elfs | Friday Norwescon: The panels.

I will say that I got more out of this Norwescon than usual. Maybe I'm just feeling better about writing. The current story is tragically bogged down in the "not another café scene, please," and I'm trying to come up with a different setting, but that's do-able.

The one major assignment of the day was "outline a book in an hour." Being stupid and Elf, I did three at a time. I had five minutes for each part. Two minutes per novel, and one for the short story. Piece o' cake. I wish I could say I was getting anything useful out of them, but when I was done I did characterize one as "What if the child Kal-El's spaceship had fallen on Hobbiton, as written by Iain M. Banks." The other made me realize that the plots of two other books in the Infinite Trunk are more or less the same, which is not necessarily a bad thing: a sword & sorcery novel will have a markedly different feel, and market, from a hard-science pastiche.

The other panel of the day was "How to write smut." I nearly took over the panel, but instead rudely topped from the bottom. I didn't learn much (duh), since I've long since graduated to reading James Salter and D.H. Lawrence for tips. When it was over, I apologized for my rudeness, but a friend of mine said, in front of the panelists, "You should have been up there. You virtually invented alt.sex.stories yourself."

Well, yeah, but I still had help.

And then came the dramatic ending.