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Rainbow Con: Friday
Managed to sleep in a smidge and still hit the hotel's fitness center before my first panel. (For short vacations, I generally give myself time off from the gym. But for what's basically 2 weeks, that would be a lot of slacking.)
11am panel participant in "Foreshadowing, Red Herrings, and Chekhov's Gun" -- Nice lively discussion of the how and why. The purposes of foreshadowing and misdirection in different genres, the ways tropes can be used and subverted. I had a chance to do an illustrated demonstration of my "nailing the octopus to the wall" metaphor with sound effects and gestures. [Note: it is not quite as hilarious as my demonstration of squid screwing, but shares the presence of flailing tentacles.]
Light lunch (smoothie) since I'd just barely had breakfast. Found company for both by virtue of imposing myself on someone who was sitting alone.
1pm attended "Crossing Genres in Fiction" which covered examples of layered genres/categories and they ways they complicate marketing and reader expectations. Ran into one of those cultural gap things where one of the panelists asked, quite sincerely, "Are there any publishers that actually specialize in f/f fiction?" Somehow, I ended up contributing (from the audience) a brief social history of lesbian publishing.
I took a break after this to hang out in the lobby working on my laptop and had an interesting follow-up conversation to the lesbian publishing comment.
4pm panel participant for "Women in Fiction", which was reasonably attended despite having been one of several programming items inadvertently cut from the program book. The panel description was "Women in science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, and other genres are oftentimes overshadowed by the men. Discuss how the landscape was, is, and how it's changing." which some panelists interpreted as talking about authors and some about characters, so we covered both. Opening remarks included pointing out that a false framing of a topic can reinforce myths: by presupposing that "women…are overshadowed by the men" it can be hard to escape a defensive position. I contributed some lists of "Yes, women have been writing sff/horror all along". We all talked about how tired we are of the phrase "strong female characters". There was a side discussion of how to create complex, "real" female characters in m/m fiction.
5pm I dropped by the Worldbuilding Workshop, but it looked like it was more of a "beginning worldbuilding" so I figured better to leave more room for others. Took in the rest of a set of readings.
I wasn't sure who else might be skipping the evening dinner-and-a-drag-show event and so hadn't made any dinner connections in advance. So I took a table in the cafe and nursed a cocktail for a while, making eye contact with everyone from the convention that came in. Alas, nothing in the way of company turned up, even when mine was the last table with open space, so I ate dinner alone and then retired to my room. (The evening programming is, once again, in the "adult" category, which isn't my thing.)
11am panel participant in "Foreshadowing, Red Herrings, and Chekhov's Gun" -- Nice lively discussion of the how and why. The purposes of foreshadowing and misdirection in different genres, the ways tropes can be used and subverted. I had a chance to do an illustrated demonstration of my "nailing the octopus to the wall" metaphor with sound effects and gestures. [Note: it is not quite as hilarious as my demonstration of squid screwing, but shares the presence of flailing tentacles.]
Light lunch (smoothie) since I'd just barely had breakfast. Found company for both by virtue of imposing myself on someone who was sitting alone.
1pm attended "Crossing Genres in Fiction" which covered examples of layered genres/categories and they ways they complicate marketing and reader expectations. Ran into one of those cultural gap things where one of the panelists asked, quite sincerely, "Are there any publishers that actually specialize in f/f fiction?" Somehow, I ended up contributing (from the audience) a brief social history of lesbian publishing.
I took a break after this to hang out in the lobby working on my laptop and had an interesting follow-up conversation to the lesbian publishing comment.
4pm panel participant for "Women in Fiction", which was reasonably attended despite having been one of several programming items inadvertently cut from the program book. The panel description was "Women in science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, and other genres are oftentimes overshadowed by the men. Discuss how the landscape was, is, and how it's changing." which some panelists interpreted as talking about authors and some about characters, so we covered both. Opening remarks included pointing out that a false framing of a topic can reinforce myths: by presupposing that "women…are overshadowed by the men" it can be hard to escape a defensive position. I contributed some lists of "Yes, women have been writing sff/horror all along". We all talked about how tired we are of the phrase "strong female characters". There was a side discussion of how to create complex, "real" female characters in m/m fiction.
5pm I dropped by the Worldbuilding Workshop, but it looked like it was more of a "beginning worldbuilding" so I figured better to leave more room for others. Took in the rest of a set of readings.
I wasn't sure who else might be skipping the evening dinner-and-a-drag-show event and so hadn't made any dinner connections in advance. So I took a table in the cafe and nursed a cocktail for a while, making eye contact with everyone from the convention that came in. Alas, nothing in the way of company turned up, even when mine was the last table with open space, so I ate dinner alone and then retired to my room. (The evening programming is, once again, in the "adult" category, which isn't my thing.)