I’ll be hanging out on several virtual panels this weekend with the awesome folks from Balticon.
Here’s my current schedule, which is subject to change.
Saturday 11:30am: Author Reading (Where I’ll be reading from a chapter of the upcoming novel, Burning Roads, book 1 of the Dead Man’s Run from the Car Warriors series.
Saturday 4pm: Handling the Controversial in SF/Fantasy: Is there anything that is so serious or so controversial that SF should not touch it? Jane Yolen has written fantasy set in the Holocaust, is that trivializing a sacred subject?
Saturday 5:30pm: Found Families in SFF: There’s the family you are born with and the one you build yourself into. What is the difference between a found family and a group of friends, a team, or work-collegues? What alternate family structures and relationships are found in SF / Fantasy? What works have the best and most convincing found families?
Sunday 11:30am: Is Older SFF unreadable?: Alot of newer readers say older SF/Fantasy is no longer readable. They say it these works are too slow, lacking in diversity, and full of cliches and stereotypes. Is this true? What books before 1980 hold up today and would you recommend? What makes them work today while other books don’t?
Sunday 1pm: Torturing your Characters: It has been said that the trick to writing is to find the worst possible thing to happen to your character and then see how the character responds. What is the worst thing you ever did to a character? Did you plan the response or did it emerge out of the character? What fictional characters have the worst luck (or most sadist creator(s))?
Sunday at 4pm: Are short stories better than novels? What can one form do that the other cannot? Is one form more innovative than the other? Why write stories when novels pay so much more?
#convention #balticon #fandom #scifi #fantasy #horror