Yes, I’m shamelessly pilfering Wicked here, but you know : artists do steal from time to time.

This is supposed to be a short post about my Utopiales con from last week. We’ll see how short I can go.

I go to Utopiales every year (in Nantes) for several reasons:

• This con has been really good to me in the past. I got to meet wonderful people and spend time with them.
• They love to invite international writers. Since french people don’t speak English this well, I can have said writers to myself
• They mix science panels with literary panels. This pleases both the old physicist me and the new writer me.

So, how did this year go?

First, I had hoped to see our famous Dan Wells there. He was free this weekend and seemed interested, but the con’s schedule was already booked by the time I talked to him about it, so he couldn’t be there. Maybe he can join us next year, though only one week after WFC in Brighton, it might be difficult for everyone to stack 2 cons in a row.

Now, I did have a great time. I got to meet Nancy Kress, a very nice lady who happens to be a discovery writer too. We discussed a bit about discovery writing and middles, since those are a weak point in my writing. Imagine someone picking a car who wouldn’t know where to go? The resulting route isn’t nearly a direct line from start to finish, it’s a meandering path with dead ends, failed scenes and scenes that take off in unexpected ways until I stumble into an idea (usually about the 2/3 mark) and find my ending. She described her process in almost the same words, so I felt a kind of kinship here. When I asked her if there was some way to direct the trajectories to get a more direct path, she said no : you can either write too much and remove the extra or rewrite the whole thing once you know the story. I was kind of hoping to skip a bit of the editing part, but nope. She also mentioned that sometimes, the book doesn’t work. Either she doesn’t find the ending or it doesn’t work. In those cases, she has to scrap the whole project and do something else. That’s not good news to me : I spend too much time on my books to afford to lose one. Maybe it’s better than trying to sell at any cost a book that doesn’t work anyway.

I got to eat lunch with both Norman Spinrad and Michael Moorcock. Michael and I discussed about his ideas for distributing electronic contents (both words and music, as he’s a musician too). He didn’t think someone had already done it, but I mentioned that Kevin J. Anderson had a couple of books he had produced with a rock band, so Michael and him can discuss how Kevin did it.

A comment about the overall panels.

• First, please do stop putting college researchers as moderators. They spend 15 minutes to introduce the topic without even presenting the panelists. I come to hear what the panelists have to say, not what the moderator wrote in his thesis.
• Then, French writers seem to have different problems than the rest of us. They don’t need agents; get two-year contracts on electronic books; have their share of the cover price guaranteed by law. Different worlds. They don’t seem to care much about translation rights either. On the other hand, they don’t see themselves as storytellers, but as people wanting to make their readers think. It’s strange to me that a writer wouldn’t define itself as a storyteller first.
• The science panels were all interesting. If I had more time, there are a thousand of story ideas there.

I’m done for this post. Next one will be about ending ‘The Emerald Shower’ – weird stuff.