Ohmygosh! He's Posting!

[corvid]

So.

Today is part of the Deepavali festival (or, Diwali, as it's called in the northern parts of India). HING #2 from Tamil Nadu & HING #3 from Hyderabad brought sweets in this morning - so we had some Punjabi milk candies, rava kesari, and kir over in the office next door. HING #2 also told me how to make lassi (which sounds pretty easy to do), so maybe I can reverse-engineer the really good cardamom lassi I had at a little food stand in Philly when I was there a couple of weeks ago.

Fortunately, the Boy from Bulgaria doesn't really cook, so we've been spared the home-made borscht on the Slavic holidays.

***

Of course, what you all are really interested in, I'm sure, is the report from the World Fantasy Convention. I've been quite remiss in that, because I've been busting out a bunch of NaNoWriMo (like, another 1,727 words last night). Right now, I'm about 3 days ahead of pace, with a nice weekend coming up.

But, WFC. It was in Saratoga Springs this year, which is about 40min north of the nearest airport, in Albany, NY. And, it just so happens that fellow Guardian Camp folk twunkle, cheenah & fpc320 live in the area. I got to have dinner with them after I got in on Thursday night, and then Ms. cheenah met me for lunch on Friday, since she works in Saratoga Springs (and she had a co-worker with her who is, I swear, the bastard love-child of ladymeshel & ardoise_vide. I'm not kidding).

The Con itself was good. I finally heard the best descritption of what exactly WFC is, while I was chatting with another writer & an agent at one of the parties on Friday night. The agent said it's less of a Con than it is a four-day free-form business meeting, which really quantifies how I'd thought about it, I just hadn't been able to put it into words.

The swag was decent - but not quite the 20+ book extravaganza of Austin last year (with there being a core of about a dozen that everyone got, and then a mix-n-match of others to overstuff the swag bag). In addition to several books, a copy of F&SF, and some little teaser excerpts, they included a bottle of local sparkling spring water & a box of cookies.

The panels were uniformly well run, and only one threatened to be hijacked by an agenda monkey. The best - for sheer entertainment value, if not for actual content - was the one on SF masquerading as Fantasy and Fantasy masquerading as SF. Firstly, the panel was positively stacked. George RR Martin, Walter Jon Williams, Nancy Kress (moderating), L E Modesitt JR, & Joe Haldeman. How can you not have an intersting conversation with that crew?

Well, let me tell you how it gets better. Time? 10-11pm on Saturday night. So, we can assume that the panelists (and much of the audience) may have had a glass or two with dinner. And, there were parties, which were kicking up around 8-9pm. Plus, it was a panel on Saturday night, so why be overly serious, right? Oh - Did I mention that Haldeman appeared to be pretty well hammered???

So, Martin starts out with his "furniture theory" of fiction. A story is a story is a story, what differentiates genre from romance from mainstream is the furniture. Is your main character an elf, a frustrated single mom, or a pretentious prick of a New York City writer with writers' block? Is your story set on Mars, in a pleasant community with a silly name like Balfour's Crossing, or in the twisted world of creatively stifled New York City writers? Does your main character need to get laid, get laid, or get laid?

Well, the panelists proceeded to gleefully stretch the furniture metaphor, ad taffium, coming up with such metaphors as "A baroque table setting on an Ikea dining room set, in a new-Victorian row house, in a well-monied wing of a generation ship".

There was also a good deal of discussion of reader bias - this was actually one of the less jovial discussions (to a point...). The panel generall agreed that the challenge of using SF plot lines and devices in Fantasy, and vice versa, is that many readers come in with certain expectations. Particularly, that SF readers assume that anything, anywhere in the story that's considered mysterious, insurmountable, or unknown is a puzzle desperately needing solution - and they get really bitchy when the story's characters simply accept that their world has obstacles that they'll never overcome, so they just adapt. Williams gave an amazing example of this, with his Metropolis series, where he tried to write a fantasy novel in a world that has similar social structures and concerns (overpopulation, huge cities with all the plusses/minuses those entail, bureaucracies gone ossified, multinational entities, etc.) as our modern world. He said that many readers really assume that he's writing science fiction, but his world has that special Clarkean technology that's so advanced we find it indistinguishable from magic. He also said that readers get pissed about "The Shield", which is a big magical barrier that keeps humans bound to their planet, simply because he didn't want them to be able to explore space. Since so many fantasy readers are writing the series off as fantasy, and so many SF readers are assuming it's SF, they're terribly annoyed at the fact that his characters simply accept that the Shield is part of their world, and do absolutely nothing to defeat or circumvent it.

Fantasy readers have similar reactions to other plot elements. This led Haldeman to express the sentiment that, (and I transcribed this as quickly as I could...), "Some readers of fantasy are really f*ing dumb, and you can make a decent living by writing really f*ing dumb stories fast." If you look at Williams' Metropolis example above, though, I suppose the same could very easily be said of SF readers...

