Meetup and Friends

Saturday's "Twin Cities Speculative Fiction Meetup Koffee Klatch with Patricia C. Wrede" was a success all around. Ms. Wrede was a joy to talk with, and she answered every question (questions ranging from "Is there anyway to make sense of a royalty statement?" to "When do you know if a crit is actually useful?" and dlandon asked some excellent questions about working with book editors) in a very thoughtful manner. All in all, I would not mind doing this again with some other local authors.

Other positives about Saturday's Meetup: Because of the way buses run on the weekend, I arrived way early, but so did dsgood and Jason Wittman, so I spent some time chatting with them before the event. It was nice getting to know them both a little better.

dlandon came to Meetup for the first time. We were introduced at Minicon, and I was able to talk with her a bit before the event started, which was pleasent.

Davanni's turned out to be a nice venue. They have a little, private room that allowed the group to have a close, intimate setting to talk, and the food was excellent.

The negatives about Saturday's Meetup: careswen ended up staying home after she sprained a muscle in her neck as we were getting ready to leave. I know she was disappointed about being stuck home on ice.

Because of my complete inability to order my thoughts quickly, I never managed to ask any questions, and pretty much sat there like a big old lump. Luckily, everyone else asked intelligent questions for our guest to answer.

One thing I did want to say, and never managed to get said, concerned something one of the Meetup members said about "liking his characters too much, both the protagonists and antagonists," and since I'll put a link to this blog post on the Meetup Message Board, I thought I'd go ahead and say what I wanted.

It's okay to really like your characters. In fact, I encourage you to care deeply about your characters. I like and empathize with all my characters, be they protags, villains, secondaries, or walk on cannon fodder. If I didn't identify with them, they wouldn't be real to me, and I wouldn't be able to write them as real people, and I want to make them real (well, as real as a fictional character can be) people, even the bit players.

That said, I am perfectly able to main, maul, molest, bend, fold, spindle, mutilate, and even kill those same characters. Because if you're not willing to do bad things to your characters, things that create tension and conflict, you don't really have a story.

By Saturday night careswen's neck was feeling better, but she was down because of missing the Meetup, and I was down from being hit with a big fat rejection as soon as I checked my email, so we called up pezwitch and williamofoccam to see if they wanted to get together. They graciously allowed us to invade their home for games and conversation and chocolate chip cookies.

I am blessed with great friends, and I am thankful for them all.

On that happy note, here's hoping you all have a wonderful rest of the weekend (and hopefully you had a wonderful weekend going on before that).

In Deep Peace
Michael

Meetup and Friends

Saturday's "Twin Cities Speculative Fiction Meetup Koffee Klatch with Patricia C. Wrede" was a success all around. Ms. Wrede was a joy to talk with, and she answered every question (questions ranging from "Is there anyway to make sense of a royalty statement?" to "When do you know if a crit is actually useful?" and dlandon asked some excellent questions about working with book editors) in a very thoughtful manner. All in all, I would not mind doing this again with some other local authors.

Other positives about Saturday's Meetup: Because of the way buses run on the weekend, I arrived way early, but so did dsgood and Jason Wittman, so I spent some time chatting with them before the event. It was nice getting to know them both a little better.

dlandon came to Meetup for the first time. We were introduced at Minicon, and I was able to talk with her a bit before the event started, which was pleasent.

Davanni's turned out to be a nice venue. They have a little, private room that allowed the group to have a close, intimate setting to talk, and the food was excellent.

The negatives about Saturday's Meetup: careswen ended up staying home after she sprained a muscle in her neck as we were getting ready to leave. I know she was disappointed about being stuck home on ice.

Because of my complete inability to order my thoughts quickly, I never managed to ask any questions, and pretty much sat there like a big old lump. Luckily, everyone else asked intelligent questions for our guest to answer.

One thing I did want to say, and never managed to get said, concerned something one of the Meetup members said about "liking his characters too much, both the protagonists and antagonists," and since I'll put a link to this blog post on the Meetup Message Board, I thought I'd go ahead and say what I wanted.

It's okay to really like your characters. In fact, I encourage you to care deeply about your characters. I like and empathize with all my characters, be they protags, villains, secondaries, or walk on cannon fodder. If I didn't identify with them, they wouldn't be real to me, and I wouldn't be able to write them as real people, and I want to make them real (well, as real as a fictional character can be) people, even the bit players.

That said, I am perfectly able to main, maul, molest, bend, fold, spindle, mutilate, and even kill those same characters. Because if you're not willing to do bad things to your characters, things that create tension and conflict, you don't really have a story.

By Saturday night careswen's neck was feeling better, but she was down because of missing the Meetup, and I was down from being hit with a big fat rejection as soon as I checked my email, so we called up pezwitch and williamofoccam to see if they wanted to get together. They graciously allowed us to invade their home for games and conversation and chocolate chip cookies.

I am blessed with great friends, and I am thankful for them all.

On that happy note, here's hoping you all have a wonderful rest of the weekend (and hopefully you had a wonderful weekend going on before that).

In Deep Peace
Michael