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Comicon 2010 round-up and wrap-up, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday

Kevin Andrew Murphy July 26th, 2010

I’m just back from the San Diego Comicon 2010.

I had considered doing a daily blog post and update, but that way lay madness or at least sleep deprivation and less con, so I’ll just do it now.

First off, a broad generalization: This appears to be a banner year for zombies and a notable year for family togetherness, and yes, we’re talking at the same time too.

Now on to specifics, in order of occurrence, not importance. I flew down Wednesday and was picked up by my friend Albert who was my guest for the con and in turn whose house guest I was. He’d already picked up our badges and since the airport was so close to the convention center, we hopped back and I got to see the last hour of preview night, whereupon I saw simultaneously the most impressive thing I saw at the con and the least impressive thing which were one and the same. The most impressive thing was the throne of Odin from the upcoming Thor movie. It’s this grand extravaganza that looks somewhat like a giant gold sword hilt (riffing, I think, on Odin supposedly having a sword suspended over his throne a la Damocles) with amazing Norse knotwork and steps and the impression that there were supposed to be valkyries perched all over portions of it like the Rockettes. However, on the throne itself was this cheap gold lame cushion that looked like it came from a ’70s porno. My guess is that Odin is going to wear some amazing fur cape and the set designer said not to bother because no one would ever see it, but it’s also going to be seen in thousands of photos as people lined up to take their pictures in it.

Regardless, I stopped by a few booths, notably Kingdom of Loathing and Girl Genius, picking up a few item cards at the first for my in-game clanmates and saying “hi” to the Foglios at the other.  The hall then closed and Albert and I went over to the bar at the Sheraton Suites to meet up with my friend Allison Lonsdale as well as her friends J. and Mel who do the Two Lumps webcomic.  Allison gave me the CD of “Live at Lestat’s” which I’d pre-ordered many years ago–and which she was glad to finally have out–and we had a good time (apart from my garlic intolerance and the unadvertised surprise garlic in the risotto, but they brought me mammoth coconut shrimp instead, so it all worked out).

Thursday we went to the con and I went off to The Power of Myth panel, which was an author track panel moderated by Maryelizabeth Hart of Mysterious Galaxy.  The room was packed to the point of them turning people away and there were a number of interesting panelists, including my friend Seanan McGuire, and my friend and editor Esther Friesner who had been flown out for the con.  It was a very fun panel and moreover informative, with Seanan mentioning the Romany legend that a certain type of fey creature was known to steal your baking stone if you displeased it which had been modernized in her grandmother’s retelling to stealing your microwave.  Michael Scott also made mention of the fascinating and tragic detail that there were entire villages in Ireland that had lost their native folklore due to the inhabitants dying during the Potato Famine or emigrating to America.  However, when they emigrated, they brought the folklore with them.

After the panel I caught up with Esther and set up to meet with her for dinner.  I then looked at the program guide and decided that there was nothing else in particular I wanted to see that day so I decided to pace the floor of the dealers room to see everything, something I hadn’t done in years since it’s the size of two and a half football fields.  But I did it.

Walking the floor made me conclude that this is the year of the zombie.  There were enormous displays for The Walking Dead, both the original comic series and the new AMC adaptation.  I was able to gather that it follows some small-time sheriff’s officer who’s injured in a shoot-out then wakes up in a hospital after the zombie plague is already in full swing, a la 28 Days, but it also has the heartwarming family angle where he’s out to track down his wife and son and rescue them from the zombies.  There were also zombies visible in the large booth for a video game called Dead Speed which appears to involve some bad-ass in motorcycle leathers, zombie card and dice games for sale from Steve Jackson Games, and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies stuff at dozens of booths.

There was also more heartwarming family stuff in the form of No Ordinary Family which postulates that somewhat dumpy looking bald guy, played by Michael Chiklis, is married to super-hot MILF Julie Benz, and they have a boy and a girl, and then they’re in a plane which is caught in some super-uber-phlebotinum storm while they’re flying, which is pretty much the same origin story as The Fantastic Four.  Michael Chiklis even played The Thing in The Fantastic Four, so it’s really not a surprise that he gets the super-strength power.  Julie Benz’s Milf gets the Flash’s superspeed power, which is also reminiscent of The Incredibles.  To be different (for certain values of different) the daughter gets telepathy and the slacker son gets super-genius calculator powers.  I’m certain it’s hearwarming but it sure looks derivative.

