceptibly shifting as Chessiecon, although much of the shift had started years ago. It still has that feel that Darkovercon had developed in recent years of being a cluster of not-entirely-overlapping micro-conventions all held in the same space. I'm looking forward to next year to see if the combination of Seanan McGuire and Ursula Vernon as guests of honor can bring more of a unified "center of gravity" to the various layers.
