Tag: Gen Con

Gen Con 2015

Posted on by Gregory Wilson

This is my ninth appearance at Gen Con, seventh as member of the Writers’ Symposium, and as always I’m looking forward to my favorite convention of the year.  The Symposium continues to grow by leaps and bounds, this year featuring Terry Brooks as Guest of Honor, and I couldn’t be happier to be a part […]

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Gen Con, August 15, 2014–Twists vs Gimmicks

Posted on by Gregory Wilson

This was an interesting panel on the difference between twists vs. gimmicks, and how authors can use the twist (not the gimmick!) to hold and heighten the reader’s interest.  Brian McClellan, Howard Andrew Jones, Don Bingle, Cassandra Rose Clark and I also talked about the distinctions between twists and gimmicks, and how the sometimes unfortunate transition of the former to the latter should be avoided at all costs…and how to do that in practical terms.

Gen Con, August 14, 2014–Monomyth Making

Posted on by Gregory Wilson

This was a topic I hadn’t had the chance to talk about before in a public setting, and I found it really interesting to watch Aaron Rosenberg, Jaym Gates, Bill Willingham and I try to hash out what the monomyth actually is as opposed to how it is often presented.  We disagreed quite a bit at the beginning of the panel, but I think by the end (of the hero’s journey, he said not so cleverly) we were actually more in agreement than otherwise.  (I was also jazzed about the whole thing since my band’s second album was entitled Monomyth, but that fact wasn’t particularly relevant to the panel…)

Gen Con, August 14, 2014–Worldbuilding 101

Posted on by Gregory Wilson

As the title suggests, this was an early panel at the 2014 version of Gen Con which dealt with the nitty gritty of worldbuilding in the speculative fiction genre.  Kerrie Hughes, Don Bingle, Erin Evans, Gabrielle Harbowy and I took a look at the nuts and bolts of the worldbuilding process, and although I’ve been on a number of panels like this I thought this was a good summary of some of the best aspects of those presentations.  (It was also one of the best-attended early morning Thursday panels I’ve ever been a part of–people really seem to like this topic!)

Gen Con

Posted on by Gregory Wilson

It’s my eighth time at Gen Con and sixth as member of the Writers’ Symposium, which continues to blow my mind.  This year is also the twentieth anniversary of the Symposium, and so if you’ve been waiting to give it a try, now’s the time to see people like Jim Butcher, Bill Willingham, Larry Correia, […]

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