My first panel at the 2011 version of Ad Astra, and an interesting one about how travel informs writing, even if you’re traveling virtually rather than actually. I was joined by Tony Pi, Jana Paniccia, and (crashing the panel, according to him) Claude Lalumiere, all of whom seem to have traveled a lot more than me!

My only panel at WFC 2010, this was a really interesting panel on what is unsaid in the best speculative fiction. Lawrence Connolly, Madeleine Robins, Delia Sherman, Martha Wells and I held forth (so to speak) to a room with really great turnout…even for a Sunday morning!

This Symposium panel at Gen Con 2010 concerns deadlines, external pressures, and other things which bedevil authors just trying to get their next book finished. I joined Anton Strout, Don Bingle, and Tobias Buckell for this one, which had some good information mixed with some frightening revelations about Anton and Toby’s love for Excel spreadsheets. Be afraid…be very, very afraid.

A third Symposium panel at Gen Con 2010, this one on how to establish an effective and memorable setting, with Maurice Broaddus, Chris Pierson, Robert Farnsworth, and Paul Genesse. This was one of my favorite panels at Gen Con, mostly because of the various approaches the panelists took to the topic…even if we couldn’t agree on how to pronounce “gazetteer.”

Another of my Writers’ Symposium panels at Gen Con 2010, this one on (shockingly) how to create a well-rounded and non-cliched antagonist, with Richard Lee Byers, Marc Tassin and Brad Beaulieu. Again, some good insights here, though heaven only knows how Sex and the City ended up in the discussion… 🙂

My first of a number of panels at the 2010 edition of Gen Con, this one on how to create a well-rounded and interesting protagonist, with fellow Writers’ Symposium members Linda Baker, Richard Lee Byers, Dave Gross and Brad Beaulieu. Some interesting insights came out of this one, and I even managed to sneak in a Paradise Lost reference without being thrown out of the room for being too highbrow. 🙂

This was my only panel at Readercon this year, and it was an interesting one–about how advanced degrees had impacted the writing careers of the panelists. More than one person noted the irony of having this panel right after the “Drop Out, Write On” session, with panelists who never graduated college, but the key point is that different paths work for different people. For me, academia was a valuable entry into the world of writing generally and speculative fiction more specifically, and the other panelists had (not surprisingly) similar takes. The panel had Brett Cox (who was the only other “Humanities” person), Lauren Burka, Anil Menon, Tom Easton and Joan Slonczewski. (I apologize for the audio–I had forgotten my digital recorder and thus recorded this with my netbook, an experiment I won’t repeat.)

This was my last panel appearance at Ad Astra 2010, and since it was about an important topic (getting the agent who can get your work sold), we had good turnout in a sizable room. Most interesting was that everyone on the panel (which included Megan Crewe, Adrienne Kress and Ian Keeling) had different paths to getting their agent, which is, I think, instructive…and I was told by a few of the attendees they were glad that we had a story or two of the “work at it and build up to an agent” variety, rather than everything being the “here’s what happened that time that lightning struck” kind. Watch out for the few audio spikes here!