MileHiCon Schedule

I will be at MileHiCon at the end of this week, and I have my schedule now:

Saturday at 11:00AM in Grand Mesa 8c: Researching Fiction (my favorite thing) How do you do research for fiction? What are good places too look? How much is too much?

Saturday at Noon in Mesa Verde C: Reading with Stant Litore. If I have the right guy, he's writing zombie horror, so it could get pretty ugly. :) (I might not have the right guy. Ask me some time about the exquisite corpse reading I was in once. The dangers of searching the interwebs.) I'm not sure what I'm going to read yet, but I may polish up one of my unpublished short stories from the Brass and Steel universe. Probably not the 7500 word one.

Saturday at 2:00pm in Wind River B: Future of Biology and Medicine. Where are we now, what do we see becoming science fact, limitations of genetic research, new medical tech.

The rest of the time I'll be wandering around like all the other fans. :)

-JRS

Prodigal Son: Finished

Okay yeah, I started this story back in April, when it was known as The Color of Blood. I put it down a couple times to do other things - write another story whose approach I already understood, spend two weeks in Virginia on family matters, etc etc, but I finally got the dang thing done. It needs tinkering and tightening yet, but all its guts are in place and it breathes on its own. It's a Brass and Steel story. It's very much about race. Normally I try to avoid this topic, mostly by saying "it's 20 years in the future, we're long past /that/. People are people. Deal." I like to challenge myself to do things I haven't done before, and to touch subjects that scare me to work on, but sheesh. Anyway. When it's finally polished out, I think, I hope, it will be a good story that rings right for all concerned.

frustration

The most frustrating thing about writing preqel stories to Brass and Steel: Inferno, is that all my favorite antique methods and mechanisms are still anachronisms. Today: carbon-zinc dry cells (invented 1886) and Bowden cables (invented 1896). Previously: bicycles as we know them today - aka Safety Bicycles, that is, a bicycle which has two wheels of about the same size and your feet can touch the ground while riding. (Invented: 1879, but the bike boom didn't happen until the 1890s).

The stories? They Also Serve (Tentatively named, set in 1887) and A Boy's Life (Set in 1883). The technology in The Color of Blood (Set in 1883) is pretty much fantastical anyway, so fewer problems with that. It's just interesting (if frustrating) how sharply the technosphere I'm used to cuts off in the late 19th century. -JRS