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Small Sci-Fi/Fantasy cons are extremely lonely to attend on one's own, particularly if they're very sparce on programming they offer. As a result of these observations, though I enjoyed meeting Sharyn November (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sdn) and Guy Gavriel Kay, I'm extremely doubtful as to my attendance of Vericon should it coincide with the Fetish Fair Fleamarket and more people want to go to that.
Dreadfully lonely. It will be nice to go to Boskone withyuki_onna, my friend N, and others.
That's not to say I had a bad time. I'm extremely pleased to have met Guy Kay and to have had the chance to warble at him about how The Lions of Al-Rassan is one of my favorite books ever. (We also discussed my RL name. His mother's family, apparently, is originally from Ukraine, round about Kiev.) And the advance purchase of Ysabel, awesome.
Sharyn, too, was an absolute dream. She was so pleased to hear about how Firebirds is the book that made me love the short story, and we spoke for a bit aboutdeliasherman's next Neef book (I mentioned that "Cotillion" was my favorite Delia short story).
I also attended the panel on action (and missed the one on culture due to the Guy Kay signing and blueness that was only abated by a hot chocolate from Finale -buymeaclue, nihilistic_kid, see what you've done?), where people spoke very intelligently about motion and scene and choreography, and a bit about the Ramayana. There was a good discussion of how action has become very cinematographic (is that a word?) in writing due to fild and television. Also, video games. There was a great deal of fatalism about all the POV shifts and quick cuts, but people also intelligently discussed the way a fight (or sex) scene has to pull its weight in the story by advancing the narrative or the characters or both. The example used was out of The Princess Bride; Inigo Montoya's fight with the Dread Pirate Roberts atop the Cliffs of Despair.
The Guest of Honor speech cheered me immensely, though. Kay offered a "partial defense of fantasy as a mode of fiction." He pointed out that all good fiction is escapism, it's a function of the act of storytelling. He added that his primary goal was always to keep a reader up to 3AM. And that beach reading serves a purpose - it's difficult to read challenging fiction in 15 minute instalments (which I will agree with - Ursula Le Guin and my trips to and from work shouldn't have mixed). He asserts, and I agree, that fantasy fiction has the capacity to be as important, moving, and thought-provoking as the finest stuff you're going to find out there. Moreso, even, as it can tap into myth and legend and bring universal truth home the way historical fiction won't necessarily because it's easy for people to assume you're writing about that one time in that one place. In other words, fantasy allows for the universality of a story and lets the timeless themes shine through.
It helps that he was incredibly funny (and punny). When he didn't wish to engage in discussion of a theme right then, he offered that after the speech whoever did could take him out to the bar and "take his best shot while [Kay] took [his] best shot." There are apparently plans in the works to bring The Last Light of the Sun to a movie theatre near you, and there's a third project for high-end television he can't talk about yet.
All in all? Good stuff. Needs better timing. And more people.
sdn) and Guy Gavriel Kay, I'm extremely doubtful as to my attendance of Vericon should it coincide with the Fetish Fair Fleamarket and more people want to go to that.Dreadfully lonely. It will be nice to go to Boskone with
yuki_onna, my friend N, and others.That's not to say I had a bad time. I'm extremely pleased to have met Guy Kay and to have had the chance to warble at him about how The Lions of Al-Rassan is one of my favorite books ever. (We also discussed my RL name. His mother's family, apparently, is originally from Ukraine, round about Kiev.) And the advance purchase of Ysabel, awesome.
