When Words Collide 2012 - Sunday





This feels so very, very long ago now! It's been a very busy week with several bloggable adventures, but I definitely want to cover Sunday of WWC, because it was just as great as Saturday.

 

The first panel of the day was on eBooks and included discussions on digital rights/piracy, whether or not there will be a demise of printed books, and how publishers are dealing with the changing climate and the rise of digital media. The panelists were a cross-section of all sorts of different publishing styles, and it was pretty interesting.

 

Next up was the EDGE book launch, which was really exciting for me, because the book I copyedited, Wildcatter by Dave Duncan was being launched with Mr. Duncan reading from the book. I snagged him at the end to get my ARC copy signed, but I don't think he was as excited to meet me as I was to meet him. :) There were other EDGE books being launched/read from, of the new ones I have Paradox Resolution by K. A. Bedford, and two anthologies - Danse Macabre and Tesseracts Sixteen - sitting on my shelf to be read.

We stayed for another live action slush - I just find them so fascinating! This panel was very no-nonsense and focused on getting through the submissions. There were some good comments, but I found that combination of people a little severe and I think if they'd read the submission I had in earlier in the weekend, they wouldn't have liked it much. :) Here's a blog post by someone who'd been in a slush reading on Saturday night, and how she felt about it...

At 1 pm we went to "How Science Fiction has Influenced Science and Technology", and it was a nice change of format. It was presented by Dr. Jason Donev, a physics instructor at the University of Calgary, so it was more of a lecture than a panel, and he had a slide show. Since I'm more of a visual learner, having that was really great for my attention span! He has a course for non-science majors which I'm going to try to take next winter - he's a good speaker, so I've added him to my wish list of profs to take classes from. (Yes, I have a list of profs who's classes are priorities. Does this make me an educational geek on top of all of the other types of geek I am? I don't know...but I do know I enjoy school! :)

Me at the presentation by Kevin J. Anderson
Photo courtesy of Christopher Chupik.

"Eleven Tips to Increase Your Writing Productivity" by Kevin J. Anderson was really interesting. He has many, many books published, and something like 50 of them are best-sellers. He's got a system where he dictates into a hand-held recorder and then has someone type up what he's written, which is handy. :) The tips were all common sense things, but it was interesting to hear them from someone for whom they clearly work - you can't argue with someone who's sold that many books! He also blogged a bit about the weekend here.

The publisher's panel had some interesting stories of how the various publishers had come to work in the industry. The publisher from a big publishing house had a lot of interesting things to say - here's a post that summarizes some of the advice she gave at another point during the weekend. It was nearing the end of a very long day, so it didn't hold my attention as much as it might otherwise. In hindsight I probably should have checked out the YA panel instead!

Lastly, we went to "The Canadian Voice in SF&F", which didn't turn out to be really what I expected. I was hoping for more discussion of specific authors to check out, whereas it was more of a theoretical discussion of concepts, which was sort of interesting, but not really what I was looking for. Although, extreme exhaustion was probably colouring my perception at that point. :)

So we took a break for dinner, and felt rejuvenated enough to come back and find out what on earth a 'dead dog party' is all about! Turns out that after a quiet start a post-con party is a lot of fun - everyone is pretty tired but not really wanting the weekend to end, and there's lots of socializing and leftover goodies from all of the other weekend parties. We met a whole gang of interesting people - including a sort-of-cousin from the same small town of Buchans in Newfoundland, who I'm sure has family who've married my family - and generally had a blast. We ended up staying until almost midnight, and really only left because I'd promised Trevor "we'll be home earlier then we were last night", which was 1 am, so we had to drag ourselves away from watching the Olympic Flame, and a massive hail and lightening storm from a hotel balcony with a bunch of people including Robert J. Sawyer and Kevin J. Anderson. How often can you say that happens in a lifetime?! (And by the way...what's up with J as a middle initial, I ask you?!)



 

Brittni and me at the 'dead dog party'.

I will definitely be going back to WWC next year - my only concern is that it's in a bigger hotel, and I like it small and cozy! Hopefully it doesn't get too much more crowded, and that the new hotel has chairs that don't make my bum numb. Also, it would be helpful if the con staff had shirts or badges or something that identified them as staff. Other then that, I have absolutely no complaints! Well, actually, I don't like having to choose between three different panels that are going on at once, but I suppose that's a first world problem I can live with!

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When Words Collide 2012 - Friday

The first annual When Words Collide, a reader con, happened in Calgary last summer. I only blogged about it briefly, but it was a life-changing experience! It really solidified my desire to go back to school, as well as my desire to get involved in the publishing industry in a capacity other than a wanna-be writer, and propelled me in to getting started on launching my freelance copyediting business.

This year I'm in a completely different position; I'm totally self-employed with business cards to hand out, I'm LOVING being a full-time student, and my first major copyediting project has been published. I was really excited for this year's WWC, and it did not disappoint! My friend Brittni, who I went with last year, came down again, and we had a couple of days of adventure before the con started (cheap ribs, Firefly, Shakespeare in the Park...) but Friday noon found us checking in at registration as early as we could.

The very first thing we did (well, after scoping out all the books for sale in the dealer's room!) was go to a 'live action slush' panel. This is kind of like America's Got Talent - the Writer Version. Writers anonymously submit the first page of their novel or short story, a reader reads them out loud, and a panel of editors/publishers judge them. As soon as one of the judges hears something they don't like, they put up a hand, and as soon as the majority have their hands up, the reader stops, and the panel gives feedback about the writing. It's VERY educational. Since I read slush for a local publisher, I'm interested to hear what other people judge it on. The reader for that particular one was Jack Whyte, who could read the stock report and make it sound amazing, which gave those submissions something of an unfair advantage. :)

Next we went to "The Role of the Academic Library in Relation to Genre Fiction" which was about the Gibson Collection held by the University of Calgary, where I'm a student. I'm interested in doing a research project on it, so I talked to the librarian after, and she offered me a tour! I'm really excited about that.

After that we crammed into a tiny hotel suite to hear two editors talk about "Building Enduring Characters: Playing in the Victorian Sandbox". They've edited three anthologies of Sherlock Holmes stories together, and Brittni and I noticed later that they actually reminded us quite a bit of Holmes and Watson in their character and interactions, which was fascinating. Were they drawn to the Holmes genre because of an already existing dynamic, or did the dynamic develop over years of working together? Very interesting! :)

Robert J. Sawyer gave a presentation on "Mastering Point of View", which was great, as pretty much everything he does is. The man is a genius. And he wins ALL THE AWARDS. But by that point I was tired and hungry, so I don't remember much about it! :P There weren't any panels at 5pm that we wanted to go to, so we found a bench and ate our lunch, and then I felt better.

The next panel was on "Humour in Fiction" and I remember laughing tons. It was moderated by a writer who used to do stand up comedy, and it included an archaeologist who writes romances, a fantasy writer, and Dave Duncan, who writes science fiction and fantasy, and who's most recent sci fi work I just copyedited. They told funny stories and talked about funny situations they put characters in, and how you can use humour as a tool to accomplish various things in a story. It was highly entertaining.

Finally there were the keynote addresses by four authors, an editor for a big publishing house, and a local filk writer. One of the authors, Rebecca Moesta, talked about a subject near and dear to my heart, which is how errors manage to make it into published books despite the gauntlet of professionals they go through on the way to print. There were a lot of different people speaking on a lot of different topics, and by the time they were done, I was fading in and out and was ready for bed. But we went home and did a little work so that we would have some things polished for the live action slush panel first thing on Saturday morning....

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