This was a panel from my first go-round at Dragoncon, and it was a really fun one–both because the Tolkien track at Dragoncon really sets things up well, and because the turnout at these things is insanely crazy.  I got the chance to focus on redemption in LOTR and Star Wars, and it was a fascinating experience to delve into the aspects of work which (though I love Star Wars) I hadn’t analyzed in detail before. In the end, Tolkien and Lucas were much more similar in various aspects of their stories than I had expected them to be.

I’ve done a few of these sorts of talks over the last couple of years, corresponding to my own (I hope) increasing presence in the genre and my branching out into other fields of endeavor (such as streaming on TwitchTV.  Here Kris Siuda (lead developer for the Icarus video game) and I talk about combining fan bases and building an online presence, and using your specific promotional strengths (short version: not just Facebook posts) to improve your work’s visibility.  We had a great turnout for this talk, and I really enjoyed the response we got (and Wizard World runs a tight ship, too).

This panel was a bit of a surprise for me, as Cathy Hird, Gail Martin, Peter Prellwitz, and I looked at portals, doors, links between worlds, and spaces–which meant I got to talk a lot about liminal space, a topic near and dear to the academic part of my heart, something I hadn’t expected to be able to do.  In general this was a really thought-provoking panel, the sort of conversation I love to be a part of at conventions like this.