Sharyn, too, was an absolute dream. She was so pleased to hear about how Firebirds is the book that made me love the short story, and we spoke for a bit about
deliasherman's next Neef book (I mentioned that "Cotillion" was my favorite Delia short story).I also attended the panel on action (and missed the one on culture due to the Guy Kay signing and blueness that was only abated by a hot chocolate from Finale -
buymeaclue, nihilistic_kid, see what you've done?), where people spoke very intelligently about motion and scene and choreography, and a bit about the Ramayana. There was a good discussion of how action has become very cinematographic (is that a word?) in writing due to fild and television. Also, video games. There was a great deal of fatalism about all the POV shifts and quick cuts, but people also intelligently discussed the way a fight (or sex) scene has to pull its weight in the story by advancing the narrative or the characters or both. The example used was out of The Princess Bride; Inigo Montoya's fight with the Dread Pirate Roberts atop the Cliffs of Despair.The Guest of Honor speech cheered me immensely, though. Kay offered a "partial defense of fantasy as a mode of fiction." He pointed out that all good fiction is escapism, it's a function of the act of storytelling. He added that his primary goal was always to keep a reader up to 3AM. And that beach reading serves a purpose - it's difficult to read challenging fiction in 15 minute instalments (which I will agree with - Ursula Le Guin and my trips to and from work shouldn't have mixed). He asserts, and I agree, that fantasy fiction has the capacity to be as important, moving, and thought-provoking as the finest stuff you're going to find out there. Moreso, even, as it can tap into myth and legend and bring universal truth home the way historical fiction won't necessarily because it's easy for people to assume you're writing about that one time in that one place. In other words, fantasy allows for the universality of a story and lets the timeless themes shine through.
It helps that he was incredibly funny (and punny). When he didn't wish to engage in discussion of a theme right then, he offered that after the speech whoever did could take him out to the bar and "take his best shot while [Kay] took [his] best shot." There are apparently plans in the works to bring The Last Light of the Sun to a movie theatre near you, and there's a third project for high-end television he can't talk about yet.
All in all? Good stuff. Needs better timing. And more people.
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From:
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Woooooooooooooooo!
I went to Vericon last year just to hear G.R.R. Martin read, and then I left.
And hey, feel free to drop a line if you're going to be in the area again, eh? We'd've joined you for that hot chocolate. :)
From:
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From:
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Interesting! I find that neat, and couldn't even describe why.
(Not in any way related to Kay, but related to last names from around those parts, it probably comes off as incredibly weird, but I find it amusing that, when I get the nigh-inevitable "Where is your last name from?" questions, I can respond with great specificity that "It's an Ashkenazi Jewish last name from a particular town in Ukraine.")
From:
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Mine is an interesting thing in itself. My mom has a coworked in a different office who is a Muslim from Damascus with the same last name (down to the spelling, which is a bit odd, as we added the first letter to make it more pronounceable to Americans - it didn't work).
And every time I dropped off dry cleaning with this Indian couple down the street from my parents house, the woman would always ask me to spell my last name, squint at me, and go "Are you Jewish?"
From:
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I don't think so, but don't know for sure. I think it extends as far back as the generation prior to 1900, but everything beyond 1917 is rather hazy...
we added the first letter to make it more pronounceable to Americans - it didn't work
Heh -- to break up a consonant cluster or something? (I'm actually blessed with a name that's relatively easy to pronounce -- most reasonably intelligent people get it on first try, though they are normally apprehensive when encountering it for the first time -- but that absolutely nobody could spell. Which is not their fault, really, as the only way its spelling makes sense is if you know the Russian word it's derived from.)
My mom has a coworked in a different office who is a Muslim from Damascus with the same last name
Hmm... that's got to be pretty rare! (My husband and I have actually been puzzling over this now for like 15 minutes, trying to come up with a class of names that this would work for... it's not an Ashkenazi name is it? Something Hebrew-based?)
I have a friend whose family comes from Leningrad, but who has a purely Sephardic last name for some reason (there's some kind of odd history of his great-great-grandfather eloping with the daughter of a Russian nobleman or something, but still doesn't really explain how a Sephardic last name was preserved all this time.
Funny things, last names...
From:
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No, the first letter in Russian is a Х, but making it an English H would make it silent by itself. Or so my parents were told.
it's not an Ashkenazi name is it? Something Hebrew-based?
That's what we think. Definitely not Ashkenazi, but we're not exactly sure on the stem. It fits the Hebrew three-consonant root rule, but translates to something like "room" or "school" so we're not completely sure the interpertation is... erm, kosher.
From:
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Ah, got it! And although the H wouldn't've been silent anyway, what you ended up going with is probably a closer match to transliterating convention, so, not totally off the wall...
And it *would* make sense for it to be Hebrew based -- neat that you can actually track it down to the three-consonant root! (whatever it would've had to mean then :)