http://www.norwescon.org/
I did what I set out to do, which was meet the folks who send me rejection slips and attend a few pannel discussions. I'm not sure if I will go again -- parking, checking into and checking out of the Doubletree was so obnoxious that I think I'll stick with OryCon (where at least it's not a five hour drive).
What was fun was being able to talk with other writers and editors.
This time around I applied the "Internet Rule" to pannels. If in the first five minutes of a pannel it looked like I could get the same experience by reading a newsgroup or web page, I left. I also didn't go to a couple of writing pannels because going to Wordos for the last two years has made them redundant. Finally, Mark forbade me from attending either the "Peter Jackson vs Tolkein" discussion or the demonstration on tying people up. A quick and dirty summary of the pannels I went to follows.
- Lots of interesting things happened in the first second of the universe's existance, but it was too hot for a really really long time before hydrogen could clump together to form stars.
- Don't start your pannel discussion, "I got all this information off of the NASA web site..."
- When publishing stories, it's usful to think in terms of your long-term franchise.
- When writing aliens, start with the biology and work backward to the planet (and star).
- You can change the wavelength at which quantum-sized crystals flourece by cooking them for different periods of time.
- Humans wont be able to understand really alien languages.
- The editors of big publishing houses don't read short fiction magazines or anthologies; so if you're writing short fiction to jump-start into writing novels, just write the novel.
- The Tengwar character for voicing "GH" is good for words most commonly found in the Klingon language, but not for the beginning sound in "ghost."
- Most poor character development can be fixed by writing very specific details.
- As long as you don't bore the reader or waste their time, you can use almost any fiction cliche.
The participants at NorWesCon fell into the usual categories: writers, editors, publishers, gamers, people with leashes, elven princesses, Aragorn- and Legolas- wanna-bes, fantasy artists, Boris Vallejo model wanna-bes ("ya want a spangle with that?"), pirates, furies (people who believe they are animals trapped in human bodies), Hogworts students, and people with latex prosthetics (everybody wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads). For most of these folks, Black is the new Pink.
I must conclude that the Peter Jackson movies were really big at NorWesCon. Although I wore cream colored courderoy pants, a white sweater and "The Loadstone of Atlantis" (a basalt rock with a hole in it on a cord) I was asked if I had danced at the disco party as Aragorn. It must be the hair.
- John
