Next weekend (Jan 19-22) is ConFusion! This is my first time going to this one, and I am excited. Looks like a big show. I will be giving away an ARC of The Holver Alley Crew to some lucky person– I just need to work out a good giveaway gimmick. Probably one that will force people to prove they really read this blog.
Here’s my schedule:
Saturday 11:00 AM
The Nostalgia of Failure
Steampunk and other historically-focused fantasies often engage with fundamentally flawed technology. Whether it’s airships or clockwork machinery, there’s a certain mystique around pre-industrial age invention. Why the fascination with the patently impossible? And is there a reason once-popular subgenres built on these ideas have fallen out of favor?
Emmy Jackson, Marshall Ryan Maresca, Sarah E. Gibbons, Cameron McClure, Gail Carriger
Saturday 1:00 PM
The Changing Faces of Comics
Many classic characters have gotten new looks, from less-exploitative costumes to new, diverse legacy faces: a teenage black girl genius wears the Iron Man armor, and a biracial Hawai’an actor will bring new life to Aquaman on screen. Will these new faces truly change the direction of comics, or will comics creators and publishers continue to go back to their old ways?
Annalee Flower Horne (M), Marshall Ryan Maresca, Pablo Defendini, DongWon Song, BluRaven C. Houvener, Jen Talley
Sunday 12:00 PM
Here’s What They Did to My Baby!
No one really knows how the game is played. The art of the trade. How the sausage gets made. We just assume that it happens. And by it, we mean publishing a book. Authors tell the tale of the publishing process from their perspective. Copyedits! Title changes! Other mad alchemy!
Patrick S. Tomlinson (M), Suzanne Church, Jim C. Hines, Marshall Ryan Maresca
It’s a light schedule for me, which means I will likely be BarConning heavily. Come say hello.
This is the perfect time for me to run away from Austin, because (as longtime readers of the blog will know), January is when my beloved city wants to kill me. Cedar allergies surge in this month, and it’s rather awful. Going somewhere else will be good for me and my brain.
And I need good things for my brain, as I’m ramping up A Parliament of Bodies. This week will be about reworking the outline, as my original outline has… flaws. We’ll leave it at that. But this is the time to address that.