I then got together with Esther for dinner and we went to the Gaslamp Strip Club which is so named because you grill your own steaks, which was good and fun.  After that I linked up with Albert and we hit Extraordinary Desserts, which were beautiful but too sweet for my taste, and went to the “From Dusk Till Shaun” party being hosted at El Camino on India Street.  It was the place that had previously been The Airport Lounge and it was kind of sad to see the 60-70s “golden age of air travel” be replaced by an admittedly cool Mexican bar.  I saw my friend Storm who I hadn’t seen in a year and it was then time to call it a night.

Friday The day began with the panel I was on, again hosted by Maryelizabeth, With Great Power Come Great Stories.  I was there representing for Wild Cards, as were Carolyn Spector and surprise extra guest Paul Cornell.  The room was about two-thirds full, but would have had more people if the interminable line for ballroom 20 weren’t routinely barring access to the rest of the hall.  One of the panelists was even late because of it.  Regardless, the panel went well, and I got the closing remark, “But sometimes you need to use the insanity widget,” which Maryelizabeth then echoed as a good final line and adjourned us to the signing area.

After the signing, Carolyn and I went to The Field and had lunch, talked Wild Cards and writing in general, and had a good time, then went back to the convention center and went around the dealer’s room until my feet got too sore and I went off to see a panel and sit down.

While I would have liked to see the True Blood panel, the line for it was insane and the main point was to get off my feet.  They’d also cross-programmed it with another vampires-and-werewolves show I also like called Being Human, but as that’s from Britain and didn’t have banners over half the convention center advertising it, I assumed it would be less impacted and I could sit down immediately.  I was right.

I got in for the tail end of Teen Wolf. No, not the Teen Wolf with Back to the Future made them release it anyway, and not the cartoon version either.  Well, yeah, sort of, but it looked like with this remake, they planned to play it straight and it looked reasonably cool.

This was then followed by the panel for Falling Skies, or as I called it afterward “In Which Stephen Spielberg Phones It In.”  How do I explain it?  Let’s see….  Take War of the Worlds and file the serial numbers off (it’s in public domain, but the last version bombed, so you don’t want to be associated with that) and cross-pollinate it with some patriotism lifted from Independence Day by making your protagonist an American history professor who specializes in the Revolutionary War and is thus is filled with idealistic hope that a small band of insurgents can continually frustrate and annoy an invading army until their intergalactic homeworld eventually suffers an economic collapse and the funding for the invasion of earth is yanked.  Or something like that.  This role is being played by Noah Wylie, an actor I usually enjoy and who was very earnestly trying to sell his new series, but the story about his character’s wife being dead, two of his sons being around, and the third son being kidnapped by the aliens for “mysterious purposes”?  (Hint: These “mysterious purposes” are invariably hybridizing humans with aliens, which he would know if he were a professor of pop culture and were thus genre savvy.)

Like The Walking Dead, the story picks up several months after the invasion, but instead of having the collapse of society glossed over by means of a convenient coma, we have this grave-voiced little girl telling us that the aliens “did not want to be friends” as a voice-over to crayon drawings of bug-eyed green men with gnashing razor-sharp teeth.  I’m about to wonder if the sheriff and the history professor shouldn’t team up and go deal with the zombies and the aliens together when the Q&A begins and this breathless woman asks the producer where they came up with the brilliant idea of explaining the invasion via the little girl’s drawings, and I’m thinking, um, it’s on tv tropes.org and it’s called a “nightmare fuel coloring book.” I could almost forgive the woman for the ditzy question when the producer opened his mouth and started blowing colored smoke about it being something Stephen Spielberg invented from his amazing creative genius, as opposed to it being a standard film convention of the genre, and you always give the dire exposition to little girls instead of little boys if you can help it because little girls are perceived as inherently more innocent and the contrast is automatically viewed as creepier.  Duh.

