I’d meant to post about Mythcon back some time ago. But now I’ve misplace the program listings, which I meant to use to describe the things I’d attended. Oh well. I’ll just say, aside from some interesting glitches regarding the location site, the conference itself went off well. Very enjoyable.
Instead, I’ll post about attending Loscon this year. The annual convention for the Los Angeles Science Fiction and Fantasy Society, it’s held Thanksgiving weekend, and draws a pretty good crowd. I’ve know about it for a long time (several of my friends attend it regularly), but I’d never gone before. I’m not sure why, other than being a cave-dwelling stuck-in-the-mud lump. But this year, two of my cohorts for the Mythcon 40 committee mentioned they’d be attending, and I was inspired to look at the programming list online. And got hooked. My friend Sherwood Smith was on a number of panels, and she offered me her guest membership (meaning I wouldn’t have to pay more than the parking). So, then I had no excuse.
Down I went to the Airport Marriott on Friday, and got myself registered. I stopped by to chat with Lisa Harrigan who was manning tablespace with information about the Mythopoeic Society and Mythcon 40. And then I began indulging in the programming.
Partly because of my efforts in getting The Scribbler’s Guide to the Land of Myth out into the marketplace, and because of wanting to apply myself even more seriously to my writing, I ended up attending a lot of programming about writing. But I didn’t mind it. Even so, one of the panels was about turning comic books to movies. That was an interesting panel discussion (Len Wein, Lee Whiteside, Marv Wolfman and the ever entertaining J. Michael Straczynski). During the Q&A part, I got in a question for which the answers were very interesting: I asked the panelists, excluding their own materials, what comic book would they really like to see as a movie? JMS very promptly said Cerebus. Marv and (I think it was) Lee both said Green Lantern. A later panel was supposedly a discussion about “Our Fascination with Evil”. The discussion itself ended up wandering around different aspects of the issue.
The Saturday programming included still more panels on various aspects of writing. I chuckled to myself that I was hooked on them right now, mainly because I’ve been procrastinating working on my own writing. And in fact, the first panel was titled “What I Do When I Should Be Writing”. I would probably have attended this anyway, but my friend Diana Gyler (Scholar Guest of Honor for Mythcon 40) was on the panel. It was fun comparing notes on what we do to avoid writing, but we also touched on how writers occasionally avoid writing because their brains are working out problems of some sort. From there I went to a panel titled “Page 119”. The panelists read page 119 of various works and then invited the attendees to make comments about the nature of the story, the quality of the writing, whether or not they’d want to know more about the story. It was actually rather fun: plus I started drawing up a list of books I’m going to have to check out. I attended an afternoon panel called “Intermediate Writing” mainly because Sherwood was on it. But the discussion was stimulating. And in the middle of it, I got inspired with an idea for an SF short story (I’ll probably write about it on LiveJournal).
After that panel, Sherwood and I and two friends of hers took ourselves upstairs to the sports bar to have something to eat. We had a fun conversation over the food, the wonderful sort of geek out that happens when you are in the company of like-minded people.
The next morning, I ran into Sherwood entering the hotel – which amused us, as we’d walked out together the night before. (Yes, I skipped church on the first Sunday of Advent! Tsk!) The first panel I attended was “How to Do Research”. And once it began, I sort of had to admit that I was something of a ringer, since I had 18 years experience researching on Jeopardy! This admission got me corralled onto the panel. But it was interesting hearing the different backgrounds people brought to their research (Barbara Hambly told a fascinating anecdote about a research trip to Istanbul). I really enjoyed it. Two panels on Fanstasy (“Fantasy – How Can It Be Good?” & “‘Realistic’ Fantasy – An Oxymoron?”) were sandwiched around one on Religion in SF books & movies. The religion panel was a very good discussion (and no holy wars broke out at all! Heh). The other two panels had some overlapping panelists, which ended up extending the discussion from the first panel into the second one. But in the latter panel, the consensus clearly became that realism of presentation, in details and character, is very important for the success of good fantasy, so the title of the panel was sort of pointless, rather than an impossibility.
All in all, I came home from the convention rather rejuvenated in my “writing spirits”, which is a very good feeling. Except, of course, that I have to get over that procrastination thing.
