Wiscon Day 4 - Report 10
Jun. 22nd, 2008 09:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
julieandrewsSunday afternoon, and it was as I was leaving the transgender books panel that I noticed my first stomach bug sign. It told people to wash their hands. I'm usually pretty good about doing that, but I heeded the sign and stepped it up a notch. I fully expected to come home from the trip with a cold from being on airplanes if nothing else, but a stomach bug was not in my plans.
Anyway, after the dealer's room and art show, I went back to my room to ditch the loot. Which is the main reason to have a room in the con hotel -- loot ditching. Second reason is naps. This was also my last chance to sort out what I was going to read at our reading, if I intended to keep attending panels until then, which I did. My preparation consisted of pulling out my story, starting to read it, and marking off where good places to stop might be. I think I marked 2 stopping points.
Then I went to some panels.
Let's Build a World
M: Benjamin Rosenbaum, Doselle Young, Naomi Kritzer, Kristine Smith
Here's the panel description for this one:
"We'll start with some categories (tech level, economic system, climate, races, etc.), get ideas about each of them from the audience, select the best ideas in each category, then watch the panelists writhe as they try to figure out how to make them work together."
No one on the panel or in the audience fessed up to having written this panel description, so everyone just went with the description and winged it. They had one of those big pads of paper to write on and as we finished a sheet, it was dangled off the front of the panel table.
This panel was full of audience participation and very light on panelists being panelists. We all shouted things out in a category and then we voted on which ideas sounded good to us. It frequently left us with a lot of strange things in each category.
I couldn't tell you if it was a science fiction story or a fantasy story by the end of it. 'New weird' probably fits the best. But once all the elements of the world were in place, characters were created and an entire plot was generated. We seriously had a story all ready to go. It just needed someone to write it. Though good luck juggling all those diverse world and character elements! I couldn't have kept it all in my head while writing.
I took some notes... oh, what the heck, I'll share my notes.
* 3.5 genders - prickly, fuzzy, scaly (pouch), shiny (spam DNA filter)
* colliding islands
* robust clouds with cloudivators - pilgrimages
* fire-breathing platypi in the tunnels
* meat mantle, chocolate core
* meat volcanoes
* chlorine sea
* carnivorous plants with meat-extruding roots
* "Eat Your Face"
* mirror worms - turn into your face
* crossdressing chihuahuas as cats
* cats as ruling overlords
* chocolate as currency
* myth that all the islands will unite
This is not everything by a long shot. And remember these aren't single ideas for a story. All of those elements are supposed to be in the same world.
A volunteer in the audience took the sheets away after the panel to write up comprehensive notes. Thank you, awesome volunteer! You can see those over on the Wiscon lj.
That was the one panel I want to see repeated next year. It would be entirely new the second time around. And it was tons of fun.
For the next panel slot, I had a dilemma. S was on the Workshops panel -- the only panel I volunteered for, but I didn't make it as a panelist. I would've liked to go, but instead I chose another one, and it proved too interesting to leave and panel hop.
Publishing, Profit, Agendas, and Ideals: The Eclipse One Cover Debate
M: K Tempest Bradford, Micole Sudberg, Eileen Gunn, Jeremy Lassen
Robyn Fleming was a new addition to the panel.
Eclipse One is the first of an anthology series. It garnered attention in the blogosphere by having no women on the cover, even though half the stories inside were written by women.
Jeremy Lassen is the editor in chief of Nightshade Books, so this panel had both sides of the story. Basically he said it was a marketing decision and described what numbers they look at when choosing names for the cover. It comes down to which names have sold the most books recently. So if you're mainly a short fiction writer, you're not going to make the cover. If you were wildly popular five years ago but haven't had a book published since, you're not going to make the cover.
Micole Sudberg had a really great point and example. She said in web optimization, you can change one thing on the website and get great results from it. Readers are happier, you're getting more page views, etc. But if you take two things that individually get great results and do both of them, they may not work so well together. So collectively they were a bad change.
One facile example of this would be if you changed your background color to dark blue. Or you change your font color to dark blue. Either change, people love. Do them both together, and you make the page unreadable. Great separately. Bad collectively.
So her point was that individually each of the names that made the cover might sell books, but taken as a collective, not necessarily. As a collective, they look too male. Collectively, they're probably turning off half your audience.
Also discussed was the art of the cover. It wasn't helping matters, as it looks retro and pulpy, which makes one think white male fiction of the 50's. It also looks phallic, as it's got a rocket on it.
Sharyn November was in the audience and also spoke up at one point.
Jeremy Lassen said Eclipse Two was shaping up to have a few female names on the cover, just because of how the marketing stats worked out this time.
He was also glad of the free publicity this anthology was getting. And I have to admit it worked, because I bought Eclipse One at A Room of One's Own before this panel.
I ducked out of that panel a bit early, as I had to walk to Fair Trade coffeehouse for our reading, and I wasn't quite sure how long it would take me. Plus I wanted to be a bit early.