Then the panel was over and there was a short wait for Being Human to start.  Unlike most there, I had not yet illegally downloaded the whole second season to watch it, but I still enjoyed the panel and the actors.  There was also an interesting mention that while the BBC show is continuing, there will be an American version started up on the SyFy channel and the producer hoped we’d watch both so he’d get more residuals.

I then went and caught dinner with Albert and his friend Andrew, who’s also a housemate.  We hit the Dublin Square and had dinner and drinks with a blogger who was covering the con, after which we called it an early night in preparation for Saturday.

Contest #2 – 15 Days of Deverry

Constance November 7th, 2009

Open November 6 to 10.  Winner and runner-up will  be announced on November 11.

Anyone, anywhere in the world, can enter.  Note the dates!  Entries that are submitted outside these dates will not be reviewed.

Short essay (50 words or less)
Winner gets an autographed hardback DAW edition of a Deverry novel
Runner-up gets an autographed mass market paperback of a Deverry novel

1) Email your submission to deverry@deepgenre.com with the subject header Contest.   Only one entry per person – duplicate entries will be disqualified.

2) In the body of the email, put your full mailing address (snail mail).  Without that, we can’t consider your entry.

3) Write a short essay (50 words or less) in which you talk about your favorite Deverry timeline.  The essay should also be in the body of your email, not an attachment.

Your essay can be funny, serious, satirical, angry, or entirely straightforward. It’s all good. There is no hidden agenda.

4) The Deverry Contest Committee will review entries and select winners.  The winner  and runner-up will be notified by email, and can select the title they would like to have autographed.

Halloween!

Constance October 30th, 2009

 

The Ghost of Fiction Past

Madeleine Robins May 21st, 2009

I have been keyboarding old stories of mine to put up on bookviewcafe.com (you all remember bookviewcafe.com, right? fiction, free or for a nominal charge, from some of the best writers around. And me, too). I have to keyboard the stories, all of them published elsewhere, because 1) some of them were published before I had a computer, and no electronic file ever existed, or 2) I lost the electronic file when my hard disk was unexpectedly replaced last year*.

It’s been interesting.  After I get a work in print form I generally read it once, then don’t read it again unless I have to do so for some reason.  And re-typing is not just re-reading: the act triggers all the editorial impulses that are generally in play when I’m working on a final edit of a story.  Do I change stuff?  Leave it alone because it’s now an Historical Document?  Six of one and eight of the other? Generally I don’t change what I’ve already written, except when I do.  But retyping has been necessary, and I’ve learned a number of useful things during that process.   Continue Reading »

Girls and Reading

Sherwood Smith January 9th, 2009


Some savvy writers were discussing the New Yorker article about teen reading.

The usual denigrating points were made about young adult literature not being literature to those who don’t actually read it, but that’s SOP.

More of interest to me was this quote:

MISHAN: Teen-age boys don’t read, apparently. As Caitlin Flanagan writes in [Atlantic Monthly], an adolescent girl “is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.”

Not long ago I was reading some seventeenth century letters and essays that dealt with this very subject. Alarm! Girls of that tender age, just before marriage, are devouring novels! Oh noes, it’s the end of the world! Girls are also writing reams of letters to their friends about same novels. Charlotte Lennox wrote her Female Quixote to make a statement about this very danger, but it ends up too preachy for most modern readers to enjoy. Jane Austen did a far better job in the first half of Northanger Abbey when she depicts two young women talking passionately about reading–and then comes that brilliant discussion of novels, why they are unjustly (and hypocritically) condemned, whereas fictional but pompous speeches put in the mouths of historical figures are considered respectable and worthy.

My exploration into the history of female writers has led me to two conclusions: that with the rise of literacy young women especially were reading, dreaming, scribbling long letters as they found like-minded companions, writing their own poetry and novels (and fan fiction), in an effort not just to satisfy those emotional and spiritual cravings, but to better their lives. Everyone wanted a better life, for whatever definition of better fit. The reading and writing of letters et al was a way of trying out the ideas, inventing scenarios, in a pleasurable way. Certainly more pleasurable than sitting with one’s hands folded and back straight, listening to long hectoring sermons about Female Duty.

It seems to me that despite all predictions of the death of literacy that young women now, with perhaps more liberties than ever before, are still reading. Are they reading for the same reasons their foremothers did?

