Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 27
February 19, 2014
Moderating 201--Advanced
Announce before the panel begins when questions will be permitted and that comments are not encouraged.
Give the panelists a time limit (or at least a general idea) and interrupt if they go over with a gentle nod or touch of the shoulder (or yanking the microphone away, if necessary).
If someone seems to be mentally ill on the panel, find a way to gently redirect that panelist or to suggest that the panel focus on something else.
Bite your tongue if a panelist says something that is ridiculous or offensive. When you get the microphone back, you have a chance to put it in context.
When someone continually hogs the microphone even after having his own chance to answer a question, make a joke out of it, but don't let it pass unnoticed.
If you feel that panelists are not answering your question, do NOT insist that they try again, as if you are an elementary school teacher. Move on to another question.
Check to see who is on your panel before you enter the room. Consider carefully who should sit next to each other and how to create that seating arrangement by going early.
Practice gritting your teeth if someone has no qualifications to be on the panel and insists on blathering on anyway.
Make sure that someone else is assigned to announce time limits for the end of the panel. Consider setting a time limit for each question asked and answered.
Remember that although you are the moderator, no one will blame you for what goes wrong on the panel—even if it is your fault. The audience is often completely unaware of the moderator. Conversely, you will rarely get credit for a panel going right, either.
February 18, 2014
10 Disastrous Panels You Have Been on or Seen
Microphone Hog who will grab it every change he has. Always a he. Sad, but true.
This Paranormal event “Really Happened to Me” and the rest of the panelists will stare as they try to figure out if I'm just trying to really get into the character in my latest book or if I'm certifiable.
I'm only here to promote my book and you're not going to get me off-topic. No matter what question you ask, I will make sure that a scene from my book answers it.
I think that I have something interesting to say, but I've hooked my mouth up directly to the rambling section of my brain and it will just keep pouring out words until someone takes away the mic.
My bigotry comes out with every word I say. Give me a chance and I will make everyone cringe, and if anyone calls me on it, I will argue myself into a larger and larger pit.
Only Men are Intelligent. I won't admit I believe that, but everything I say and the way I look condescendingly at any women on the panel will prove it again and again.
Girls against the Guys because the guys have no idea what male privilege is and refuse to accept that they have it. Also, they don't see anything wrong with books with no female characters because “that's just what people want.”
Bombastic Jerk who is also Best-seller and thinks that everyone in the audience has come to hear him tell you about how awesome he and his books are.
Moderator looks ready to walk out (me on several panels) because no one actually answers the questions she asks and she is working so hard to try to get the panel to address the topic the audience came to hear about.
TMI about bodily functions and other nasty truths—seriously a panel is not the place to explain to us about your latest surgery. Not even in the introductions!
February 17, 2014
Writing For Charity March 22, 2014
Almost all authors will do live critiques for only $15, including Shannon Hale, Bree Biesinger Despain, Lisa Mangum, Kristyn Riley Crow, and on and on (seriously too many for me to list here!). And we have different tracks for beginning authors, advanced authors, and even professionals. We have a class on taxes done by a real attorney, and a class on contracts by the amazing J Scott Savage. Free lunch, which will be really good food and gluten free and veggie options!
At only $50 for a full day, this is a steal! Plus you have a good feeling knowing everything you pay us goes to charity, and I really mean everything. We organizers end up paying for almost everything out of our own pockets so we can give more to charities.
http://writingforcharity.blogspot.com/
Uncomfortable inside my own skin
At a Kaffeeklatsch this weekend at LTUE, a reader asked me why it was that I chose to write such an unusual romance in The Princess and the Hound. It’s a romance about two people who are uncomfortable inside their own skins. Prince George is terrified that if anyone knows the truth about his animal magic, he will be burned at the stake. Princess Beatrice is terrified that people will discover that she has been transformed into a hound/that she is a hound transformed into a human body. I spent some time talking about my discomfort inside my own skin and realized that this is a nearly universal experience.
I don’t wish that I had been born male, not really. I noticed as a kid that there were certain things that boys were allowed to do and that I wasn’t. I also spent some time angry about the bouncing boobs that interfered with any athletics, and seemed to draw unwanted attention as I hit puberty very early. I didn’t want to trade my body for a different one, but I felt like there was something about my body that wasn’t displaying properly who I was inside.
