Well, maybe not really sad. Kind of happy sad. It was a wonderful con and there is so much to blog I don't know where to start. I think maybe I need a night's sleep first. Suffice it to say that I've been going to Swancon since 2003 or thereabouts and this was the best one yet. Perhaps that's at least in part because I know more people now. The con-going community is like one huge extended family, with some cousins you know well and feel at ease with, others you like but aren't too sure of and still others who are friends you just don't know yet. This year I caught up with loads of old friends and colleagues and made some new acquaintances. Some of those I already "knew" from Facebook and the blog round and some were introduced to me at the con. Tomorrow I'll look up all their blogs or web pages and make links.

You'll be glad to know the two panels I was involved with went OK, and I emerged unscathed. One was entitled "Girl Meets Boy: Romance in Fantasy". I felt really honoured to be on the dais with Glenda Larke and Juliet Marillier, to say nothing of fellow fan Ju Landeesse who is a much more experienced con-goer than I. Glenda Larke has a photo of this panel up on her blog. (See link up left, under my photo.) Juliet is holding forth (very knowledgeably, I might add) and I look like a stunned mullett, probably at the realisation of actually being up on a panel beside her. Juliet chaired this panel very skilfully, I thought. It can be hard to keep panels on track as some enthusiasts from the audience tend to get excited and throw in comments with wild abandon, sometimes to the point of being quite disruptive. Not on this panel, though: everyone was very well-behaved:-) We each nominated our favourite romances in Fantasy, and there was a surprising degree of agreement. We three older women loved Jacqueline Carey and Guy Gavriel Kay, although Ju, perhaps because she is younger and has different tastes, selected works by Anne Bishop, Louise McMaster Bujold and Scott Westerfield as her faves.

The other panel I was on was called "Critiquing: how much is too much" and here again Juliet was a great chair. The other panellists were Lee Battersby, Robert Hoge and Cat Sparks. I forgot to get anyone to take pix of that one, darnit. Just be assured we were all confident, well prepared and extremely knowledgeable. Well, the others were, anyway:-) We all agreed, I think, that crit groups can be useful provided the members all have the same aims (it's no good putting occasional writers in with intending professionals) and are willing and able to critique each other's work in an open-minded and open-hearted manner. Everyone, it seemed, had some experience of being in groups that just weren't working for them, and we all agreed that it's best to move on when that happens.

I'll come back tomorrow with lots of links and a bit about the panels and talks I liked best. But right now I really must go to bed!

This is just an interim post to tell you all how much fun I'm having at Swancon. It is wonderful to be among like-minded souls and to listen to talks and panels on a wide range of topics by a variety of knowledgeable people. This afternoon there was one of the best panels - Glenda Larke, Juliet Marillier, Karen Mills and Bevan McGuiness discussing "How to stand out in fantasy". While the content was interesting and encouraging, the main thing that gripped me was the sincerity and enthusiasm of all four writers. My favourite writers are all very dedicated people. I guess you have to be to stick at a job where the money isn't all that crash hot and you only have a job for as long as you can go on turning out good books. I am so filled with affection and admiration for these special people that my heart always feels open and joyful when I'm at a convention. And that, friends, is the very best thing about cons:-)

I'll post a more thorough report on Tuesday, or maybe even Monday night. May you also have open and happy hearts in the meantime!

As promised and procrastinated, here is the gist of the workshop I gave to the Mount Gambier U3A group a few weeks ago. Titled "Creative writing the modern way", the workshop was only two hours long and into that short time I managed to compress material that could easily be expanded into a whole writing course. It was a valuable experience for me because the elements I talked about are all things I am still working on myself. There is no surer way to learn something than to teach it to others, since in the preparation and teaching of new material the instructor's thoughts and opinions are clarified and gaps in his or her knowledge are made glaringly apparent.

U3A patrons are generally over 55, which means they grew up with very different styles of writing from those of today. Authorial intrusion, "head hopping", fly-on-the-wall description and sometimes quite floridly purple prose were commonly used until about 1960s. By that time, movies and television had begun to impact on reader expectations, and by the turn of the new century readers were deserting books in droves and turning to more visual forms of entertainment.

But writers were striking back! They realised that in order to compete with the visual media, books must give the reader a sense of immersion in the story's world and in the sensations, emotions and thoughts of the point-of-view character. Action began to play a critical role: something has to happen on page one and be followed by a tension-building series of events to keep readers enthralled for anything up to 900 pages. A tall order.

The notes I handed out to the students encapsulate the material presented in the two hour workshop:

1. Start “In Media Res”
Get right into the action, preferably on page one!

2. Show, don’t tell: use plenty of sensory description
At the end of any scene, three of the five senses must have been engaged. (This is not new: the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, who died in 1904, said, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”)

Compare these two passages:
Her visitor strode across the room, swung his pack from his back to the floor and bent to kiss her cheek before taking the seat opposite hers.

