October - Volunteering and Octocon

I volunteered, along with my husband, to teach senior citizens IT skills, so they can be informed and stay safe online. Age Action runs short courses for free, and over the next six weeks we saw what a difference this made to the lives of the students. We also benefited from a sociable activity and making new friends.

I also volunteered at Octocon again, held in a Dublin Docklands hotel and great fun, as ever. I assisted with panels, registration desk, carrying goods in and out, directing guests, anything required. I had been invited to join a panel on The Lord of the Rings. Here are highlights from last year’s set of notes on Octocon. Among the events I was asked to join a panel on maps in SF&F.

Endings panel.
Paul Anthony Shortt, Michael Carroll, CK McDonnell, and others.
Good endings – MC, Babylon 5, PAS, Star Trek The Next Generation, CKM – Devil’s Hour. Cliffhangers – panel said no. End should be consistent with the story at that point, not revealing the story to be a dream like Dallas. You need to feel the characters earned the outcome. Not a good fantasy if you just collect side quests and swap that for an ending. The end should carry the message of the whole story, not just come to a halt. No new themes should be introduced. Build character endings, not events. When you get an ending you should say “I should have seen that coming,” not “Where did that come from?” However, show runners don’t want to remove anyone popular.

Culture of Ireland panel.
Triona Farrell – how to describe the complexity of Irish myth – shorthand is often a leprechaun. Samuel Poots – Judge Dredd went to Ireland and saw stereotypes, all green, everyone ate potatoes.
Ruth Frances Long – colonial influence, John Bull was shown as a noble influence on Irish peasants. At one point the Irish stereotype was a black-haired colleen, that shifted to red-haired, now the Scots stereotype is red-haired. Postcolonial the emphasis shifted to anything outside the British influence.
TF – The people creating visual images of the Irish were the English. War posters showed an Irishman in tweed, or with bagpipes; men drawing these in London may never have been to Ireland. They were enmeshed with poverty and became the narrative. RL – There was an episode of Eastenders in the 1990s where London people came to Ireland and were picked up by donkey cart at the airport. SP – Artists often made thing up wholesale and this went into collective consciousness. Now we are peeling back the layers.
Paul Carroll – Neil Gaiman’s leprechaun is 6’6 tall and fights. Brought character to life in a different way, feels authentic.
SP – changeling – developmental issues.
PL – Peadar Guilin – The Call, the Sidhe are so chilling and alien and scary.
Deirdre Thornton – the idea of having a faerie door in your child’s bedroom, how scary and twitchy. We are quite dependent on the tourists who want to find leprechauns.
PC – There’s a leprechaun museum in Dublin.
DT – older stories reference yesterday – the recent past.
RL – also, the field at the end of the lane, feels more immediate, within reach of listener. Feels more real.
TF - old fables feel very personal, and were warnings.
SP – Ulster has a cross-cultural mix and has its own content.
RL – Cornwall and Devon myth is different to English. Immigration adds new stories.

Film panel
During the Pandemic, people did a lot of viewing and reading. Generally they thought they would clear up the big pile of unread books but did not manage it. Some didn’t want to watch constant new films or series but stuck to familiar. If something has seven seasons, do you start if people did not like the end? Is it too big a commitment? (Panelists kept generalising with “everyone” and “everyone else” when these did not include me.)
If you’re one of six characters in a show you do not get treated specially. A major character can’t be shown as a recreational drug user although they hunt people for money. Series are drifting from core fandom to gain wider viewership. Willingness to view new content is based on having seen older content. Marvel Comics has 4,000 copyrighted characters. Spiderman is most used for walk-on parts, he does a swing-by in other stories.

TikTok shows 10 minutes at a time and people will snack on films this way, follow someone waiting for them to post the clip. Amazon checks which promo image you respond to – is it a female character, say – to show you more of these, even if she is one of six. YouTube killed off the fan film rooms at Cons. The demand for long films is dropping away. Episodes – do I have an hour? Will I give it another three hours if I don’t enjoy the first episode?

Netflix provides a free app which listens to the sound in the background and matches it – so it hears Deep Space Nine while you are playing a game or texting. Then feeds it back to Netflix. Some shows became casualties of Covid. Others were not available where people had to locate. The panellists had heard of people who ‘yo ho ho’d’ it or ‘the Jack Sparrow method’, while not recommending this.

Maps in SF and F panel.
I participated in the panel, meaning I could not take a set of notes. I sat with fantasy cartographer Jog Brozin on my left, and I said to him, “I have a map!” and produced a map of Doggerland, the land now under the North Sea between the Continent and Britain. This was dry land during the Ice Age. “See, the Thames and the Rhine are the same river. They join and flow south,” I continued. Jog was delighted to find a kindred spirit. He had some of his work exhibited at the Con, but I was the only one to hold up maps during the panel.

The other maps I showed were of London, as my characters cross the Thames, which lies between their zine office on the Isle of Dogs and the Dome, now the Embassy of Jupiter, at Greenwich. I explained I’d had to go there and find out how people cross the Thames. There’s more than one rowing club on that stretch, there’s the Docklands Light Rail, the Tube, a pedestrian foot tunnel, a motor tunnel from Poplar, a cable car, besides the bridges. And sailing boats and barges ply the trade route, plus which the characters can hitch a ride from friendly Neptunians.
We discussed Tolkien’s maps and political maps. I explained that I used geopolitical maps in my book Dining Out With The Gas Giants, blasting a way for rail and flight through the dry Andes from Argentina to Chile. My research discovered that there is already a motor tunnel, but I’m removing mountains. Jog got a little concerned and asked if this was really happening, so I assured him it was only in my SF, and no mountains were harmed in the making of this book.
I used the Doggerland map to illustrate sea level change and referenced Iceapelago by Peter Brennan, during which the ice falls off Greenland and Ireland becomes a chain of small mountaintops. The room collectively sucked in its breath. This panel had standing room filled at the back, and I always try to speak to and involve the audience. Panellists chatting among themselves can get rather uninvolving, though at Octocon the topics and people are always interesting.
I’ll provide more notes next month.

This month I am making Rodeo Finn free to download. 22 – 26 November.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00OU100W8
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OU100W8

If you need another store’s link, ask below in the comments box. If you enjoy a book, please consider leaving a rating or review to help other readers.
You can follow me on Linked In to see some of my photography. Catch up with my news, events and Young Adult Page on my website. You can also sign up for my seasonal newsletter. I have a page devoted to helping writers publish independently.
www.clareobeara.ie