And I later heard some interesting things about S's Workshop panel, so now I wish I'd gone to listen to it.
Next up, we finally get to the reading. If I do a reading next year, I want it to be at the start of the con so I can get it over with.
Anyway, after the dealer's room and art show, I went back to my room to ditch the loot. Which is the main reason to have a room in the con hotel -- loot ditching. Second reason is naps. This was also my last chance to sort out what I was going to read at our reading, if I intended to keep attending panels until then, which I did. My preparation consisted of pulling out my story, starting to read it, and marking off where good places to stop might be. I think I marked 2 stopping points.
Then I went to some panels.
Let's Build a World
M: Benjamin Rosenbaum, Doselle Young, Naomi Kritzer, Kristine Smith
Here's the panel description for this one:
"We'll start with some categories (tech level, economic system, climate, races, etc.), get ideas about each of them from the audience, select the best ideas in each category, then watch the panelists writhe as they try to figure out how to make them work together."
No one on the panel or in the audience fessed up to having written this panel description, so everyone just went with the description and winged it. They had one of those big pads of paper to write on and as we finished a sheet, it was dangled off the front of the panel table.
This panel was full of audience participation and very light on panelists being panelists. We all shouted things out in a category and then we voted on which ideas sounded good to us. It frequently left us with a lot of strange things in each category.
I couldn't tell you if it was a science fiction story or a fantasy story by the end of it. 'New weird' probably fits the best. But once all the elements of the world were in place, characters were created and an entire plot was generated. We seriously had a story all ready to go. It just needed someone to write it. Though good luck juggling all those diverse world and character elements! I couldn't have kept it all in my head while writing.
I took some notes... oh, what the heck, I'll share my notes.
* 3.5 genders - prickly, fuzzy, scaly (pouch), shiny (spam DNA filter)
* colliding islands
* robust clouds with cloudivators - pilgrimages
* fire-breathing platypi in the tunnels
* meat mantle, chocolate core
* meat volcanoes
* chlorine sea
* carnivorous plants with meat-extruding roots
* "Eat Your Face"
* mirror worms - turn into your face
* crossdressing chihuahuas as cats
* cats as ruling overlords
* chocolate as currency
* myth that all the islands will unite
This is not everything by a long shot. And remember these aren't single ideas for a story. All of those elements are supposed to be in the same world.
A volunteer in the audience took the sheets away after the panel to write up comprehensive notes. Thank you, awesome volunteer! You can see those over on the Wiscon lj.
That was the one panel I want to see repeated next year. It would be entirely new the second time around. And it was tons of fun.
For the next panel slot, I had a dilemma. S was on the Workshops panel -- the only panel I volunteered for, but I didn't make it as a panelist. I would've liked to go, but instead I chose another one, and it proved too interesting to leave and panel hop.
Publishing, Profit, Agendas, and Ideals: The Eclipse One Cover Debate
M: K Tempest Bradford, Micole Sudberg, Eileen Gunn, Jeremy Lassen
Robyn Fleming was a new addition to the panel.
Eclipse One is the first of an anthology series. It garnered attention in the blogosphere by having no women on the cover, even though half the stories inside were written by women.
Jeremy Lassen is the editor in chief of Nightshade Books, so this panel had both sides of the story. Basically he said it was a marketing decision and described what numbers they look at when choosing names for the cover. It comes down to which names have sold the most books recently. So if you're mainly a short fiction writer, you're not going to make the cover. If you were wildly popular five years ago but haven't had a book published since, you're not going to make the cover.
Micole Sudberg had a really great point and example. She said in web optimization, you can change one thing on the website and get great results from it. Readers are happier, you're getting more page views, etc. But if you take two things that individually get great results and do both of them, they may not work so well together. So collectively they were a bad change.
One facile example of this would be if you changed your background color to dark blue. Or you change your font color to dark blue. Either change, people love. Do them both together, and you make the page unreadable. Great separately. Bad collectively.
So her point was that individually each of the names that made the cover might sell books, but taken as a collective, not necessarily. As a collective, they look too male. Collectively, they're probably turning off half your audience.
Also discussed was the art of the cover. It wasn't helping matters, as it looks retro and pulpy, which makes one think white male fiction of the 50's. It also looks phallic, as it's got a rocket on it.
Sharyn November was in the audience and also spoke up at one point.
Jeremy Lassen said Eclipse Two was shaping up to have a few female names on the cover, just because of how the marketing stats worked out this time.
He was also glad of the free publicity this anthology was getting. And I have to admit it worked, because I bought Eclipse One at A Room of One's Own before this panel.
I ducked out of that panel a bit early, as I had to walk to Fair Trade coffeehouse for our reading, and I wasn't quite sure how long it would take me. Plus I wanted to be a bit early.
And I later heard some interesting things about S's Workshop panel, so now I wish I'd gone to listen to it.
Next up, we finally get to the reading. If I do a reading next year, I want it to be at the start of the con so I can get it over with.