I'm in post-convention recovery mode today, which means it's taken time to form coherent thoughts. I saw someone wearing a button that said something to the effect of "Parties are extreme sports for introverts," and that seems to sum things up for me, especially with it falling in my extreme introversion/borderline agoraphobia phase of the year. A convention becomes something of an X-Treme Enduro Iron Man Pentathlon event. It's fun while I'm doing it, but then it leaves me drained of all energy. It doesn't help that either there was a fast-acting Con Crud, I picked up something from someone last weekend or else it was yet another drastic weather change, because by the end of the weekend I was seeing the beginning signs of something that looked a lot like something several of my friends seemed to be recovering from. I kind of needed today to be a gray, rainy, crawl under the covers kind of day because sunny days make me feel like I should be doing something productive.

Still, in spite of feeling like I was run over by a truck now, I had a great weekend. The biggest giggle fit was triggered by Brad Sinor, and it was not in a panel I was on. It kind of had to do with a chick in chain mail, a dragon and a cat, and you had to be there, but just thinking about it makes me grin even now. Sunday I just had a bad case of the gigglies in general because everything set me off. I spent a good part of the panel I was on that day shaking helplessly in laughter for no specific reason I can think of (okay, I was sitting next to Selina Rosen, and if you've been to cons in this area, that probably explains a lot for you).

The local Steampunk group had an afternoon tea on Saturday, which was rather delightful. There's something about the idea and look of Steampunk that appeals to me (probably my fondness for Victoriana), but I'm not sure about actually getting into it beyond reading and maybe writing because doing the costuming and all that looks suspiciously like it might involve work and effort. And probably leaving the house. I do like the hats, though.

Otherwise, there was much hanging out with friends and talking books, TV, movies, generational theories, publishing business, etc. I think the dealers sold a few of my books or else I had a number of fans there because I didn't get bored during my signing (and that wasn't just because I got a few giggle fits and was very sidetracked a few times). I had some of my writing processes validated by Jim Butcher on a panel. Shannon Butcher and I realized we had the same watch, except I had the black watch face and she had the white, which is kind of the reverse of what you'd expect given what we write.

There was one really thought-provoking question asked by an audience member during the Sunday panel on "mythological plotholes," and it's got me still thinking. Fantasy is the genre where the legends are real -- where the magic works, the dragons, beasts and monsters really exist, where the heroes aren't just the figments of someone's imagination. But is there room in fantasy for myths and folklore that aren't literal or true, that are just stories? I've been running that through my mental processor, and I can't think of too many cases where there's a mention of a story in a fantasy story that's just a story without any literal truth to it -- the fantasy world's equivalent of Cinderella, etc. Using the example the questioner gave, why can't there be a story about the monster in the lake in a fantasy world without there being an actual monster?

I suppose to some extent, it has to do with what you focus on in stories. There's not a lot of conflict or drama that will impact your characters in a story that's pure fiction, so you're not going to spend a lot of time talking about a monster that isn't there. Your story is about the monster that is there. But I can see where the stories a culture tells could be part of the worldbuilding and can set up certain expectations that can be used. So what if there is a story about a monster in the lake, and everyone's pretty sure it's just a story, but that's part of the local folklore and they even have lake monster festivals where there are contests to build the best lake monster boat, or there's a ritual "sacrifice" where they send a boat full of flowers into the middle of the lake with much ceremony (and plenty of souvenirs and snacks on sale beside the lake). Those people are going to be really surprised when a real monster comes out of the cave on the hill overlooking the town.

And I think I just plotted my short story for the FenCon program book.

I should know better than to even pretend to be ambitious about getting work done on the Monday after a convention. I spent most of the afternoon trying to stay awake while brainstorming a sequence I needed to write -- with the conclusion of the brainstorming being that I didn't need that sequence at all. I suppose it's better to spend time thinking about something than to spend time writing something you don't need. I guess realizing I didn't need to write it means I'm less behind than I thought I was, so I came out ahead on the day's "work." But that was all the work I got done yesterday. Today I need to do some writing, and I absolutely must deal with some real-world things, including my ongoing battle with AT&T, which somehow seems to have forgotten that I cancelled my long-distance "plan" with them because they're still billing me for it. There are times when having a killer robot sidekick (a la Cameron on The Sarah Connor Chronicles) would come in handy. I just imagined her on the phone with the AT&T Customer Disservice Department and went to my happy place.

