My Readercon Schedule

Just got my Readercon schedule (I'm hoping for a reading as well, but those haven't been scheduled yet). I'm very pleased; these all sound like great panels/workshops (if I do say so myself).

[Note: Oops! I've been reminded that this is a preliminary schedule and could change -- for once, I was too quick on the blog... I'll let ya'll know when things are more set...]

Just FYI, if you're planning to attend the "How To Write for a Living..." workshop, keep in mind that I've actually got a Web site that I use as a place to list resources; if you've got any that I'm missing, let me know and I'll put them on one of the lists.

Looking forward to it!

Thursday July 14

9:00 PM    ME    How to Write for a Living When You Can't Live Off Your Fiction. K. Tempest Bradford, Jeff Hecht, Elaine Isaak, Alexander Jablokov, Barbara Krasnoff (leader), Terry McGarry. You've just been laid off from your staff job, you can't live on the royalties from your fiction writing, and your significant other has taken a cut in pay. How do you pay the rent? Well, you can find freelance work writing articles, white papers, reviews, blogs, and other non-SFnal stuff. Despite today's lean journalistic market, it's still possible to make a living writing, editing, and/or publishing. Let's talk about where and how you can sell yourself as a professional writer, whether blogging can be done for a living, and how else you can use your talent to keep the wolf from the door. Bring whatever ideas, sources, and contacts you have.

Saturday July 16

12:00 PM    G    Daughters of the Female Man. Matthew Cheney, Gwendolyn Clare, Elizabeth Hand (leader), Barbara Krasnoff, Chris Moriarty. After the 2008 Tiptree Award was given to The Carhullan Army/Daughters of the North, Cheryl Morgan said, "We've been here before," and noted that she thought many of the books on the honor list expressed "a 1970s view of gender." In the U.S., at least, third wave feminism is generally said to have begun in the 1990s. Now there's talk of a fourth wave, womanism, and numerous other variations and expansions on the theme. How has speculative fiction kept up with the progress and diversity of feminisms in the world? (Let alone the degree to which related fields like queer theory have grown.) Did the classic texts of the 1970s push the boundaries as far as we've yet been able to take them, or have the last 30 years contributed new and varied approaches to feminist speculative fiction?

9:00 PM    ME    Dybbuks, Golems, Demons, Oy Vey!: Jewish Mythology & Folklore in Speculative Fiction. Steve Berman, Barbara Krasnoff, Matthew Kressel (leader), Shira Lipkin, Faye Ringel. From Rabbi Loew's golem of Prague to Peter Beagle's dybbuk of Brooklyn, the literature of Jewish supernatural and fantastic has been a long and rich one. In Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic and Lisa Goldstein's The Red Magician, the authors use magic and myth to comment on the horrors of the Holocaust and the meaning of tradition. In Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, in alternate-history Alaska, a heroin junkie might be the long-awaited Messiah. We'll discuss the stories of Rachel Pollack, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Lavie Tidhar, Neil Gaiman, Sonya Taaffe and other writers of Jewish-themed fiction. What is it about Jewish stories of demons, golems, dybbuks and angels, many of them non-canonical, that appeals to writers of speculative fiction? What obscure Jewish myths, like the gargantuan bird Ziz or the miniscule stone-cutting worm Shamir, have yet to be mined (pun intended)?

Sunday July 17

10:00 AM    G    Great War Geeks Unite, Part 2. Walter H. Hunt, Victoria Janssen (leader), Barbara Krasnoff, Alison Sinclair, Howard Waldrop. Last year, the Great War geeks filled a room; there were so many that we barely had time to introduce ourselves before the time ran out. This year, let's try to focus on a single topic: What makes the period of World War I so fascinating to speculative fiction writers and readers? Is it because The World Changed or is there some other reason? Let's chat and maybe get some future panel topics out of our discussion.