Confluence 2012

Posted on July 29, 2012 by fsdthreshold

What an amazing weekend! We tend to underestimate things near us, don’t we? “It’s a twenty-minute drive away, so it surely won’t be very good.” But some people live twenty minutes away from Mammoth Cave or the Grand Canyon.

I just spent the weekend at Confluence, the annual sf/fantasy/horror convention held in Pittsburgh, and WOW! This is definitely (Lord willing) going to be an every-year event for me! It far, far, FAR exceeded my expectations. Yes, everything was on a slightly smaller scale than World Fantasy. But that, I discovered, can be a really good thing. There wasn’t the craziness, there weren’t the obligations . . . I found myself able to relax, sit back, and enjoy what the con had to offer. The quality of the panels was every bit as good as at World Fantasy — tremendous, knowledgeable people talking about fascinating things. The readings were outstanding. There was a con suite to put food in our stomachs on that long Saturday, an incredible art show (I bought a small art print by Kerry Maffeo, a steampunkian image that I fell in love with), and a dealers’ room full of tantalizing books, clothing, jewelry, accessories, calligraphy, and other artifacts. Many thanks to the organizers! A regional con can be extraordinary!

Here are the panels I attended — and I really crammed in as many as I could:

1. a PowerPoint presentation on vampires

2. I Read Your Story (about critique groups and beta readers)

3. Psychology of Horror

4. Keeping Constraints (about when to throw out the rule book)

5. Guest of Honor Talk: Seanan McGuire

6. What Editors Want

7. Cutting Edge

8. Can’t We Get Along? (about collaboration)

9. [Rather unquotable title, but it refers to villains. A fun one!]

10. History of Pulps

11. Readings by John Alfred Taylor and Denise Verrico

12. Where in the World Is__? (a presentation about hunting for missing persons)

13. Not Always Awesome (famous writers talking about early rejections they received)

14. Sub-Genres

15. Geek Culture

Here, in a raw form, are my notes:

Concerning feedback from editors: When they say there’s something wrong with a section, listen to them. If they tell you how to fix it, stick your fingers in your ears and hum. [That rings true to me! With my first novel, the editor rightly pointed out that the climax needed improvement. He had concrete suggestions for how to improve it, which I completely rejected. I did it my own way, and he said it gave him goosebumps, and he whole-heartedly endorsed my revisions to the publisher.] Editors are great at detecting where the writing needs help, but they aren’t writers!

For beta readers, you should use people who haven’t read a previous draft. You need the reaction of someone reading it for the first time.

G. Masterton’s The Manitou — one of the best-paced novels out there!

Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting has been called the best horror novel ever written. Look up the first paragraph on Google.

Don’t overdescribe. Allow the reader to participate in creating the horror that most affects him/her in the shape that’s effective for him/her. Sacrificing the child in Salem’s Lot . . . the politician kicking the dog to death in the prologue of The Dead Zone . . . these are marvelously understated, not shown in gory detail, but left to the imagination — and they’re passages that people are talking about years and years afterward. People think the dog scene goes on and on, but it’s two sentences long!

Read Dr. Rat.

Ultimately, terror is an individual, intimate experience, so suggestion is almost always the way to do it.

The “thousand-foot bug theory” quoted by Stephen King in Danse Macabre: If you build suspense, build it, build it, and then finally deliver the payoff, and it’s a ten-foot bug!!! — the reader will say, “Yeah, that’s scary, but I was expecting a 100-foot bug.” If you show it directly, what you show will fall short of what the reader was imagining, if you did the setup right. [Personal thought: It is my favorite Stephen King novel, but he didn’t take his own advice.]

Monster stories don’t focus on the monster. The monster isn’t the point. [Personal: I guess that’s true. Consider Jaws. The shark isn’t really the point. The point is, what do people do when a shark won’t go away? Will they confront their deepest fears?]

Woe, To Live On — depicts atrocities during the Civil War.

Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy) — the violence has always been with us. It’s not a new thing.

House of Leaves is a terrific book! [I’m partway through it.]

“If you’re doing what you love, you should always say yes.” — Christopher Walken [He is my favorite American actor.]

Jacques Cousteau swore unto his last breath that he had seen a megalodon. He specified exactly where he was when he saw it, and it was not a whale, not a whale shark. Cousteau would know.

Footprints of cryptids in history: There’s real-life documentation of “the last unicorn’s head” being presented to the king of France. Soon after, there was a devastating cholera outbreak. Humans had killed off the creatures that kept the water pure . . . [Don’t get me started on the subject of vampires hinted at in the Bible!]

