Readercon Schedule

Since the cool kids are posting theirs...

Friday july 11

11:00 AM CR Teaching the Ghost Story: A Seminar for Instructors. Erik Amundsen, Michael Dirda, Gemma Files, Jack Haringa, Glen Hirshberg (leader). This presentation and conversation will help help instructors inspire fresh, compelling new work in the ghost story genre. Longtime writing teacher Glen Hirshberg will go over essential principles that all instructors will find useful when teaching writers of all levels, and will open the floor for the sharing of tips and techniques.

2:00 PM EM Fearful Symmetries Group Reading. Nathan Ballingrud, Gemma Files, John Langan. Fearful Symmetries is a new all-original anthology edited by Ellen Datlow, published by Chizine Publications.

7:00 PM CL Kaffeeklatsch. Marc Abrahams, Gemma Files.

8:00 PM ENL Dealing with Discouragement. Lisa (LJ) Cohen, F. Brett Cox, Gemma Files, Barbara Krasnoff (leader), Bud Sparhawk. As writers, we learn very early on to handle rejection, but how do you handle it when a story you're sure is good is rejected by 20 different publications? Or when your carefully crafted novel is shrugged off by five different agents? Or your self-published novella is bought by only 25 people, all of them friends and relatives? Or your fantasy novel disappears from public view after a couple of weeks? This discussion, led by Barbara Krasnoff, will cover personal strategies to deal with disappointments, rejection, and other setbacks.

10:30 PM F Meet the Pros(e).

Saturday July 12

10:00 AM E Autographs. Amal El-Mohtar, Gemma Files.

3:00 PM F Dark Fantasy and Horror: What's the Difference?. Jeanne Cavelos, Ellen Datlow (leader), Gemma Files, Jordan Hamessley, Jack Haringa, Steve Rasnic Tem. "As an editor of both dark fantasy and horror," Ellen Datlow writes, "I've been struggling with differentiating the difference for the last couple of years, particularly when editing the Best Horror of the Year, but also when reading for the Women Destroy Horror issue of Nightmare magazine." This panel of editors will discuss how they draw the line between horror and dark fantasy when selecting stories for publications that are firmly in the horror field—or vice versa.

6:00 PM Women Destroy Science Fiction/Horror Reading, with Livia Llewellyn et al. (Not sure where it is yet.)


Sunday July 13

12:00 PM G Horror for Diverse Audiences. Gemma Files, Nicholas Kaufmann, John Langan (leader), Shira Lipkin, Jennifer Pelland, Shveta Thakrar. Stereotypes and -isms often come from the id, from a place of deep fear. Horror writers have made use of this for ages, particularly describing monsters and monstrousness in ways that evoke racial anxiety, sexual anxieties, and fears of bodily change. However, that only works if your audience is in the racial majority, sexual majority, and able-bodied. What is the place of horror based on normalized fears for someone who doesn't or can't identify with the norm? How can writers effectively write horror for diverse audiences with diverse fears and anxieties? Can horror be a tool for expanding social empathy and social justice?

2:00 PM EM Reading: Gemma Files. Gemma Files. Gemma Files reads selections from her work in progress Experimental Film and the upcoming book We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven

The long Canada Day weekend was a bit of a crazy grind, as ever, but at least I got the corrections in on the We Will All Go Down... proof and finished "In Hell, An Eye." Today will be about trying to finish "What You See (When the Lights Are Out)," hopefully in time for that deadline. If not, I'll at least have something to bank for later. And today Cal starts summer school, and tonight I'm seeing a theatre show with my Mom, all that.

So: onward.