Skip to main content

Updated Schedule for Arisia 2018


Next week is Arisia 2018 and I'm on a few panels you might be interested in. In addition to my first couple of writing panels, I'll be joining in conversations about ghosts, haunted houses, and Steven King. If you find yourself at the convention, please consider stopping by!

In order of occurrence with location, time, participants and brief panel description:


Writing Horror, the Occult, and the Macabre 
Bulfinch (3W), 8:30pm - 9:45pm
From the revival of Stephen King's dark fantasy series 'The Gunslinger' to long-running post-apocalyptic dramas such as 'The Walking Dead,' horror is hot ... it just lurks under different names. Come learn how to use the horror conventions to ramp up suspense, weave the supernatural into your stories, use real-life elements to prey upon your audience's fears, and how you can create your OWN dark and edgy worlds where no character is safe and morality is not always clear.

Horror Reading Panel 
Hale (3W), 10pm - 11:15pm
Douglas Wynne and I will be reading their own work of terror and suspense. My plan is to read excerpts from "Implicate Order" and two other flash pieces published this year. 

It Came From the Past…
Douglas (3W), 8:30am - 9:45am
Morven Westfield (moderator), ML Brennan, Hillary Monahan, Darcie Little Badger, Morgan Crooks Ghosts often appear in stories as signifiers of old crimes, guilt, and injustice that needs to be corrected. In this panel, we'll face the accusing ghosts, the avenging ghosts, and the ghosts who remind us of things done wrong. Why does the ghost work so well as a visitor from the past? How can ghosts lead readers to a better understanding of injustice and history? What ghosts need to be summoned to remind readers of what has gone on before?

Emotional Impact — How to Make Readers Care
Faneuil (3W), 1pm - 2:15pm
E. C. Ambrose (moderator), Timothy Goyette, ML Brennan, Jeanne Cavelos, Morgan Crooks No matter how great your plot is, if the readers don’t care, you’ll slip to the bottom to the to-be-read pile. Come learn how to use emotional stakes to add conflict to every page, use transformational arcs to create an inner struggle, delineate compelling flaws without losing reader sympathy, make your audience connect on a primal level, and create stories and characters that break readers’ hearts and keep them turning pages.

2017: The Year in Stephen King
Burroughs (3E), 8:30pm - 9:45pm
Griffin Ess (moderator), Genevieve Leonard, Tom Deady, Deirdre Crimmins, Morgan Crooks 2017 saw the release of both "The Dark Tower" and the first chapter of the remake of *It*, both long-awaited adaptations of two of Stephen King's most iconic properties. Additionally, "The Mist" made its way to television screens. It was a busy year for fans of King's stories, but was it a successful one?

Houses of the Dead: Haunted Houses in Fiction
Alcott (3W), 2:30pm - 3:45pm
Andrea Corbin (moderator), Gordon Linzner, Leigh Perry, Lauren M. Roy, Morgan Crooks Many popular genre staples, such as Shirley Jackson's "Haunting of Hill House," Mark Z. Danielewski’s "House of Leaves," and many of Stephen King's works, feature haunted houses. What is it about a confined haunted space draws us in and keeps us hooked? And what can this tell us about ourselves?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation.  Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...

A Reaction to Peter Watts' "Echopraxia"

Peter Watts’ Echopraxia  is a side-sequel to his previous hard sf horror novel  Blindsight . Daniel Bruks, a biologist in the Eastern Oregonian desert, gets stuck in the middle of a war between a fugitive vampire and a cult of rewired post-humans called Bicamerals, ultimately kidnapped by them as they head towards the sun. The goal of post-human and vampire alike is to investigate a possible alien intelligence gaining strength there, to determine if it poses a threat, or offers a weapon for the two sides as they struggle for advantage. Bruks' goal is simple survival. Reading Watts is a simultaneously bracing and discouraging experience. Bracing because his depiction of the future and the oddities who inhabit it continue to get better and better, his plots more complicated and more involving, his characters less like sock-puppets for his ideas and more like actual human beings (or whatevers). Discouraging because Watts uses his considerable gifts, artistic and academic, ...

The Dorsia Brevia Solution

While "Green Mars," didn't include nearly as much mind-blowing speculative awesomeness as the first book in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, it did include one set-piece that I enjoyed very much: The Dorsa Brevia Declaration. As mentioned in my review earlier this week, the plot of Green Mars focuses on the approach of a second Martian revolution. The first revolution, as described in Red Mars, was a spasm of senseless violence, mayhem, and targeted assassination, accomplishing little besides the deaths of many, many important characters in the story. As would-be revolutionaries gather in an enormous lava tube named Dorsa Brevia, the central question is how would any future revolution escape the fate of the first. The process, which I'll describe below, was very familiar to me. During the course of my path to teaching history in Middle School, I worked at an afterschool program named Citizen Schools based in Boston. Citizen Schools had its ups and down...