A Busy Weekend at Penguicon 6.0

I'm off to another convention this weekend, and I have a few more that I need to add to my "wanderings" list. This time it is Penguicon 6.0. If you've never attended this convention, but you have the chance, do so. It is quite an experience.

Over the weekend I'll be in a number of panels. Please drop by and say hello, or attend and ask questions.

Friday, 18th April:

5:00 pm: Are the Space Monkeys Back Yet?
M Keaton, William Jones

[A panel on the resurgence of space opera fiction]

6:00 pm: Writing Workshop Part 1
Wanda DeAngelo, William Jones, M Keaton, Daniel J. Hogan, Michael "FREON"Andaluz, Anne Zanoni

[A writing workshop]

8:00 pm: How We Learned to Love the Dystopia
Sarah Monette, William Jones, Daniel J. Hogan, Elizabeth Bear

[Why are dystopian settings so popular today?]

9:00 pm: A Murder of Crows
William Jones, Catherynne Valente, Cherie Priest

[Meet the authors of dark fiction; speak to them; hear them speak; play with the lights]

Saturday, 19th April:

11:00 am: Blue Collar Writin'
Keith Baker, William Jones, M Keaton

[Playing the Game: Three writers, each with a background in both playing and writing for gaming, share a stage together. They might read, they might take questions, they might just tell horror stories of working with gaming companies.]

12:00 pm: Writing Workshop Part 2
Michael "FREON" Andaluz, Anne Zanoni, Daniel J. Hogan, Wanda DeAngelo, William Jones

[A writing workshop]

3:00 pm: There's Darkness in My Genre
Sarah Monette, William Jones, Catherynne Valente, Cherie Priest

[Horror elements increasingly creep into Sci-Fi and Fantasy, especially in the urban settings. Why? Is there something basic in the nature of horror itself that translates into all genres?]

5:00 pm: There will be War
William Jones, John Scalzi, M Keaton, Elizabeth Bear, Tamora Pierce

[Warfare in science fiction and fantasy and what attracts us to it, discussed by authors who've written a lot of words, and sold a lot of books, about it.]

7:00 pm: Johnny can't Read and Nobody Thinks it's a Problem
Jeff deLuzio, William Jones, M Keaton, Tamora Pierce, Lucy Snyder

[The dangers of illiteracy, the post-literate movement, and the dropping rate of child literacy. Should we care? What can we do?]

Sunday, 20th April

11:00 am: Writing Workshop Part 3
Wanda DeAngelo, William Jones, M Keaton, Michael "FREON" Andaluz,
Anne Zanoni

[A writing workshop]

12:00 pm: Writing in a Fixed Setting
Keith Baker, William Jones, M Keaton

[From gaming novels, movie adaptations and corporate series to the reader expectations of shared mythos such as HPL's Chthulu and Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, how do you write in a fixed world and still be original?]

2:00 pm: How has the Ease of Computer Animation Changed the Monster Movie?
Jeff deLuzio, William Jones, John Scalzi, Daniel J. Hogan

[Now that the monster can be on-stage early without looking cheesy or costing a fortune, have the basic tenets of visual horror changed? Does this bring the movie closer to written horror?]

2:00 pm: Sequencing the Genome of Fiction
William Jones, Catherine Devlin, Sarah Elkins, Matt Arnold

[What if we do for fiction what the Music Genome Project did for music? MGP culminated in Pandora.com, an Internet music station with automatic DJ that customizes itself to your tastes and introduces you to music you might like. What if we identify hundreds of attributes of a reader's emotional experience and apply these tags to a large enough collection of samples? In the Internet age, what if we can do better than just filtering the generically good from the bad? After the slide show presentation we'll have a brainstorming session where software expertise meets editorial know-how.]

For those wondering about the scheduling conflicts, I hope to see if things are sorted out by the time I arrive at the convention. Obviously, I cannot be in two places at one time - or maybe there is trick I'm not aware of yet.