Darkest Suburbia...and Beyond!

He lives!  (This is what happens when one has two DW identities; one gets out of the habit of switching, so that most of the -- still minimal -- updating happens under the ID where one is logged in.  I will try to be better about this going forward; OTOH, do see also the dedicated Webspace over at lonepenman.net.)  At any rate:

It's time to venture once again from Darkest Suburbia to the spectacle that is OryCon.  This year's schedule has a unique wrinkle: I've been tagged as the moderator for all five of the panels I've been assigned.  I hasten to note that this is not a complaint; in all cases, I checked the "willing to moderate" box on the survey of my own volition, and I'm pleased with the range of subjects I've drawn in the scheduling lottery.  Here's where you'll find me at the front of the room:

Friday • 2:00 pm (Overton) • How to Design the Perfect Politician
John C. Bunnell | Bob Brown, Mike Shepherd Moscoe

How do you design and implement a career-development program to produce elected officials and high-level administrators who can break free of the broken adversarial paradigm and actually work together with one another to solve society's problems?

Saturday • 10:00 am (Pettygrove) • The Right Writing Advice
John C. Bunnell | Elizabeth Guizzetti, John Hedtke, Esther Jones, Kat/K.R. Richardson

Panelists discuss how to handle feedback from beta readers, writing groups, friends and strangers-- including how to know whose advice to take, and how to accept criticism gracefully!

Saturday • 11:00 am (166B) • Care & Feeding of a Successful Book Group
John C. Bunnell | Gibbitt Rhys-Jones, Theodore J. Williams

I want to talk about books year-round, not just at con. Where to look for like-minded souls, how to go about setting things up, and how to keep people interested once you've lured them in.

Saturday • 7:00 pm (166B) • Paths into Fanfiction: Challenges & Exchanges
John C. Bunnell | Elinor Gray, Kara Helgren

Whether you're a writer looking for a fresh challenge or a reader hunting for a particular kind of story, there's probably a curated fanfic exchange on the Net that can supply just what you're looking for. From Yuletide to Holmestice, from Kink Bingo to the Ficathon that Goes Into a Bar, we'll talk about how challenges and exchanges work, where to find them, and catalogue some of the more memorable works they've produced.

Sunday • 10:00 am (166B) • Holmesian Apocrypha: Women of Baker Street
John C. Bunnell | Karen L. Black, Elinor Gray, Shawna Reppert

This isn't a panel about Sherlock and his adventures – it's one about the rapidly growing number of tales featuring his sisters (Enola), multi-great granddaughters (Charlotte), rivals (Irene Adler), and other notable women in his orbit (Mary Morstan, Mrs. Hudson, Mary Russell). And then there are the universes in which the original Holmes was a woman all along.

The week has slipped away entirely too fast; in an effort to catch up with the rest of the pack, we'll do two days at once this round.

Day 3 - The best book I've read in the past year

Ouch.  Singling out one title for this kind of tag is always a challenge for me, ( Read more... )

It is, of course, actually Day 3 by now -- that post will go up shortly, but this one is late.  Ah, well, it happens sometimes.

Day 2 - A series more people should be reading/talking about

This choice was harder to make than I originally anticipated.  The trouble is that while I've read a number of intriguing books recently, many of them already have a sizeable degree of buzz attached to them, and so arguably don't fit the category.  And when I looked backward to consider older or more obscure titles, the titles I looked toward first arguably belong in categories we'll get to farther along in the meme.

And then I thought of two books that have just come back into print, and I had my answer: The Night of the Solstice and Heart of Valor by L. J. Smith, who's mostly known at present for having written the books from which the Vampire Diaries television series was adapted.

( The present volumes are of a different kind. )