There’s nothing wrong with that. It gets across what happened in a few succinct words. But look at this rewrite:

He brought a draught of cold air with him as strode across the room. Shrugging free of his pack he tossed it to the floor and caught her in a hug. Laughing, she threw her arms around the rough dewy wool of his cloak. She tilted her cheek up to his as he bent to kiss her, suppressing a shudder at the sudden chill contact.

Exercise: Write a paragraph showing a meeting between two people that tells us more than the fact that one is waiting and the other arrives.

3. Voice and narrative style
• Editorial (or intrusive)
• Neutral (or non-intrusive)
• Invisible author – today’s preferred style. Requires use of plenty of sensory detail and the “close” (or “tight”) 3rd person POV.

4. Point-of-view (POV)
The “close third” limits itself to the sensory information available to the point of view character, even in the narrative passages.

Compare these two passages:

Cinderella looked beautiful and important in her new gown and little gold bell-shaped earrings. Her eyes sparkled in the firelight as she twirled across the kitchen floor. ‘I’m going to the ball!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m really, truly, going!

If Cinders is the POV character, in close 3rd you might write something like:

Cinderella had never felt so beautiful, so important. The silk of the gown caressed her skin and the golden bell earrings jingled as she twirled across the kitchen floor. ‘I’m going to the ball! I’m really, truly, going!’

Exercise: Rewrite this passage in close 3rd POV:
Red Riding Hood’s voice carried to the edge of the forest as she sang all the way to grandma’s house. She stopped singing and her face paled when she saw a wolf padding along the path towards her.

5. The Unities
Many modern stories honour a revised version of Aristotle’s unities:

• A story should have only one POV character. (Usually presented in close 3rd POV but sometimes in 1st)
• A story should follow temporal sequence with no gaps in the narrative and few, if any, flashbacks.

(While these are by no means universally observed, few popular writers today adopt the opposite extremes – “head hopping” and messing around with the time line.)

6. Beats and Tags
The tight third POV uses as few dialogue attribution tags (“he said”, “she grumbled”, “he thought”) as possible and often replaces them with “action beats” (“He crossed the room”, “She put her book down”)

7. Strong Writing
Insofar as possible, steer clear of adjectives and adverbs. If you feel you have to add an adjective, look for a stronger noun instead. If you feel you have to use an adverb, you possibly have the wrong verb.

And that's my workshop in a hazelnut shell. In the interest of brevity, the notes are simplified to a degree that might even be misleading, but they suffice, I hope to give you an idea of the points we discussed, and I'll be interested in reading your opinions of the points I chose. You will notice that I drew on the excellent assistance I had from Ursula and others on the Online Writers Workshop, which I mentioned in an earlier post.

Next weekend is Easter, which each year brings Swancon, Western Australia's Speculative Fiction Convention. It looks to be a beauty (this year it's also the National Convention) with several of my favourite authors on panels, including Glenda Larke, Juliet Marillier and Karen Miller. I'm actually going to be on two panels alongside some very fine writers. I expect to learn a lot! I might be late posting next week as the convention doesn't end until Monday afternoon, but never fear, I'll soon come tiggering back with a full report!

BTW, over on my other blog, I've posted a new Shakespearean meme, together with a lament about the lack of interest in Shakespeare among the younger generations:-(

I can now say that I've "done" the famous Adelaide Writers Week. I have a long way to go to catch up with my friend and hostess Annalou, though, as she's been a regular attendee for a couple of decades and is an old hand now. Of course, every year is different, since the organisers invite a wide variety of guests each time. This year we were regaled by speakers as disparate as William McInnes (who is probably better known to most people as an actor) Germaine Greer, Ian McEwan and Gabrielle Lord. One surprise was the presence of Sister Veronica Brady, who was launching her book The God-Shaped Hole. I have long admired Brady: despite being a nun, she was already known as a feminist and an activist when I was doing my Religious Studies degree twenty years ago.

It's simply not possible to hear all the speakers, since they run a double program, split between two massive tents. Furthermore, the weather was not kind: it was in the high thirties Celsius (that's around the century in old money) and I didn't go in every day. Even Annalou took one full day and a couple of half days off. One could become exhausted through over-stimulation otherwise, quite apart from the unfriendly weather.

I could only identify two Speculative Fiction writers: Margo Lanagan and Lian Hearn (Hearn attracted a bunch of SF fans who brought a breath of fresh air to the rarified atmosphere with their enthusiastic questions and cheering of their favourite) although we must not forget that Gabrielle Lord put a toe or two into SF before she finally settled on Crime as her favoured genre. One of the last panels was called "Friday Crime", and it included Marshall Browne, Garry Disher and Denise Mina as well as Ms Lord. (Mina, by the way, is a hoot, and she also has a delicious Scots accent with a hint of her Irish heritage thrown in.) It was a breath of fresh air to hear this quartet jibe gently against their literary brethren, who, I regret to say, did sometimes come across as more than a little precious and snobbish. On another panel, Margo Lanagan obviously felt she'd had enough of it when she said, "You were supposed to get Amanda Lohrey on this panel. If she'd been here, when all the penises were out on the table she could've put her brain down alongside them". This brought a huge round of applause as well as a good laugh.

