CONduit: Sunday panels

Saturday night, Dylan and I spent at the hotel, so as to be able to stay later than trains or get to earlier-than-trains Sunday panels. Despite staying up very late Saturday night, we managed to get up early enough to eat breakfast, check out, and get to the 11am panel:

In Writing a Multi-Book Series, some of the dangers of writing multiple books about the same set of characters was discussed: for instance, reviewers may give a bad review because they don't want to have to read multiple books in order to understand the book they need to review; finding the balance between too much recap and not enough--because there are two types of readers out there: the ones who want nothing but a story, and the ones who will never get enough detail, information, etc.: and You Will Never Be Able to Please Them Both At Once. Also, you can't wrap everything up neatly, or there's nothing to write about next time. In fact, L.E. Modesitt Jr. says to not be afraid to leave loose ends, because life doesn't neatly tie together, and the story will feel more real that way.

The thing I really took away from Using Your Environment for Setting Ideas was, do your research! Especially your geography/geology: if your setting is this world, information is available to both you and your readers; if your setting is your own, do research and be accurate, lest you make your knowledgeable readers cringe (and this goes for pretty much anything, but mostly, the panel was discussing geography/geology/culture).

Also, Utah has an amazing variety of geography, and research trips are tax-deductible.

I was slightly disappointed to find that Building Your Audience was not, in fact, about Frankenstein building his monsters, futuristic scientists building androids, or about steampunk sparks building clanks. Alas.

Instead, we discussed blogging, Twitter, Facebook, newsletters. We discussed you as your own brand, and ways to promote books that are being published.

Toward the end, I asked how to promote and build an audience in absence of a book about to be published, and the answer was basically, get out there, blog about being an aspiring writer (because people like to read about that sort of thing, use your pen name on the internet so people are familiar with it before you start publishing.

I took a break after this, picked up the art I had won at the auction, wandered around some more, hung out with people, and for the last panel, I attempted to go to Urban Fantasy, which ended up being less useful/interesting than I had hoped, so I left to go to Position and Positioning, which talked about social position and social equality or lack thereof, and the myth of upward mobility: in novels, the commoner always gets the title and position promised him, but in real life, it was a small estate, and let's hope he goes away to enjoy that, and maybe his grandchildren would be able to gain the larger estates and possibly the title that was promised their ancestor. Social change happens slowly, was the motto for the panel.

And after such an eventful, exciting, informative weekend, Dylan and I went home and rested. 

Yay! I managed to finish the saga of CONduit!