Kristin Janz

Donald and I will be at the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego next week. After years of attending conventions and sitting in on panels (or not, mostly–I’ve been known to attend a convention without taking in a single panel), I’m finally going to be on one (scroll down to the bottom of the page).

The panel is on “Magic and Metaphysics”.  Here’s the description:

What makes a magic system believable? Authors and world builders create the rules that govern their magic when the whole point of magic, one would think, is to break the rules.  Is it reasonable to try to constrain magic by the laws of nature?  Bonewitz proposed a whole set of rules based on principles such as similarity and contagion? Is a logical and consistent magical system actually magic?

For those of you unfamiliar with the whole fantasy/science fiction convention circuit, and panels, I sit at the front of a room with three other people, and we discuss this topic amongst ourselves for the entertainment of an audience, and then maybe take questions at the end.

I’m definitely going to be the least qualified panelist, with my 6 published short stories (and 2 pending).  My co-panelists are Mark Teppo and Peter Orullian, both of whom have published multiple novels and short stories, and Ted Chiang, who’s exclusively a short fiction author, but a multiply-award-winning one.  But I’m excited about this opportunity to participate in an interesting discussion with some more experienced authors; hopefully I won’t embarrass myself too much!

If you’re going to be at World Fantasy, and you like panels, I hope you’ll come!  It’s in Pacific 2/3 at 10 pm on Thursday night.

I’m also excited to be seeing many of my classmates from Clarion West 2008 at World Fantasy this year.  Our class is having a reunion, and while not everyone is able to attend, over half of us will be there.  Caren Gussoff is on a panel at 4 pm on Saturday, and Rajan Khanna has a reading at 11:30 am on Saturday.

I know I’ve been lax about blogging lately, but I’ll try to write up some posts about the con either during or after.

If you like listening to stories instead of (or in addition to) reading them, an audio version of my story “Sons of God, Daughters of Men” is now available at Strange, Weird, and Wonderful Magazine (scroll down a little and look on the right-hand side, under “Audio Short Stories”).  The text version is also still available here.

I did the narration myself, using my desktop computer with a USB plug-in mic.  It was an interesting experience.  When I listened to the first take, I noticed that I could hear a distracting popping sound whenever I pronounced the letter “p” (and sometimes the letter “b” and a few others).  This is a known phenomenon, caused by puffs of air emitted with aspirated letters hitting the microphone (if you want to do an internet search and learn more, be sure to search for “popping p’s”, not “p-popping”, or you’ll learn about … other things).  I was able to eliminate the problem in the final take by holding a jury-rigged microphone filter–made out of an old knee-high nylon stocking stretched over a wire coathanger–between my mouth and the mic. But then it was a bit difficult to also hold the reading copy of the story I’d printed out in the other hand at an angle such that I could see it past the pantyhose-covered coathanger. Eventually, I settled on reading from my laptop while recording on the desktop, my eyes darting from text to mic to recording outputs. A little awkward, but functional.

Makeshift microphone filter

I’m not sure I’m entirely happy with my reading performance, but I’m not a voice actor and I’d never done this before. I think I overcompensate at the beginning for my fear that I might read too quickly, and my pauses between sentences are overly long. It does improve as I get more into the story. If I were doing this again, I might re-record the opening, and splice it into the current draft. But I was also learning how to use the recording software and wasn’t sure I’d figure out how to do that. (Turns out I had to, as I dropped something at one point, and had to cut out the clatter and subsequent gap in narration while I recollected myself.)

I gave this warning when I originally posted about the story being out in the magazine in the spring, but just to reiterate, it’s the least kid-friendly story I’ve ever written (sex with demons!), so probably not appropriate for story time with the young ones.

It’s been over a month since I last posted. Shame on me! However, having not yet discovered the magic formula where I avoid distractions all day and get as much writing done as I think I should, I figured I would at least use the time spent sitting at my computer for actual fiction writing, rather than blogging about fiction writing (or about all the cooking I’m doing instead of fiction writing).

I would be remiss in my wifely duties, though, if I failed to mention that my husband Donald’s short story “Her Majesty’s Guardian” is now out in Daily Science Fiction, an excellent online magazine.  If you’re already a subscriber, you would have received this in your email inbox a week ago, but now it’s live on the website for everyone to enjoy.  It’s a great story, and very short, so I hope you’ll all have a chance to read it.

Here’s a picture of Donald for you to enjoy, from our Italian honeymoon back in May.  This was taken in an ancient tavern in Ostia Antica, the old port of Rome at the mouth of the Tiber River.

Donald posing as an ancient Roman bartender

Speaking of ancient Rome, Donald and I are thrilled to be “embark[ing] on a culinary exploration of ancient Pompeii” tonight, with help from the Museum of Science.  Donald is excited that all the courses include some sort of meat.  I’m hoping that the wine pairings won’t be served traditional style (i.e., diluted 3:1 with water).