tamaranth | The Write Fantastic Anniversary Thing

Thanks to The Write Fantastic for a thoroughly enjoyable day in Oxford yesterday: basically a small, amiable convention, at which I caught up with lots of people I haven't seen / talked to for far too long, and did not fall over at all.

This is pretty much a transcription of my patchy notes: mostly for my reference but discussion welcome
10.30 - “Debut novels - the adventure starts here” - Kari Sperring, Ian Whates, Mike Shevdon and Jenni Hill
- series are good
- online publishing may be the salvation of the SF short story
- if you want to be published by the major publishing houses, you'll probably need an agent: they rely on agents as a quality filter.

11.30 - “Politics and Genre - fantasy conservatism vs SF radicals?”- Juliet McKenna, Geoff Ryman, Ben Jeapes, David Moore
- lots of examples of radical fantasy (Gullivers Travels onward) and conservative SF (Star Trek)
- GR using Zelazny's Lord of Light as an example of how myth is used to maintain status quo
- JM on Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow examining the economics of spaceflight.
- the gap in the market for economically-informed fantasy ('K J Parker,' said

major_clanger, and how right he is)
- SF movies have surpassed the written word in terms of visual spectacle:
- GR: "writing now is like painting when photography arrived" -- valuable for style, subjectivity
- writing about the future requires reimagination of social relationships: future characters in particular need to feel alien, and probably won't be politically correct

12.30-2.00 - Lunch interval
- in which we discussed the entertainment:intellectual engagement spectrum and how it relates to the conservatism:radicalism spectrum. (My hypothesis: entertainment is innately conservative / restorative.) Also, why Iron Man 2 is not as good as the first one, and why the other Sherlock Holmes film is worth watching*.

2.00 - “Character; the Heart of the Story?” - Sarah Ash, Freda Warrington, Stephen Deas, Chaz Brenchley, David Moore
- CB on prequels: "like creating lacework and then going back and filling in all the holes"
- JM and FW on the joys of non-human characters (patient elves etc): but the trick is to make 'em lose their dignity
- SD on revealing character through narration, letting reader see through self-image (I suggested Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World as example of unreliable first-person narrator)
- voice: first-person vs. third-person. CB's writing tends towards 1st person for romance, 3rd for crime
- fantasy can make moral axis overly black-and-white (to which I'd add, explicit alignment with 'real' forces of good or evil can reduce complexity)

3.00 - “Reflections on a life in writing” - Chaz Brenchley, Liz Williams, Ben Jeapes, Geoff Ryman, Ian Watson.
- in which the panel meandered fascinatingly, and now we know many of their dirty secrets.

After which, following COFFEE, I headed home (post-viral nonsense still knocking me out more than I should like: thanks to

desperance for pharmaceutical aid!) Presumably a great deal more fun was had.

The good thing about the day (apart from all the lovely people) was that it got my brain back into writerly mode. Indeed, I was plotting a short story during one break (Google Search on my phone is very handy!)

FAO

coalescent: that Geoff Ryman thing (Mr Ryman was yesterday revealed as the God of Coffee, but that's not what he will be talking about.)

*steampunk dragons. I rest my case