Fourth Street Fantasy

Sorry for the radio silence lately. I've been extremely focused on a variety of writing projects, including the YA Regency interplanetary airship adventure novel (first draft nearly done!), the Space Magic audiobook (hope to have the final audio files today!), a novelette (completed, rejected by one market, off to the next), a proposal for the next Wild Cards book (not accepted, alas), two characters for Wild Cards (one accepted, the other awaiting response), and the ebook of "Second Chance" (cover is done, review comments received on the text). Whew! I haven't been blogging, or even reading blogs much, and I'm way behind on television.

Today we're off to Minneapolis for the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention. This is the first time I've attended this convention, but it comes highly recommended. I'll be appearing on the following panels:

• Friday 5:30-6:30 PM: Short Fiction with Michael Merriam (moderator), Marissa Lingen, and Michael D. Thomas: It can be challenging to bring worlds to life at novel length, much less in a handful of pages. What are the specific challenges of writing fantastic fiction at short lengths, and what are some ways in which short fiction's effects and goals differ from those of novels? What strategies can be used to overcome these challenges, and how much grounding in genre protocols does a reader need to be able to unpack short-form fantasies?
• Saturday 8:00-9:00 PM: Tell, Don't Show with Emma Bull (moderator), Steven Brust, Marissa Lingen, and Skyler White: Let's talk about exposition! Authors like James Michener, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Francis Spufford have written novels that break all the "rules" about people hating exposition, and sometimes it's better to just come out and tell readers things (c.f. Douglas Adams). What's going on here, and what techniques and insights can we glean from it?

After the con, my father had planned to come to Minneapolis, which is where I was born, and we'd all hang out together there for a few days. Unfortunately, when I called him on Father's Day I found him in the hospital with a blood clot in his lung. :-( He's already home from that and doing much better (though he'll probably have to take Coumadin, aka rat poison, for the rest of his life), but he was advised not to travel, so instead of him coming to Minneapolis we'll be going to Milwaukee. Kudos to Delta Airlines for waiving all those nasty last-minute change fees for us.