3-D printing could utterly change our society within 10 years. Hagiograph? Your thoughts?

John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: All stories must be about moral choice. Will the character do the right thing, despite the consequences? [Jaws fits the pattern. LOTR fits the pattern. Whenever anyone makes a blanket statement about story, I always plug in those two to check it out. Yeah, it’s there in my three finished novels, in one way or another — whew!]

Pulps were named after the new, cheap paper made from wood pulp. (Linen & rags before that.) 1896 — Frank Muncey (sp?) publishes a magazine containing only fiction. (Magazines contained a little of everything before that.) 1913 — Differentiation into magazines containing stories all in one genre: railroad stories, cowboy stories, boxing stories, etc. 1923 — Weird Tales is the first all-fantasy magazine. 1926 — Amazing Stories is the first all-sf magazine. By the 1950s, the pulp era was over.

The Kirkus Reviews said of one of Tamora Pierce’s novels: “Slam-bang tedium.” [Boy, does that comfort me! The Kirkus reviewer hated my book The Star Shard.]

4-star reviews (out of 5) are often the most balanced. Those reviewers aren’t writing out of an emotional state. They’re usually giving a considered opinion, expressed pretty well.

Tamora Pierce’s typically stern, severe editor gave her this mantra when she was weeping over that Kirkus review: “All bad reviews are wrong; all good reviews are right.”

You can get Google to alert you of any references to your book anywhere on the Web.

“Fantasy football: It’s Dungeons & Dragons for people who used to beat up people who played Dungeons & Dragons.” — from the Internet

Tamora Pierce asked this to her on-line followers: “Romantic love between couples lasts about two years. After that, if they haven’t built something deeper underneath it, they’re in trouble. So, after the two years, what do you think Bella and Edward will talk about?” [Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh!]

[Anyone, feel free to jump on any of these points. There should be some good grist for discussion here! Very good convention!]

 

14 Responses to Confluence 2012

  2. Daylily says:

    “All bad reviews are wrong; all good reviews are right.” Thanks, Fred! I can certainly use this quotation, as can any working artist.

    The bit about not overdescribing: I’ve had that experience of remembering a great passage in a book, recalling it over and over, and going back to the book to reread it, only to find that I had added my own details and the actual passage was rather short!

    Reply
    • fsdthreshold says:

      I hear you about that reviews quote, Daylily! Yes, any of us who put our work out there can use it! The keynote guest, Seanan McGuire, also said she loved it when a reviewer wrote “This is the worst book I’ve ever read!” If her work generates that kind of passion, she counts it successful. I’m happy with the way the reviews of Dragonfly are so divided. There are people who adore it, and people who can’t stand it. I’d much rather have that than a bunch of “pretty good, not bad” reviews.

      And yes, that’s certainly true about description, too. I’ve also had that experience, and not only with descriptive passages. Sometimes whole scenes in a book stand out in your mind for years afterward, and when you go back and revisit them, you’re startled by how brief and economical they really were. You remembered them as having gone on for pages.

      Stephen King wrote: “Description begins in the writer’s mind and ends in the reader’s mind.” As the writer, you want to include just the few, right, powerful details that trigger memories for the reader, so that the reader can complete the description.

      Reply
  4. Daylily says:

    3-D printing? I read up on it, and it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with books. What was the context for the reference to 3-D printing?

    Reply
    • fsdthreshold says:

      True — the reference was not directly to books, but it sounds like something that would change everything in our society. I’m surprised people like Hagiograph and Tim in Germany haven’t jumped all over this issue. 🙂 It sounds like there will soon be the technology to reproduce anything, like in the food replicators in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Instead of making a bunch of parts and assembling them into a car, people will just “print out” a car. I know I don’t begin to grasp what the process entails.

      The context — well, remember, Confluence embraces sf as well as fantasy and horror. I think the question was raised as to what emerging technologies will figure largest into the immediately forthcoming generation of sf stories.