Random notes of things that came up in FenCon panels (I didn't take notes, so we're going by my fuzzy memory):

We really need an Internet-generation Emily Post to write a definitive etiquette guide for spoilers, including how long the "safe" period with books and movies should be. Not everyone sees movies or reads books at the same time, but how long must people avoid talking about things that interest them in order to avoid spilling spoilers? Twenty years is probably too long. Opening weekend is way too soon.

In the Whedonverse panel, we were asked who our favorite character out of all the series was, and I was surprised that someone else had mine and for the same reasons, because I've often felt alone about that. Both Rachel Caine and I love Wesley for the way they managed to grow the character from buffoon to badass and make it totally believable. I also came to the conclusion that I will have to give Dollhouse a shot, even though the concept doesn't really enthrall me, since I realized that I haven't really been enthralled about any of his concepts, but ended up loving the shows. I wasn't planning to watch Buffy because I don't care about vampires and wasn't into the idea of teen angst shows, but I didn't change the channel fast enough when the pilot came on and got hooked. I didn't think I'd like Angel, since it was a spinoff involving a character I had found boring and, again, vampires. But the pilot came on when I was in a hotel on a business trip, so I watched and I ended up liking that series better than Buffy. I wasn't turned off by the concept of Firefly, just more in a big "huh?" because I hadn't heard much about it, but watched out of a sense of duty and loved it best of all. So now my big "really?" reaction to the concept of Dollhouse probably means I'll fall in mad, passionate love with it.

On the House panel, I was the real oddball for picking "The Mistake" as my favorite episode. I thought it was an excellent example of the fact that House can show his human side while still being very much House and without going off the deep end into pointless meanness or woobification (I kind of liked the House who was a jerk just because that was his personality, so I'm a little bugged by the trend toward showing him as some kind of tortured soul who might be a jerk because of his painful childhood and because his mean old friends don't cater to his every whim). And it showed that a character can be mysterious by, you know, just not telling stuff instead of wafting around being "mysterious."

But there was something said with Doris Egan during the opening ceremonies (and that also came up on the panel) that brought up an interesting dilemma. Vagueing it up to avoid spoilers because I don't know where other countries are in getting the series, but it referred to the death of a character who'd become popular. Someone asked Doris why they had to kill that character (and why not kill the boring one instead), and she said they killed that character because people loved her. I get that a character death has no impact if people don't care about that character, and that killing an unpopular character or a character people don't care about means the death is meaningless (it sort of ruins the tragic moment if the audience is dancing for joy). But then that means if you kill off the character people care about the most, you run the risk of being left with the characters people don't care about. I guess the ideal is to have all your characters be cared about, but when you've got a supporting/recurring character who's really catching on with the audience and one the audience generally finds utterly boring, I'm not sure that killing the popular one and leaving the boring one is such a wise move. Yeah, the immediate death has a real impact, but it makes the series from that point on somewhat less entertaining.

But then no one's paying me to write for TV, so what do I know?

On the character creation panel, other panelists were talking about the challenges of making dark or despicable characters sympathetic. I said I had the opposite problem, making nice characters interesting. And I think that's actually more difficult, especially these days when there seems to be a common belief that dark automatically=good. I didn't have an answer at the time for how to make nice characters interesting, but I think a lot if it has to do with the fact that "nice" doesn't have to mean "perfect." Even nice, good, people who are not morally ambiguous can make mistakes, have bad days and struggle. Nice people can panic, lose their temper or snap at people. They can even make bad decisions. And all without dipping their toes into real darkness.

I don't really have anything from the CS Lewis panel other than that I reread The Silver Chair over the weekend, for the first time in ages, and I was reminded of the many reasons that's my favorite of the series, plus I think I really got the spiritual message of it for the first time, and now I like it even more.

Now time for lunch, the post office, then girding my loins and finding my inner Terminator to deal with AT&T.

I've survived another convention, and I think that's my last public "author" event of the year. Now I go back to being entirely a "writer." The convention was great, I had fun, got to see old friends and make new friends, I learned stuff and had enough of a steady flow of people at the autographing that I never got the chance to feel sad and pathetic. Now I'm utterly exhausted, to the point that the thought of going to the post office makes me whimper. I may hold off until tomorrow. It's a slightly rainy day, which is good for writing, so I may make a pot of tea and settle back to work this afternoon.

