.
I'm home from Capclave and can report that I had a very pleasant time. Some of my seven panels were better than others but impartial witnesses told me that they were all good. (This is not bragging on my part; it takes all the panelists working together to make one of these things fly.)
I heard that part of the reason the panels worked so well was that the Program committee removed one track of programming, resulting in larger audiences at all the panels. And there is nothing that will make a panel work half so well as an engaged audience. Except when two of the panelists get so angry with each other that they threaten to begin slamming each other with the folding chairs. But I haven't been involved in that kind of melee for years.
For my money, the best panels were the two dinosaur panels featuring paleontologists Tom Holtz and Michael Brett-Surman. Partly because they're both engaging speakers but mostly because their knowledge of the subject was encyclopedic. I was on one panel and Robert Sawyer (who, remember, originally intended to become a paleontologist himself) was on both. Before the one we both sat on, we agreed that our role was mostly to keep our mouths shut and ask respectful questions.
Not easy for either of us, but we managed.
I heard that part of the reason the panels worked so well was that the Program committee removed one track of programming, resulting in larger audiences at all the panels. And there is nothing that will make a panel work half so well as an engaged audience. Except when two of the panelists get so angry with each other that they threaten to begin slamming each other with the folding chairs. But I haven't been involved in that kind of melee for years.
For my money, the best panels were the two dinosaur panels featuring paleontologists Tom Holtz and Michael Brett-Surman. Partly because they're both engaging speakers but mostly because their knowledge of the subject was encyclopedic. I was on one panel and Robert Sawyer (who, remember, originally intended to become a paleontologist himself) was on both. Before the one we both sat on, we agreed that our role was mostly to keep our mouths shut and ask respectful questions.
Not easy for either of us, but we managed.
And "The North Wind Speaks" (part 21) . . .
posed by a sphinx?
(continued tomorrow)
And today's diagram . . .
In this diagram I show all the major influences on Cat (and Helen) at the point shortly before she journeys to Ys. Esme and Raven, of course. Barquentine and Saoirse, regrettably. The Baldwynn and the Goddess inevitably. Remarkably, Fingolfinrhod and Dahut merc'h Gradlon haven't been factored in. Even more surprisingly, I seem to have been toying with the possibility of dangling a romance between Cat (at that time Kate Gallowglass) and Barquentine before the reader. Anybody who's read the The Iron Dragon's Mother knows how implausible that would be. (Though I was playing with the tropes of the Romance genre there.)
And the purpose of the diagram? To make certain I wasn't overlooking anybody. There were a lot of characters in play by then.
Above (l-r) Tom Holtz, dodo, Michael Brett-Surman.
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