Sunday Night: the Last Con*cept Blog Post (for now)

Well, that was a pretty good end to a pretty good weekend.

Spent most of the day in the dealer's room, selling books and getting one more chance to talk to people before they headed on their way. Sold a lot of copies of Small Magics and a fair number of Cold Magics. Had several people who'd bought Small Magics on Saturday come back for Cold Magics on Sunday, just based on their reading Saturday night. That was a very nice feeling indeed.

My panel today was "Killing Your Babies," which was all about editing and the joys of realizing that that amazingly cool scene/character/description/idea/philosophy that you just know was the perfect thing when you wrote it is the thing you need to cut from the book. And if ever there was a group of people qualified to talk about it, it was my fellow panelists. From closest to furthest from me (I was sitting on the end of the table and moderating! I was moderating this group! cool!), there was Tad Williams, Marie Bilodeau, Violette Milan, and Deborah Beale!

It was a wide-ranging discussion with lots of great audience participation and lots of great stories from the writers at the table. In the course of talking about editing, we shared some of our favourite/most horrifying story realizations, discussed the "Disneyfication" of popular culture and the many times all of us have either written or read something which we know needed to be cut out.

Great fun, and an excellent panel to end on.

Then, to make things even cooler, I got an interview with Angela Roberts from The Gloaming. She asked some great questions, and I hope I wasn't talking too much in my answers. Thanks, Angela!

And speaking of thank you's, my thanks to everyone at Con*cept for having me as a panelist and treating all of us so well. And my deep, deep thanks to Marie Bilodeau, my partner in crime and at the Dragon Moon Press table for the weekend, who kept us both laughing through the weekend, translated for those whose who spoke mostly French but still wanted to know what my book was about, and for finding us great breakfast spots two days running.

To everyone new I met, and to everyone I got to see once again, merci beaucoup, et au revoir until next time!