When Life Skips a Beat

What happened to November? When November started, I was in Florida, attending conventions and theme parks and fighting a sore throat. I came home, got through the sore throat and on Thanksgiving Day, we headed for a con in Indianapolis. (Note to self – pack sandwiches for the day when traveling on a major holiday – we could not find any restaurants open during the drive nor when we got there.) Got home from that and had to start Christmas shopping. On November 30^th, I fell on a frozen patch of sidewalk that looked bone dry. After a week of aching and hobbling around the house, I woke up realizing that I’d been so busy with other things all this time, I’d forgotten … my blog!

Sometimes life is like that. You get so busy, juggling so many things, that it’s easy for something to slip out of the mix and you don’t notice it for some time. It’s a real pain when it happens in your life.

It should be a real pain to a fictional character, too, if the author chooses to use it as a device to move the plot forward. If the heroine is too busy to remember to hire a handyman to clean out her gutters, a hard rain could overflow those gutters and flood her basement. The new neighbor who’s been trying to meet her might come to her rescue when he sees her out in the downpour, trying to wrestle a ladder into position. After he cleans out her gutter so it isn’t overflowing, she pulls him inside to dry off, and … nature takes over. (Thanks, Linda, for that suggestion.) But hot neighbor aside, she still needs to dry out and clean up her basement. If she forgets to do that, she’ll have a mold problem to deal with!

This kind of thing happens to everybody. Or at least, it happens to enough people that people say it happens to everybody. So it wouldn’t be out of line for it to happen in a story … as long as ‘fallen balls’ don’t run rampant throughout the story. And now I have to try not to let it happen again in my story.

Necronomicon

This post was actually written on Oct 28, 2012, but I didn't have access to the internet to get it posted.

My husband and I have been exploring some Florida conventions these last few years, and particularly this year. This weekend, we have been at Necronomicon, a 31-year-old sf convention held in Tampa/St Petersburg.

I like this con! Even though there are apparently no ‘big publishers’ in attendance, or even any big book sellers, this con is strongly centered on books. There are a number of small presses and self-published authors here, eager to share whatever knowledge they have gleaned with others. So there are plenty of panels that concentrate on writing, contracts and so on. Even though these panels might be touching on subjects that I may have heard about at many other conventions over the years, I am hearing them discussed by authors I haven’t already heard a dozen times. And publishing is in such flux right now, it is good to get information from as many sources as you can.

Many of the panelists here also have some sort of science background, so there are panels on science subjects also. I have always like science, but I seldom seem to see science panels at the midwest conventions I usually attend. These are not ‘classes’ like one would take in school, but discussions on a specific topic that sometimes wander off topic, sometimes get a bit silly, but they are entertaining and also a call to a person’s curiosity. Certainly they have called to mine.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that this is all that is happening at Necronomicon. Absolutely not. There are several rooms devoted to gaming, both tabletop and computer, a video room, dealer’s room and art show... . A concert on Saturday night preceded the costume call. And the costumes run the gamut from D&D characters to anime, Dr Who, Joker & Harlequin, Poison Ivy, steampunk, space armor, Chathulu - a wonderful pantheon of imagination and craftsmanship!

I’m going to give some serious thought to coming back next year.