The article goes on about teen boys’ reading. Some maintain they don’t read, with few exceptions–with one person saying, …Those men end up joining the bourgeoisie in two ways: law school and untouched home libraries full of leather-bound Shakespeare. which I think says more about the speaker than about teen boys who read angsty and angry poetry, or listen to same in musical form.

I think the article is dead wrong to assume that boys don’t read. Speaking as a junior high and high school teacher for 20 years, I found that, as in my youth, when my male peers devoured comics (which were dismissed as trash) a lot of boys’ reading passes under authoritarian radar. Many boys read non-fiction, complicated game manuals, all kinds of material lying outside the purview of those Summer Reading Lists chockfull of earnest books deemed Good For You.

There’s another possibility, and that’s that many boys aren’t seen reading—they don’t make it a social act as do so many girls. Do boys read for different reasons than girls?

I read the Atlantic Monthly article quoted above, but except for a couple of points, found it disappointing. The writer gave a vivid example of reading to learn the “how tos” of life, but I really think that point is a given for all young folk. Her “I hate Y.A. novels; they bore me” was certainly daunting.

My feeling is that, just as tastes vary not only from person to person but in a single person over time, so does the experience of reading. Is it possible that girls are more likely to make reading a social act rather than a solitary one? A social and creative act? Because what first drew me to reading about the history of the novel, specifically the early novels of the 1600s and the rise of the salons, was how women swiftly organized themselves as soon as they found one another and a shared venue for expression.

Here are some quick impressions from my own non-academic and entirely sporadic reading.

The Renaissance brought about a revival in learning, with an especial focus on classical literature. The Renaissance contributed not just new ideas, but a new paradigm–the idea that the world could be different. From monarch to middle class, the use of classical vocabulary gave you style points–meanwhile, the content of the classics led to extrapolations in various forms of writing about what the ideal world could be . . . which in turn led to ideas about what the ideal man could be. Of course this “man” was assumed to be literate, and Castiglione exhorted in his book of social climbing, The Courtier, “He must be of noble birth.”

But though the language of classical literature was male, guess who else was reading? With the spread of wealth came leisure time, and as women had been denied much involvement in seignorial concerns, they turned to books. Women read, talked, penned reams of letters.

In the 1600s Madame Scud?ry’s novels were not just romances, but long conversations and careful details about courtly behavior. A lot of those conversations were published separately in the latter part of the century as manners manuals. They were meant to depict an ideal of civilized life–but eager young women read them in hopes of emulating those up the ranks, to better their lives.

Meanwhile, Louis XIII’s court was so uncouth that a remarkable woman named Madame Rambouillet opened her house in 1618, and for three decades the haut French courtiers and literati came to her place, instead of the king’s court, to speak about refined love, and other polite subjects. She designed the ruelles, or alcoves, which were to become a standard of most salons; at first made so that the temperature of the room could be controlled, these intimate little partial rooms appealed so strongly that other hostesses raced to make their own.

The definition of public and private was changing. To be private, and intimate, among chosen people, was also to be exclusive. Madame du Deffand, a famous salonniere of the mid-18th Century, took eighteen months to design and furnish her place, to a very specific design. No detail was deemed too trivial; the buttercup yellow silk wallpaper in her entertainment rooms was copied by most wannabe salonnieres throughout Europe.

What did all this mean? The romance is tied up in the betterment of life–the happy ending if all live up to a standard. Unfortunately, the focus here was the betterment of an exclusive society, rather than the betterment of all. Or rather, the two things conflicted, which caused rifts among women publishing in the years before the Revolution. Not surprisingly aristos wanted to hold onto power and privilege, and women born lower down on the totem pole felt that civilization ought to benefit all.

During the patriarchal nineteenth century, there was one calling where women could hold their own with men: reading—and writing.

It’s interesting to me, watching the remarkable organization of fanzine fandom (specifically fan fiction) over the past thirty years, done mostly by women. What’s going on underneath fanfic? A whole lot of stuff. Women writers exploring sexual questions is usually the first thing brought up (or mudball slung); but there is so much more going on—including the notion of transformative story. Are our attitudes toward story, ownership, creativity, and the meaning of ‘author’ changing?