Blogging from Worldcon -- 1

Posted by Colin Harvey Aug 9, 2008

I meant to post every day as I did at Eastercon, honest...

...but there's so much going on here. It's like some weird variant of Parkinson's Law, whereby panels and parties expand to fill time available.

Most of my time has been spent on the Rising Stars thread of programmes: How To Write A Query Letter, Surviving As A Professional Writer, Breaking Into Hollywood -- just three of the highlights of the thread, but there were fifteen --yes, fifteen-- other panels on that thread alone.

I moderated three panels in four sessions, which was a fairly brutal concentration, but the panel organizers have thousands of participants to organize in hundreds of panels, so I've no complaints, and in some ways it's beneficial to squeeze them all together.

First of all I got to meet four medical and legal experts on CSI in the Future which turned out to be a stimulating deconstruction of the challenges facing real life investigators as well as the things they'd like to see developed; brain scans that would act as a true lie detector; a way of separating DNA traces that have got mixed together; and an automated APHIS system that would save thousands of laborious man hours.

Then PC Hodgell and Hugo and Nebula nominated Benjamin Rosenbaum discussed City-Building with me, roaming from Ankh-Morpork to Ambergris to the Cities In Flight.

Lastly, I had the pleasure of decades of experience from SFWA President Russell Davis, veteran author Steve Miller and newbie Robin Owens, as they discussed After the Day Job -- surviving as a full time writer. It was both terrifying and exhilerating hearing how hard they work, but at least it kick started me into posting this blog!

More tomorrow.

Hasta Luego

Colin