If there's a recording, I'll get a copy to you. Rob was a really fine Tom Stevens: in other words, as I described to ladymondegreen, a smug Fifties gender-blinkered schmuck. Fortunately, lots of people came up to him afterward and told him he should play more against type.
Enjoy the rest of the con.
Thank you! Today was grueling—I crashed for an hour in the afternoon in a friend's room, having managed an hour and a half of sleep the previous night—but I think all of my panels went well, I'm especially pleased with moderating the Bradbury retrospective at ten in the morning, and my pulling a nonexistent example of the kind of easy-way-out death-by-redemption I hate in fiction out of my ear at ten thirty-five at night on the panel about moral ambiguity went over sufficiently well that at least three people told me I have to write the novel now. That was entertaining and unexpected.
[edit] I was explaining how much I hate when a complicated and difficult character dies as part of a successful heel face turn, because it's easy to idealize a self-sacrificial memory and it's much harder to go on dealing with someone who has been a jerkass often enough they're unlikely to change no matter how heroic their moment-of-crisis choice—"I don't care if you helped save the world, last week you were trying to mind-control me! And the week before that, you burned down my girlfriend's house! I don't care if you were making an elemental bargain with the King of Lava to save the city of San Francisco in fifteen years! Her house burned down!"
I was asked instantly what novel or television show I was summarizing. I said I wasn't; I'd just made it up. (I get like this on late-night panels. I also recommended Alan Garner's Boneland with a lot of profanity and at one point declared that we'd crashed right back into Russian literature, having started the panel with Raskolnikov: "Happy countries are all alike!" We'd been talking about dystopias.) I believe the phrase is besieged with requests.
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If there's a recording, I'll get a copy to you. Rob was a really fine Tom Stevens: in other words, as I described to
Enjoy the rest of the con.
Thank you! Today was grueling—I crashed for an hour in the afternoon in a friend's room, having managed an hour and a half of sleep the previous night—but I think all of my panels went well, I'm especially pleased with moderating the Bradbury retrospective at ten in the morning, and my pulling a nonexistent example of the kind of easy-way-out death-by-redemption I hate in fiction out of my ear at ten thirty-five at night on the panel about moral ambiguity went over sufficiently well that at least three people told me I have to write the novel now. That was entertaining and unexpected.
[edit] I was explaining how much I hate when a complicated and difficult character dies as part of a successful heel face turn, because it's easy to idealize a self-sacrificial memory and it's much harder to go on dealing with someone who has been a jerkass often enough they're unlikely to change no matter how heroic their moment-of-crisis choice—"I don't care if you helped save the world, last week you were trying to mind-control me! And the week before that, you burned down my girlfriend's house! I don't care if you were making an elemental bargain with the King of Lava to save the city of San Francisco in fifteen years! Her house burned down!"
I was asked instantly what novel or television show I was summarizing. I said I wasn't; I'd just made it up. (I get like this on late-night panels. I also recommended Alan Garner's Boneland with a lot of profanity and at one point declared that we'd crashed right back into Russian literature, having started the panel with Raskolnikov: "Happy countries are all alike!" We'd been talking about dystopias.) I believe the phrase is besieged with requests.
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