I also felt like I didn’t fit the category “female” as it seemed to be embraced by other women. I wasn’t interested in makeup, in fancy dressup clothes, in dresses at all, or in conversations that seemed “feminine.” Much later, I realize that a lot of this culturally constructed “female” stuff isn’t authentic to anyone, and also that I had plenty of internalized misogyny to deal with. Nonetheless, I was left as an adolescent feeling like I didn’t belong even inside myself, like I was afraid to tell anyone who I was, but I was seeking for a group of people who would understand.
Both Prince George and Princess Beatrice go through this same self-loathing/hope that I was going through, and that is why I think that I was able to write them so authentically. It is why so many readers connect to them, as well, because almost everyone feels some disconnect between their outer selves and their inner ones. We are all hiding something that we are afraid to have revealed. We all want to be seen and loved for the deeper, frightened self we keep hidden.
February 13, 2014
10 Ways to Jerk Your Reader Out of Your Fantasy World
Use a modern word in a medieval fantasy.
Modern feminism transported back in time. (Lots of kinds of feminism in lots of time periods.)
Modern politics in the future.
Pontificating characters when action should be moving forward.
Sexiness when we should be planning for battle.
Revealing your ignorance about how gravity and other basic principles of physics work.
No other languages in your fantasy (sf) world. (Ditto other cultures, myths, religions)
Megapowerful beings who intervene to protect humans just when things turn for the worse.
Changing your rules of magic when it is convenient to the plot.
Characters who believe in everything that modern people believe in, and who sneer knowingly at the common misconceptions of the past.
February 12, 2014
My LTUE schedule
Thur Feb 13 9:00 Agent or No Agent
10:00 Writing and Personal Health (moderator)
6:00 Stealing From History (moderator?) w/Scott Card
7:00 Connie Willis
Friday 9:00 FTL and Time Travel (moderator)
10:00 Writers Think Tank Plot and Character Symbiosis
Saturday 9:00 Writers on Writing
10:00 Writing Religion (moderator)
The Secret History of Magic
If you are writing a fantasy novel, you undoubtedly have already spent some time considering what the rules of magic are. There is nothing wrong with making the rules of your magic very simple, by the way. You can have the only magic in your world be a wishing well. Or dragons. Or an enchanted book that sucks you into the pages of its story. In fact, I think that changing only one rule about our world and then looking at all the implications of that change can be a better way of making fantasy than trying to make too many changes and not following all of them through.
But no matter how you build your rules of magic, don’t forget to write the history of that magic. Magic doesn’t come to be in one sweep of the hand. If there is magic, there are stories of magic. There are warnings against magic. There are whispers among children about what they think magic is and what it can do. There may be laws written about what to do with those who have magic. Write your myths of the creation of magic. Write what everyone knows about magic, and what they fear and love about it.
Then after that, consider where the lies are in all the stories you are telling. Because real magic should never be what is expected. Even those who think that they know the most about magic, even those who teach and work magic—they should be surprised by it. So after you write the myths and fairy tales that your characters believe in their own world of magic, write the secret history of magic, as well. This is the real history that has been covered up, either by those who are afraid of magic or those who are afraid of people knowing magic too well.The secret history is what really happened, and it needs to be written alongside the official history of magic.
Make sure that your magic has the capacity to change. Because if you are going to write more than one book, you need to keep surprising the reader. And even if it is only one book, the magic should be like anything in real history. It crumbles when you touch the remains of it, and seems to recede the closer you get to it. We can’t know any real history. The only thing we know is that it isn’t what we tell ourselves that it is. It isn’t comforting. It isn’t as simple as it seems. And it definitely isn’t the story that people who want you to learn their rules tells you it is.
February 11, 2014
10 Foods People Should Not Be Eating in Your Fantasy Book
Potatoes (If you're doing European medieval fantasy, they will be eating turnip mash or possibly parsnips—potatoes are a new world food)
Tomatoes (or barbecue sauce or tomato sauce)
Corn/Maize
Any part of an animal without other parts of the same animal (ie boneless, skinless chicken breasts—people ate eyeballs, brains, intestines, and marrow from the bone—and they liked it!)
Carrots that are orange (they were originally purple).
Stew (this is boring and nonspecific, and people eat food they like to eat, so make it a specific kind of stew and make it taste like something good)
Orange juice (should be obvious, right?)