Also, while in Con Land, I got to chat briefly with _stranger_here, a fellow Madisonian who's also one of the editors of Strange Horizons, and upstart_crow, who I first met at Wiscon a couple of years ago. And, I added a few more LJ folk that I met there, that I'll hopefully see at more cons, because that would rock.

Finally, I ran into mtreiten, who lived in Madison for a while, and used to be in the same big amorphous blob of friends here. However, there were some moves involved, and deployments overseas (both of us ended up in the Balkans, but at different times), and other such and we'd lost track. Until we ran into each other again this weekend!

And now I'm back at work, and this time, I mean it - no more travelling around for Cons until I get the savings account back to being a real entity instead of a vague concept.

Comments

[kekhmet.livejournal.com]

Between Bonfire night and Diwali we get a *lot* of fireworks in London this time of year :-)

[suibhne-geilt.livejournal.com]

Maybe London needs to host WFC again, so I have a really good excuse to be over there in early November...

My Slavic pride is offended dude

[alana-scyleia.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, the Boy from Bulgaria doesn't really cook, so we've been spared the home-made borscht on the Slavic holidays

Slamming Borscht? You have never had my borscht there partner.

Re: My Slavic pride is offended dude

[suibhne-geilt.livejournal.com]

Slamming borscht may be the way to go. Anything that gets it past the taste buds with minimal contact.

;-p

[jane]

mmmmmmm... Bpal has a Diwali scent as a Yule Limited Edition. One can smell like yum all day.

also? homemade cardamom lassi is an idea made of win!! yus.

[suibhne-geilt.livejournal.com]

You may think I don't understand your crazy moon language, but I know exactly what you're trying to do. And I shall continue to resist the Borg Phoenix Assimilation Lab fandom.

[jane]

me?!? observe my Big Innocent Eyes. yus. *bats lashes*

I are pure as driven snow in January.

*wafts smellies at you*

:P

[suibhne-geilt.livejournal.com]

Bah! Going to Soap Opera to blend your own > BPAL.

^^^ Note prompt use of gas mask to resist your smellies.

[jane]

*licks your gasmask* *lick lick*

but... but... I have not the smellie genius and I appreciate talent when I smell it. yus.

wanna go see Beowulf this weekend? ^____^

[suibhne-geilt.livejournal.com]

Mmmmmaybe???

I should have some time to catch a flim in there somewhere. Tomorrow evening, perhaps? After knocking out not_eurotic's deck?

[jane]

okee. ^_^ I get off work a little bit after noonish, if y'all want me to help with the sealing too.

I go to bed now. *yawns* See you laters! Good writing! ^__^ *mwah and hearts*



also, soap opera doesn't have Mistletoe or

La Petite Mort:

Seduction, sensuality, the Act, and the aftermath all in one. The scent of warm, damp skin flushed with the glow of passion, touched by the luxuriant potency of ylang ylang and myrrh..

just sayin'

[wolfwoman.livejournal.com]

lassies in general are easy to make. i even mastered making them with fresh mangos. yums.

tha bad part of reading your post is taht there is no Indian restaurant within an hour of me. the good part, well, it was interesting.

[suibhne-geilt.livejournal.com]

Mango lassis are good, but the cardamom was sweet, sweet, green ass-kickery.

[jane]

Also:

Cardamom Lassi
Cardamom Lassi
Cardamom Lassi

Also a link to Nanee's Kitchen from whence the lassi came. yum.

okee. bed for reals!

[darkphuque.livejournal.com]

You wrote: Fortunately, the Boy from Bulgaria doesn't really cook, so we've been spared the home-made borscht on the Slavic holidays.

FWIW.. Bulgarian cuisine is very good and not all that "pan slavic" I would presume that they do eat some sort of "Beet Soup", but much of their cuisine is far more pan Balkan... It comes from the fact that they were, as were all th Balkans, under the Turks for 500 years. They have many more recipes in common with Romania, Greece and Macedonia than they do with the Russians, or other slavs.

[suibhne-geilt.livejournal.com]

In that case, the Boy from Bulgaria is certainly free to bring in as much baklava as he can carry.

:-D

[darkphuque.livejournal.com]

They do make something similar to Baklava... its a walnut Pita....
btw.. we had 3 Bosnian construction workers in the restaurant this week....

[suibhne-geilt.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, as near as I can tell, the Boy from Bulgaria subsists almost exclusively on a diet of oatmeal & boneless, skinless chicken breast. If anybody I know needs a partner with mad food skills, it's him.

Out of curiosity, since I know nothing about the restaurant you work in, do you serve up a good taste of home for visiting Bosniaks?

[tasiha.livejournal.com]

O
M
F
G

it sounds like you have the best fun ever! maybe I should drop the whole physics thing after all if it means I can go to things like WFC and just appreciate great writers and try to improve my own.