10/29/00 -- World Fantasy Con, Day 4

The last day and "How the hell am I going to get home, now?"

So Jennfire and I talked last night before we went to sleep.  Sounds familiar, huh.  We also remembered to change the clocks since it was daylight savings time.  The staff had been nice enough to slip a reminder under the doors yesterday.  Thankfully, we didn't need it.  Though I'm sure if they hadn't, we would've and we wouldn't've managed to get up in time this morning.

But we got up in time and made it downstairs with enough time to grab coffee and a muffin then get to the 10am panel we wanted to go to.  After the panel, we went to the dealer's room and talked with Gavin and Kelly for a little while, then we ran upstairs to get our stuff and check out (and talked with Beth Meachum while we were in line to check out because she was there behind us).  We left our stuff with the hotel, then headed out to the diner (again) to get lunch.  We talked.

It was a good talk.  It made me think.  It will probably continue to make me think for quite a while.  About what I want from life.  Because when I'm at work, I know what I want.  And when I'm around writers, I know what I want.  But they're not the same things.  And I need to figure out how to make them work together, or figure out which one I'm going to give up.

Anyway, after lunch, we went back to the hotel and wound up talking with Daniel Abraham, and one of his fellow CW98 classmates.  And then with the Swensons (the editors for Talebones) while we were waiting for the shuttle to take us to the airport.

And the airport. Oh, what a nightmare.  I was going to see Jennfire off, but her plane was delayed, so we said g'bye and I headed over to the terminal where my flight was supposed to leave.  Only the flight before it hadn't left yet.  It was a nightmare of delayed flights and the less said about it, the better.  Suffice it to say that I missed my connecting flight in Dallas, and didn't miss the second option by about 2 minutes once I finally got to Dallas.  And our flight left before the flight that was supposed to leave before us did.  There were people who had jumped to that earlier flight based on the theory that they'd get to Dallas earlier.  Whoo.  They were unhappy.

Lots of con people leaving the airport then.  Saw Scott Edleman over by Delta.  And Ted Chaing.  The two women on the plane with me going out were on the same plane coming back.  And every flight was packed.

Thanks to the psychotic driving of the courtesy zoom-zoom guy at the airport, I made it to my connecting flight, I made it onto the plane.  I made it home.  Thankfully.  Jonah and Boo picked me up at the airport.  I went home, unpacked, and repacked to go out of town tomorrow for work.

Anyway, here are some of my thoughts and scribbles from the panel I went to today:

10am  - Mining Myths

I suppose this panel went hand in hand with the mythology panel from last night, in some respects.

Most of the furniture and pottery and whatever could be carted away has been carted away.  Whatever could be looted has been looted.  But there is a whole lot of mythology left out there from other cultures, from other civilizations, a whole lot of oral tradition that hasn't been mined.

You can build on any myth system, twist them together.  Additionally, you can take current myth systems (from the twentieth century) and twist them with other, older myths to create something new.

Don't give up on Native American mythology, on northern or southern American mythology. There are a lot of ideas there, a lot that hasn't been done.  Gene Wolfe (who weaseled his way onto the panel) said, "Any writer who can't get a dozen stories out of the Day of the Dead should go into telephone solicitation."  Also, if a writer has already touched on a mythology, that doesn't mean it can't be done again, because it has been touched does not take it away.  You can always do something new and different with things that have been done before.

Panelists mentioned some mythologies that haven't been touched on too heavily.  They mentioned Alaskan, Middle Eastern, African, Far Eastern, and Aboriginal Australian mythologies as areas that haven't been mined very heavily.  Additionally, in the twentieth century, you have the myth of celebrities, modern myths like voodoo, and a blending of beliefs to create mew mythologies.  Also, they said that your audience shouldn't have to have a deep understanding of the myth system if you've written the story well.

The thought I'll leave you with from this panel is this: Myth is stronger than allegory.