Spices that were only available to royalty, including pepper.
Bread that is sliced (hunks of bread are acceptable, however).
Food that doesn't have a bunch of dirt and rocks in it. (If you're fantasy characters aren't spitting out bits or noticing as they swallow that certain parts go down harder, you're not in the real world.)
February 10, 2014
Don't Want, Don't Expect, Don't Plan, Don't Hope
I went to a baby shower this weekend. To my surprise, the friend who had been expecting a baby at the end of the month had delivered nearly 3 weeks early, and had tiny (5 lb) baby in tow for the shower. I asked to hold her (the only person who seemed to dare) and spent nearly an hour sitting, listening to others talk and letting myself experience my own emotions.
It has been 8+ years now since I lost my own daughter at birth. I thought when it happened that I would struggle with friends who delivered babies around the same time. I imagined that I would look at their children and conjure in my mind the image of what my daughter should have looked like at the same age. And that happens occasionally. Not the conjuring up part because I am apparently lousy at that kind of visual abstraction, but a tiny pang now and again when I remember that my daughter was “supposed” to be that age.
But mostly, the fear I continue to experience hits me when I see pregnant women. When pregnant women talk about having named their babies already before birth, I want to stop them and say—wait a minute, not so fast. When they talk about plans for the future with the baby, I am tempted to step in and warn them that the future isn’t always what you expect it will be. Of course, I have never done that. You just don’t do such things to other people, no matter how well you know them or how well they know you and your own experience. You can’t ruin their joy by reminding them of your pain.
It isn’t really a sour grapes impulse, though. I think in my heart that I want to help other people. I don’t want them to think about me. I just have this idea that somehow if we are less invested in what we want, then not getting it will hurt less. When I look at that set out so baldly like that, I know it’s not true. I know that you can’t just stop wanting to be happy, stop wanting anything. That’s not the way you avoid pain. But that is still my impulse for myself, and it is my impulse to advise other people to do the same thing.
The other thing that happened while I held this baby was that I kept finding myself falling back into the “what if” thinking that nearly killed me that first year. I spent so many hours living a life that wasn’t mine, my mind going off in the direction that I had planned for life to go, but that it hadn’t. If I had delivered three weeks early, this is what my baby would have looked like. If I had known there was a problem, everything that happened in the last eight years could have been prevented. I struggled to stop that thinking then and I’m still working on it now.
My daughter will never grow up into the 5 or 8 or 16 year old I wish I knew her as. She is forever halted at the pre-baby stage. And accepting that is still a little hard now and again. I know that this is my life. There are part of the this life that I am glad about (and feel guilty about being glad about). There are parts of this life I hate because of all the many branching problems that came into my life as a result of that loss. I wasn’t strong enough to deal with it. I broke, and things broke around me. I am still rebuilding.
I want new things now. That is OK. I am allowed to walk away from the grave. I am allowed to let go of the wishes of the past and embrace new wishes. I am a new me, and that is both good and bad, but mostly it just is. I will have new wants, new hopes, new expectations and plans. Because that is what life is. New, every day.
February 7, 2014
10 Names Not to Give Your Protagonist in a Teen Novel
Willow/Buffy/Dawn/Anya or any name borrowed from your favorite fan universe
Reneesmee or any name that is actually two names stuck together and which no one can pronounce
Desire/Love/Forlorn or any variation of a stripper name (including those translated into foreign languages the reader might recognize).
Heather/Jennifer/Melissa or any other name that hit its peak in the 1980s when you were a young girl and making up the names for your own daughters (which your husband didn't let you use because they were already outdated by then.)
Melody/Forte/Andante/Fortissima or any name that is not actually a name but a reference to the talent your character will soon reveal.
“Beauty” names that are non-ironic or ironic. Naming a girl after beauty just seems like a chance to make your book into a political rant.
Faith/Hope/Charity/Chastity or a religious name that might have been popular in the 70s and is now truly unusual except among religious people.
Mary/Jane or Maryjane. Seriously, you couldn't think of a better name than that? Go look in a baby book.
Most popular girl's name from 15 years before you hope your book comes out. (If you want to know, most popular girl's name from 1999 is Emily.)
“Utah” names, which are typically regular names spelled with a “y” or a double “k” to make them look “special”: Jynnifer, Mkkala, Kyrin, and so on.
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