      Reply
      • Buurenaar says:

        Dad and I have been discussing 3-d printing for some time. Shapeways.com deals exclusively with producing products through this method.
        You choose your material, and put your hand on your wallet. We were talking more about the technological aspects of it and medical applications more. There was talk of printing extra organs as needed from artificially grown blocks of DNA from this.
        Someone was even talking about just printing out another heart when you got old. The only failing of this is the inability to reproduce memory, emotion, and experience in a new brain. That, of course, only holds true if we don’t find out that there is a “hard copy” of all data in the brain itself.
        Obviously, the most intriguing technological application would be the ability to print out circuitry in a more-or-less flexible format. A lot of the reason why we use hard circuit board now is that it is almost impossible to repair or attach components to a lot of surfaces otherwise. A flat surface is hard enough to solder on as it is.
        Beyond that, a few of my friends have printed out armor components on 3-d printers owned by their colleges in plastic. There’s just so much possibility…

        Reply
    • Hagiograph says:

      As luck would have it I just got invited to a meeting at my work wherein they were discussing “3D printing”. It is really a neat technology. One of my coworkers has a “makerbot” on his desk that makes the most interesting items from plastic. He’s made skulls, random geometric shapes, even a 3-D company logo. He had a box of polyhedra he’d made and I suggested he go to ComicCon next year and make custom polyhedral die and make a truckload of money.

      The company I work for apparently has dabbled in the technology.

      Personally I love 3-D printing because of the gee whizzy stuff, but I’ve also seen some really cool applications. One engineer down the aisle from me needed a replacement part for a piece he was working on so he did a quick CAD drawing of the piece, e-mailed down to the 3D printer downstairs and within a day had a replacement part for his machine.

      Years and years ago I applied for a job with a 3D printer in the Boston area. I didn’t get the job but they wanted me to draft up an “idea” for materials. I was working with silane-treating agents for silica and various other silicious materials, so I drafted up an idea of functionalizing diatomaceous earth with a silane-coupled “epoxide functional group” and suggested that spraying on the curing agent would “fuse” the pieces. I don’t know if it had been used before or not, sounded good to me. Probably some horrible downside to it though.

      Reply
  5. fsdthreshold says:

    What I don’t understand about it is, how can the copy be made from the same materials as the original? Where does the material come from? In photocopying, the copy is made of a new sheet of paper and new ink. That, I understand. But if you’re “copying” an organ, where does that new tissue come from?

    Reply
    • Hagiograph says:

      In 3D printing like they do now the materials are usually made from plastic that is extruded (melted and placed and cooled) or from a bath of material that hardens upon exposure to some sort of radiation or light that builds up the shape and it grows up out of the liquid. There are apparently some that fuse solid inorganic materials together (see my earlier discussion of the epoxide-functionalized silica, but I think there’s other materials they use).

      So in many cases it is a reproduction or a production from a material that is forced on you.

      NOW, that being said when you talk about organs what is being discussed (as my aging memory recalls it) is “jetting” (as in using an inkjet printer type head) living cells out to make a template. Alternately what they often do is grow cells on a scaffolding to give it shape but the properly chosen cells can take the proper function of the living cell.

      Finally the “flexible electronics” may not necessarily need a 3D printer. Again the wonderful world of Inkjet Printing comes to save the day. There are some specially adapted inkjet type print heads which can jet electrically conductive inks out in thin layers onto flexible substrates.

      Remember: when you see a complex “Integrated circuit” likely that circuit started life as a “drawing” in a computer program that was transferred to a “photoresist” type setting where it was burned onto a template and that templated used to apply the circuit to it’s integrated circuit board.

      There’s already some flexible circuits out there.

      Caveat Emptor: these are things I do not deal with at all, so my understanding of the details is sketchy and iffy at best.

      Reply
      • fsdthreshold says:

        Wow! Fascinating! I understand a tiny bit more than I did before. So it is still like old-fashioned printing, in a way: you can’t make something out of nothing. It sounds to me more like molding — an electronic way of “pouring plaster into a mold.”

        Reply
        • Hagiograph says:

          More subtle than mere molding. What the systems do, as far as I can tell, is take the 3-D model on the computer and build it up layer by layer. Think of making a sphere. You start with a dot of material the next ‘slice’ is a slightly larger dot, then a few slices up you aren’t putting down a big dot, you are putting down a circle of material and hardening it. Then a slightly (very slightly) larger circle of material on top of that, harden it, repeat until you hit the “equator” at which point you go backwards.

          The fascinating things are the intricate shapes. The guy I work with who has a Makerbot on his desk made a skull the other day. Inside you can see some “support” structures laid down (slice-by-slice) but the outside was amazingly detailed.

          It works off a variety of programs which read, essentially, the shapes and dimensions into the “printer” to tell it where to put the next “voxel” (3d version of a pixel)

          Reply
    • Buurenaar says:

      Hagio’s got a good grasp on everything. My dad leaves me in the dust where technology is concerned…except software. Yes, 3-d printing is gigantically expensive unless you go through shapeways. Then, it’s merely moderately expensive.

      Reply

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