incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

My Tweets for this panel were 50% despair at being unable to catch the names of things, as I said in the prior placeholder version of the post. However! Robert Killheffer put together this very thorough list, with links, of stuff mentioned at the panel, and gave me permission to share it! I have tried to revise my panel notes into something with minimal overlap with the document, so please do consult both.

S.A. Chakraborty, Haris Durrani, Robert Killheffer, Darcie Little Badger, Susan Matthews (leader)
Discussions of "genre classics" tend to focus mainly on modern Western works. This panel will discuss proto-genre narratives from antiquity and the pre-modern and early modern era in the world beyond Western Europe, including not only myths and legends but early authored works such as the Hamzanama (The Adventures of Amir Hamza), the Baital Pachisi (Vikram and the Vampire), and Fengshen Yanyi (The Creation of the Gods).

( Read more... )

There, that's better. Thanks again to all the panelist, and especially Robert for compiling the list.

I was really not awake for this panel and so took almost no notes; this is extremely sketchy as a result, but better than nothing.

Phenderson Clark, Greer Gilman, Victoria Janssen (leader), Kate Nepveu, Naomi Novik
Guest of Honor Naomi Novik's Temeraire books take a slow and clever approach to a common issue with alt-historical fantasy: if magic has always existed, why have historical events gone essentially the same way that they did in our magicless world? Her focus on the familiar territory of Western Europe during the Napoleonic Wars gradually broadens to include other regions that look very different. This panel will examine this and other techniques for integrating magic into history, including using the appearance or reappearance of magic as a timeline divergence point, limiting magic or paranormal entities to a particular region of the world, portraying paranormal communities or magic-users as hidden and secretive, and entirely reinventing history from the Neanderthals on up.

( what I can remember )

Annnd that's all I can remember. Feel free to comment, either if you were there or if you want to continue the conversation!

I was going to say, last one for night, and then I remembered I went to three in a row but four total for day. Whee.

Lila Garrott (leader), Bart Leib, Natalie Luhrs, Sonya Taaffe, Vinnie Tesla
Our panelists muse on books that are really bad but in an amazing way! Genevieve Valentine's term "shitmazing" may be appropriate here. What makes something both terrible and great? Are these works worth analyzing and perhaps even emulating, or do they exist simply to be enjoyed (if that's the word) on their own merits (if that's the word)?

( more tweets, getting less cleaned up as we go )

1) We are renovating our house. We had no spare bedroom and our kitchen was falling to pieces, so we are a) gut-renovating the kitchen, b) expanding the mudroom off of the kitchen to include a bathroom with a shower and enough space between the sink and toilet that people over the age of five can comfortably sit on it, and c) expanding the little room above the mudroom into an actual bedroom, rather than a small low-ceilinged room good for nothing but random storage. The new bedroom will become SteelyKid's room (she and the Pip will have closets that back on to each other now; regretfully, I declined her request for a secret door between the closets), and SteelyKid's old room will become a guest room. (For instance, Chad's parents live two hours away, regularly come up for the day to visit . . . and then go back home again the same day.)

The end result will be great. The process has been . . . interesting. Getting the loan, for instance, involved regular and literal rage headaches on my part as speaker-to-the-mortgage-people. And while our contractors are awesome, the ridiculously wet weather we've been having delayed the start of construction until mid-May (they'd hoped to start in April), and then more rain while we were on vacation led them to advance some indoor work, so we came home to find our kitchen half-gutted and couldn't figure out where anything was. (It wasn't that much stuff, because we had been moving things out in preparation, but still. I wanted to cry.)

2) Oh yeah, vacation. We went to Mexico for a week with Chad's grandmother, who took her kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids (except one grandkid + family, who couldn't make it) on a collective trip to a fancy all-inclusive resort. The kids had a great time with their Midwest cousins, who they'd never met, and spent a good 50% of their waking hours in a pool of some kind, and we enjoyed catching up with everyone. Check out the sillyheads with dolphins!

( 3) also I concussed myself and messed up my neck, but everything will be fine )

Edit: Chad has more detail about vacation in all its aspects.

4) Readercon! I will be there seven days from now. I have a schedule:

( cut for length )

I will also be taking Safety Committee shifts--this will be my last con on the committee, I've handed in my resignation solely on the ground that I've been doing it for a long time now and it's time for me to move on.

So, given the panel times above, and the possibility that I may have to bolt off if the phone rings, a poll:



(If you don't tick the second box, I will assume that you are entirely swamped and it would not be plausible, and I will hope to see you in passing.)

5) What with vacation, and the concussion, and making the non-demolished parts of the house fit for human habitation, and work, and Readercon prep, and staring balefully at my notes for the Books of the Raksura post I promised Tor.com pre-concussion . . . I have not read Twitter or DW in more than two weeks. I am sorry! I miss you all! It is just . . . a lot.

And now, we are taking the kids to an amusement park tomorrow, so I really need to go to bed.