I didn't have a really good panel giggle fit at this convention. I had two close calls, but nothing quite in the tears running down my face, needing CPR range. One was in the Whedonverse panel, but I don't remember what it was about. The other was in the spoilers panel, courtesy of A. Lee Martinez (author of the absolutely brilliant The Automatic Detective). Alex is responsible for a lot of my con suite giggle attacks, but I think this may be the first time he's really set me off in a panel. We had a bit of a digression after he asked if it was a spoiler for the Star Wars prequels that Anakin becomes Darth Vader. I said no because those movies are built around the idea that you know his ultimate fate, and there are a lot of little hints that things aren't going to go well with him. You're more likely to notice all the foreshadowing if you have seen the original movies, but there's still plenty of "dum Dum DUM!" level "this is potentially ominous!" meta subtext going on. That then reminded me of an article I'd read that morning about how the Clone Wars movie had pretty much tanked, and about what they were trying to do with the TV series. One of the TV series executives was talking about how they wanted to show that before he became Darth Vader, Anakin was this heroic, fun guy. I said that the fact that we're spoiled about him becoming Darth Vader makes it really hard for us to ever see him as a heroic, fun guy. There's always going to be that sense of foreboding about him, so if they wanted a fun romp of an adventure in the Star Wars universe, he's probably the wrong person to build it around. Then Alex went off on a riff about a "Young Adolf" cartoon series about Hitler in his younger days, that sure he grew up to be a mass-murdering megalomaniac, but he was a fun, heroic guy in his teens, so kids will enjoy watching his adventures. And that set off the giggles, followed by a deeply uncomfortable feeling as I realized that it wasn't really hyperbole. Darth Vader did destroy entire planets and systematically wiped out specific groups of people based on their belief system and culture. So, yeah, they're trying to make the equivalent of "Young Adolf." Something tells me that someone at Skywalker Ranch didn't exactly think this through.

But now I'm running out of words and I need to get to work, so I'll resort to pictures.

One of my friends made an absolutely brilliant (and tasty) TARDIS cake for the con suite, complete with cute little Adipose guests:



And then there was this rather clever costume that totally cracked me up. I guess you could call him MacTrooper:

First, a reminder yet again that Doctor Who starts half an hour earlier tonight on the Sci Fi Channel. I don't want to hear the wailing, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments when people tune in at the normal time and miss the beginning because You Were Warned. I've seen the episode already, but this is the last Doctor Who night on Sci Fi for a very long time, so I'll probably watch what I taped from last week (which I'd also already seen, but I taped anyway while I was out of town and haven't watched yet) before this episode. I don't know what I'll do for dinner to round out the Doctor Who party, but since there's now a Taco Cabana in my general vicinity that won't be too far out of my way for the errands I need to run this afternoon, I may pick up some fajita tacos.

The rest of this post will be very random.

My WorldCon schedule:

Panels:
On Thursday at 1 p.m. I'll be moderating "What Makes SF Work? Characters, Society, or Technology," with panelists J. Alan Erwine, Ken Scholes and Larry Niven.

Then at 5:30 on Thursday I'll be moderating "Re-Telling Old Stories: The New Fairy Tales," with panelists Adam Stemple, Lisa Spangenberg and Valerie Frankel.

On Friday at 4 p.m. I'm on the "Firefly: What Would the Second Season Have Been Like?" panel with Craig Miller, Dani Kollin and Rebecca Moesta.

I have an autographing at 10 a.m. Saturday.

As always, check the program guide and other announcements for updates and changes. I'll also be helping out at the SFWA table in the dealers' room on Wednesday from 3ish to 4ish and on Saturday from 11 to noon, so if you don't make the signing and want to chat or get something signed, I'm sure they can spare me for a second or two to scribble my name.

In the interest of maintaining the illusion of at least a modicum of cool, I will not post my planned stalking schedule. That takes the "chance" out of the idea of "chance encounters." You can't exactly say, "Oh, wow, we keep running into each other" or "fancy meeting you here" when you've announced plans to stalk that person. (Though, actually, I've already met most of the people who would be on my stalking list. I can now even talk to Connie Willis without shaking violently.)

Finally, I was asked in a comment for some examples of cool techniques from that Writing For Emotional Impact book I mentioned yesterday. It's hard to choose just one or two because they sort of build on each other and weave together, but here are a couple of concepts I liked:
You can maintain reader curiosity by layering your story with questions. People keep reading to find the answers, and then as you give the answer to one question, you should raise another question, so it leads the reader from scene to scene. There should be an overall story question, but each scene also needs its own question, and even each beat within a scene should raise a question. It's like a trail of breadcrumbs through the story.

