avrelia

a recent post in coffeemakers has brought to my mind a memory of one Writercon 200 panel that I always wanted to write about, but always forgot. Now, though, I have an ulterior motive to do it - and nothing pushes me better.

so, two years ago at Writercon 2006, there was a panel I don't remember a name of. or who was there, besides me. sorry about that. on that panel we discussed the relationships between the setting and the story being told. I raised a question of setting in BtVS - how setting reflects the story, and more importantly, Buffy's state of mind. Buffy comes from L.A. to a "one-Starbucks' town". It does not matter how many Starbucks are there and why (didn't sacrifice enough virgins? lost the best spot to Sunnydale High?). Vancouver after Moscow felt to me as a "one-Starbucks' town", even though Moscow doesn't have any Starbucks to my knowledge, and Vancouver - quite a lot. it's all about the feeling inside. Sunnydale grows over the first years, together with Buffy's world and her interactions with it, reaching its largest size, I think, in season four with a shine bright huge campus. Then, in season 5 it starts shrinking and in season 6 we hardly see anything but cemetery, house, Magic shop and DMP. and we don't notice the absence of the world, not really. In season 7 the world forcefully reminds us about itself - here are we in England, here we are in Berlin, Istanbul, etc - and here is the whole world comes crushing to a small house on Revello drive, giving us a slightly claustrophobic feeling. This centripetal motion ends up with the big explosion, giving Buffy the whole world with that wonderful last shot.

the thought itself was not too original or super-amazing, but it gave start to a curious discussion: a lady got up and said that that claustrophobic feeling was due to shrinking production values and not higher creative considerations. I actually don't remember what was said after and by whom, but my perfect answer as always came to me later. here it is: thank you, and we also know that vampires and slayers don't exist, but we still discuss their relationships and meanings.

I am back home from the Writercon and trying to post something relatively sensible and not consisting of the list of names with my squees attached (at least not only).

The Writercon was all kinds of awesome and I am very glad I was able to go there. I've got to hang out with various cool people - those I knew before and some met in the first time; I've got to listen to interesting discussions and occasionally mumble something of my own; I've got to get some useful information and some gossip; I've got to drink and dance a lot; I've got to wear stuff I have nowhere to wear usually and generally had a jolly good time.

The only thing I wish for: More! More! (of everything mentioned above)

There is so much to tell, I am getting lost, so I'll probably post bits and pieces and then some more bits and pieces.

1) The whole pattern of our communication there was not unlike it is here, on LJ. People grouped with those who they know and share fandom / views. the smaller fandom circles are overlapping or fit inside of a larger circle and people could meet new folk from those overreaching circles. On the other with some circles we never crossed. I, for example, was hanging out with folk from my f-list that I know and love: sweet_ali, fer1213, molly_may, st_saliery, soundingsea, missmurichson, revdorothyl, ascian3 and also with poshcat and marsterslady, I've met some awesome people, whose LJ handles seemed familiar, but whom I didn't actually know: musing_mia, lisalamona, hazel75 and many more (ok, this part of this list can be endless, so I just stop here - I met a lot of awesome people); I also met a lot of cool folk about whom I had never heard before.
As I do here, online, I lurked - except lurking online in public posts is very different from lurking in person. I mean, you are actually lurking here. Or actually stalking. I found myself following exactly same patterns with talking to people I don't know well as I do

2) meeting people from The Internets is not scary at all. Probably the fact that we all are axe murderers and deviants (AKA giant dorks) helped. I know, I felt very confident about it, especially remembering the Serial Killers convention in Sandman. Were there expectations met? Well...
a) I found that personality-wise the people are exactly the same as I knew them through their posts. and if we knew each other through LJ reasonably well, we hit it off immediately, and it didn't feel like the first meeting at all. otherwise, it took some time and talk to start squeeing over each other. ;)
b) appearance-wise, people were much prettier than their pre-con photos and self-descriptions led me to believe.

3) the panels I was at (as a panellist or just in an audience) were mostly great. Pity the best ones were too short. My favourite so far is the last one: Magic, Science and Technology - we hit some really cool thoughts and didn't have nearly enough time to explore them. (the fact that the most interesting ideas came to me when the time was over didn't help, either).

4) There was A LOT of drinking and dancing, and it was GOOD.

5) Apparently, my LJ name is unpronounceable. Who would have guessed? Hee. It's not as bad as some though. and even knowing our real names, we still think of each other as our LJ names.

6) carmen_sandiego did a tarot card reading for me with her Buffy deck, and we had an interesting discussion about whether Fred or Willow is better suited to be the Queen of swords.

7) there was a lot of folk flying from Toronto to Writercon on the same flight. Basically, we occupied half of the plane. ;)

More people, panels and pictures later.