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Boskone 43

I'll be in Boston February 17-19 for Boskone 43 at the Boston Sheraton, one of the best of the regional SF conventions. You can find me on these panels:

Friday 9:00 pm Hampton: Building Worlds with History

It is almost trite these days to note the layers of deep history that underlay Lord of the Rings and gave it depth and richness missing from fantasy like Conan. OK, a world needs history which never shows up in the stories. How do you go about building that history? Do you need to be a real-world history buff? Do you copy from our history or make it up from whole cloth? Is there such a thing as too much history for the good of the story or the good of the writer? Should an aspiring fantasy writer start out by constructing the history or does the history just grow?

Darlene Marshall, Debra Doyle, Leigh Grossman (m), Naomi Novik

Sunday 10:00 am Hampton: What I Do When I Should Be Writing

G.B. Shaw said of the English encyclopedist Samuel Johnson, "I have not wasted my time trifling with literary fools in taverns as Johnson did when he should have been shaking England with the thunder of his spirit." Done any tavern-trifling yourself lately? How abut TV watching? Web surfing? Cat vacuuming? How else do you distract yourself from getting any work done....and how do you get back to the writing?

Darlene Marshall (m), Beth Bernobich, Sarah Monette, Steven Popkes, Wen Spencer

Sunday 1:00 pm Kent: Nautical Novels

Sea stories of the age of fighting sail.....pirates.....shrimp boats? Why do so many fans like this stuff? (Hmm, well, maybe not the shrimp boats.) Perhaps a cruise is like a convention; we all embark together into a small but stimulating environment with its own rich customs (sodomy and the lash?), language, hierarchy, smells, jokes.....

Darlene Marshall (m), Beth Bernobich, James D. Macdonald, Jim Mann, Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Hope to see some of you there!

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