Not that laughter was lacking: most speakers were intelligent, amusing and not at all wanky. One of my favourites was Tim Parks, a British academic now living in Italy. He spoke with humour and sincerity on the art of essay writing and on translation. Nor did Lanagan need to apologise for not being Lohrey: she spoke extremely well on a panel called "Rules and how to break them". She assured us that rules - which are always changing - are secondary to good writing. "The cream," she assured us, "will rise. If you're not rising, you're not cream yet," which is as sound a piece of common sense as I've heard in a while. One "rule" she did mention, quoting Kurt Vonnegut, was Every character should want something, even if it's only a glass of water. Again, sound advice, especially to someone like me who has trouble carrying the tension forward. The following speaker, Matt Rubinstein, agreed that following rules is not as important as writing well. "By the time you've worked out the rules," he said, "they will have changed".

Now that, friends, is Bad News for me, since I feel I've only just got a handle on how to use the currently favoured Close Third POV with any degree of competence. That was the subject of the talk I gave to the Mount Gambier U3A writers a week or two ago, but I've rabbitted on enough for today so I'll expand on that next time, as promised. By then I'll be in Perth - huzzah and halleluia!

BTW, forgive my lack of blog-visiting. I've had only limited computer access and every different computer I use seems to present me with a new set of difficulties! All being well, I'll be back on the rounds next week.

Apologies to regular readers for the late posting. Sunday was a busy and slightly frustrating day because there was a problem getting internet access, so today I elected to forgo the delights of Writers Week and stay behind to catch up on e-mails and blogging. I also took the opportunity to wash my hair. At least, I call it hair, but it's more like the stuff that grows on sweetcorn - soft and limp and fly-away-in-the-slightest-breeze stuff. So on the day I wash my hair I never plan to go anywhere as the cornsilk will not allow itself to be confined until it has acquired a bit of dirt and grease. That takes, usually, about 24 - 36 hours. Yes, I do use gel. Yes, I do use mousse. Yes, I do use hair spray. The cornsilk laughs at them all.

My Adelaide hosts, Annalou and her husband David, have been most hospitable. Annalou picked me up from the bus station on Saturday evening and brought me to comfortable quarters at their home in the hills that surround this fair city. I've come to be on friendly terms with Buster, Rastus and Zelda - furry critters who live here - and have met son Hugo, who in the manner of many young adult children, came home to collect some washing. This is a pleasant area, generally cooler than the city, which means a lot when it's mid to high thirties Celsius!

David, Annalou and I spent Sunday running from one tent to another at the Writers Week campus. We heard William McInnes first, then a panel of four ex-pat writers talking on how this had influenced their work - each was a native of one place and a resident of another but none had either locale in common with any of the others, so it led to an interesting mix of cultural experiences. On thing stuck in my mind: that an emigrant and a refugee will have completely different mind-sets when it comes to settling down in a new place. The former is largely optimistic and forward-looking, while the latter is likely to feel a keen sense of loss for a long time, if not permanently. These attitudes cannot help but affect their writing styles.

Last Thursday, I gave a workshop on Creative Writing, 21st Century Style to the U3A writing group in Mount Gambier. Like me, many of the participants had become thoroughly confused by the expectations of modern readers. I started by asking for ideas on how stories written in the last 10-15 years differ from the ones we used to read when we were younger. Many suggestions sounded quite negative. "Too much padding" said one member. "Too much bad language", said another. "Too much violence" and "Too much sex" were other complaints. We spent the next couple of hours discussing why this new style had come into being and it was gratifying to see the dawning realization in participants' eyes that these features have not arisen out of some perverse desire to make books thicker and more expensive or to provide salacious entertainment. Next Sunday I might list the points we discussed to see how you feel about them. It was the sort of workshop I wish I'd done ten years ago and like a born-again religious convert I am trying to spread the word and persuade others of my generation that we should all take the precepts of this new faith to heart. Of course, by next Sunday I will have had heaps of input from Writers Week and will have so much to tell you that I might burst at the seams before getting it all down on paper, so perhaps Spreading the Word might have to wait. (I will try to remember to update the "What I've been reading and reviewing" column at left, too. I haven't actually stopped reading and reviewing: I just keep forgetting to tell people about it!)

By the way, The Specusphere (see link in my profile above) has gone bi-monthly. The first issue in the new format is just out, with lots of previews, reviews, articles and fiction. We've uploaded eight new reviews, three of them written by me and others by Stephen Thompson, Sonia Helbig, Simon Petrie, Joan Malpass and Bobbi Sinha-Moray. I hope you will enjoy them all.

Tomorrow is my sixty-fifth birthday and I'm looking forward to spending part of it with Annalou and David, and part of it with my daughter Billy Jo. It's Festival time in Adelaide - Writers Week is just one small part of the huge Biennial Festival of Arts for which this city is justly famous. After a few hours at Writers Week, Billy Jo and I plan to have a meal and hear some free performances in a park, renamed for the duration as the Garden of Heavenly Delights! Doesn't that sound like a super way to spend a birthday?