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rickthefightguy!]
My one weakness, when it comes to panels and such, is that I don't actually come up with novel ideas well on-the-fly. I'm great at answering questions, and once I get started on something I can expand on it endlessly, but starting a conversation is fairly hard for me. (It's one reason whyhungrytiger and I make such a good game-writing team: he's particularly good at coming up with ideas, and I'm particularly good at fleshing them out.)
So I've just spent an hour coming up with topics for my Arisia panels, and I'm feeling a lot more secure about them now. On the really interesting panels ("The Ephemeral City", "Making a Video Game 101", "The Future of Online Community" and "Secret Societies in Fiction"), I wound up with so many notes that I suspect I could talk for the entire hour myself, and I'm going to have to force myself to shut up and let everybody else talk. "Secret Societies in Fiction" started looking a lot more interesting to me once I realized that I can and should speak to the question of how a secret society really works in practice, and how that can inform writing better fiction. And really, I expect all four panels to be a blast: they're deep and interesting topics that could easily take four times as long a discussion.
I should note for the future, though, to volunteer for fewer comics panels. They make up half my panels (4 out of 8), and I can do all of them easily enough, but I'm notably less passionate about them than I am the other topics, and with the exception of "The Best Indie Comics You're Not Reading" I have a lot fewer notes on them than on my other panels. I love the subject, but I don't love it that much more than all other subjects. So next year, I should mark down fewer on comics and more on Stuff in general. (Or simply put down a note to sign me up for no more than 2 comics panels...)
rickthefightguy!]My one weakness, when it comes to panels and such, is that I don't actually come up with novel ideas well on-the-fly. I'm great at answering questions, and once I get started on something I can expand on it endlessly, but starting a conversation is fairly hard for me. (It's one reason why
hungrytiger and I make such a good game-writing team: he's particularly good at coming up with ideas, and I'm particularly good at fleshing them out.)So I've just spent an hour coming up with topics for my Arisia panels, and I'm feeling a lot more secure about them now. On the really interesting panels ("The Ephemeral City", "Making a Video Game 101", "The Future of Online Community" and "Secret Societies in Fiction"), I wound up with so many notes that I suspect I could talk for the entire hour myself, and I'm going to have to force myself to shut up and let everybody else talk. "Secret Societies in Fiction" started looking a lot more interesting to me once I realized that I can and should speak to the question of how a secret society really works in practice, and how that can inform writing better fiction. And really, I expect all four panels to be a blast: they're deep and interesting topics that could easily take four times as long a discussion.
I should note for the future, though, to volunteer for fewer comics panels. They make up half my panels (4 out of 8), and I can do all of them easily enough, but I'm notably less passionate about them than I am the other topics, and with the exception of "The Best Indie Comics You're Not Reading" I have a lot fewer notes on them than on my other panels. I love the subject, but I don't love it that much more than all other subjects. So next year, I should mark down fewer on comics and more on Stuff in general. (Or simply put down a note to sign me up for no more than 2 comics panels...)