Then there's the art of subtext. In general, except for very few situations, characters shouldn't just say exactly what they think, and the higher the stakes are for the character, the more they have to lose from saying what they think, the less likely they are to be direct in what they say. So you have to convey the truth in a different way, usually through the character's actions. When what a character says and what he does conflict, we instinctively believe the actions over the words, and having the words and the actions clash heightens the emotions in the scene and creates a sense of conflict and interest. The example the author uses is the end of When Harry Met Sally, where Harry tells Sally all the reasons he loves her, and she looks at him with tears in her eyes and tells him how much she hates him, before she kisses him. We know that she actually does love him because of her body language in the way she tells him she hates him and because she kisses him, but we also know that her saying she hates him means she's actually afraid of her feelings and overwhelmed. If she'd just said, "I love you, too," the scene would have been flat.

Or, to bring this post full-circle, an example of this I like is from Doctor Who, where it's a recurring thing for the Doctor to always insist he's alright, no matter what he's just been through. He may look utterly shattered. He may be shaking and have tears in his eyes, but he'll insist he's always alright if someone asks him how he's doing. Then in a recent episode, Donna, who looked equally shattered, said she was alright, too, when he, as usual, claimed he was alright, as she took his hand and gave it a squeeze. Again, that contrast between what the characters say and what's really going on makes those scenes more meaningful than if they just said they were feeling emotionally battered. Donna's repeating his usual claim also showed that she saw through his facade, and it allowed a nice bonding moment.

Now I'm home from Tulsa and in my usual post-con exhaustion, which isn't helped by the extreme heat. After the mix-ups on Friday, things went pretty well. I did have a couple of people come to the early-morning autographing Saturday, then I signed more books throughout the day for people who didn't have psychic powers or who weren't early risers who happened to be walking by. I got a laugh or two from my reading, had another panel giggle fit about something I probably shouldn't post publicly, then had a full room for my workshop. That's such a fun workshop to do, and I enjoy it even more when the audience gets into it. (For those who were at the workshop and are looking for the handout online, I will get to that today.)

They did an "author speed dating" event where they had fans sitting at tables, and the authors rotated among the tables every four minutes for quick intros and chatting. I'm so glad I've never tried to do that for real dating, and I now know I never will. It generally took me the whole four minutes to get into enough of a comfort zone to talk, and then it was time to move on. I suspect in a dating environment, that would be a recipe for rejection. But it was kind of fun just doing it as a "meet the author" thing where no one would be filling out cards about whether or not they'd want to go out with me.

I had a great chat with some of the authors I've met online through various groups but have never met in person, like Sarah Rees Brennan, whose young adult fantasy novel will be coming out next year and who came all the way from Ireland, Jennifer Lynn Barnes (who's been a regular Girlfriends Cyber Circuit guest), Marie Brennan and a bunch of others. I also saw the solidarity of the Curly Mafia in action when agent Miriam Kress (a charter member) knew exactly what trauma the forgotten hair gel entailed and offered to let me use some of hers. But by then the con was almost over and a ponytail had become a viable option.

I've decided I'm definitely anti-Sleep Number. I never did get this bed to work properly, and I was able to work the one last year. It made sounds like it was doing something, but it didn't really change. Even if it did, all it is, really, is an air mattress. And air mattresses just aren't comfortable. If you like a softer bed, what you get is a partially deflated air mattress, which is really uncomfortable. Or maybe I'm just spoiled by my down-topped feather bed at home, which manages to combine softness and support. I guess this means I'll be avoiding Radisson hotels in the future, since they seem to think the Sleep Number beds are a plus. I may take it easy on the exercise today and just do some yoga because I'm still stiff.

Now I have just a little more than a week before I leave for WorldCon. I'm sure that will be quite the experience, but the short turnaround means I don't have time to indulge in post-con exhaustion.

And in a programming note, have y'all checked out The Middleman on ABC Family? If you liked the short-lived live-action version of The Tick, or you like the vibe of the Men in Black movies, you should check this series out. It's very much tongue-in-cheek and quite funny. You have to love a series in which a group of interstellar alien dictators gets banished to Earth -- and forms a boy band because the squeals of tween fangirls can provide the energy they need to get home. And, it turns out, the boy band was played by a real boy band. It's on at 9 p.m. Central Time on ABC Family.