Tag: Carrie Ryan

ConCarolinas: Day 3 (the final chapter)

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

It’s tough for a day 3 to live up to a day 2 at any Con.  For me, this day three was no exception.  Everything was pleasant enough, but not special.  Some very nice panels that have inspired me to do posts on a few different topics that are of great interest to me: rejectomancy, advertising, and YA, to name a few.  I bought a book, got talked into Kindle-buying another.  And, against my better judgment, I left a few hours early.  It’s fun to be one of the last ones out the door because it increases recognition and conversation among the other late-stayers, but I was tired and missed the rugrat.

The best part of day 3 had nothing to do with the con.  (Not THIS can, anyway.)  I’m not 100% sure how vocal I should be bout it (he decided after flapping his gums to a few friends) so I won’t spell anything out.  Let’s just say that, thanks to a friend, I have a new reason to explore steampunk.  This was good news and made me a happy writer.

As a whole, it was a good weekend.  I made some new friends.  Some pros recognized me and struck up conversations on their own.  I got to know some pros (see day 2): develop a tiny crush on Faith Hunter and refueled a pre-existing tiny crush on Carrie Ryan.  (Nothing tazer-worthy, just a harmless smirking fanboy kind of thing.)  Expanded horizons.  Had fun.

Did attending this Con further my career?  Not per say.  What I did was build up my people network.  I turned strangers into acquaintances and acquaintances into friends.  You’ve heard the expression, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”  I always thought that was kind of a sinister saying.  In this case, it’s more about having a friendly faces along the road.  When my career gets off of blocks in the front yard, it will go somewhere.  Wouldn’t it be nice to get there and know someone?  Even better to know ten people?  If I feel like I belong a that stop, it will make it that much easier to move on to the next.  Okay, I’ve retyped this metaphor six ways and it’s still not working, so I’m leaving it.  If a decent metaphor comes to me, I’ll make a whole post about it.

It’s late.  Brain…failing.  Must sleep.  ____________

Hands, Teeth, and Pitchforks

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

I know I’ve said it before, so I guess this makes be-five; I dig zombies.  I’m not generally a horror guy.  Never got into Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th or Halloween.  Not much of a vampires versus werewolves enthusiast.  Hauntings and demons freak me out.  But I dig zombies.

I just finished (a couple nights ago, while on vacation) Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth.  It’s been mentioned in my sidebar for a while and in an old post or two.  It’s YA (young adult) and very much centered in the mind of a female teen.  Had I been less motivated to get into the book, I might not have.  Why?  I’m a man in his thirties, hardly the target demographic.  Had I not met Carrie and been so impressed with her at ConCarolinas, I never would have picked the book up.

I’m glad I did.

TFHT is set well after the zombie apocalypse has occurred, so much after that the characters don’t know a life before.  Stories still exist; those paired with a pheromone-driven kind of love are the driving force behind the characters and hence the plot.  Oh, and some desperation.

I spent way more time inside the main character’s head experiencing her very narrow selection of emotions and topics.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing since I do work with teen girls and they seem to have very limited catalogs as well.  It was, for lack of better terminology, a bit more “angsty” than I usually prefer.  (Is that a word?  No; no it’s not.)  This is angsty in the Twilight style.  Ooh, I just did the unthinkable, comparing a book I liked to Twilight.  Maybe I should say it’s ansty the way Twilight should have been.  The angst did drive characters to act rashly and lose focus and do things a normal person might not do, but no one ever became even temporarily stupid.  Sentimental, yes.  Paralyzed, yes.  But never stupid.  (Thank you for that, Carrie.  I get enough stupid elsewhere.)

The plot arc starts out complicated and gets much more linear in the end; again, not a complaint, just a necessity of the way it’s written.  Actions had consequences and consequences required action.  It was a plot that moved and the characters sometimes pushed the plot and other times were swept away by it.

I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss the zombies themselves.  Excellently devised and explained.  The zombies, you see, are outside the fence; people are inside.  So what do the zombies do?  Go after the fence, of course.  This leaves their fingers broken and cut and hideous.  It was a well that was visited often, but the descriptions were always graphic.  Besides, if the fingers are what penetrate into your world, that’s what you notice.  Their fingers are like sharks’ dorsal fins that way.

Will I read the sequel, The Dead-Tossed Waves?  Eventually, I suspect.  What better endorsement could there be?  I guess I could be typing furiously on Amazon to get it, but the book’s just a little too far from my zone to be that enthusiastic.  If you like zombies or teen angst, you will likely enjoy this book.  If you like both, you’ll love it.

So what did that have to do with the pitchforks in the title?  I also watched (the new version of) The Crazies.  Zombie movie?  Eh, close enough for me.  And it rocked.  A lot purer a science fiction movie than most zombie films, it was sufficiently disturbing and violent without being ridiculous.  The whole pitchfork scene was very disturbing, more from a stress and anticipation angle than anything else.  And the notion that the crazies are not undead, just…well, crazy, made the plot that much more credible.

Oh, the plot had faults, but not too many.  It might have been better if the words “stay here” had been purged from the script.  And let’s discuss the foolishness of wasting ammo.

Sufficiently scary.  I still have to take the dogs out tonight, so we’ll see how freaked out I ended up.  If there’s a human outside, I’ll surely scream like a little girl.  In my defense, I can’t see any neighbors from my house so no one should be out there.

Post Con Report

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

While I have nothing to compare it to, I think ConCarolinas was about the right size and design for my sensibilities.  The writers’ track seemed to be very strong.  Attendance was strong.  And it was fun, right down to the last panel.

I sat in a couple of Jerry Pournelle‘s panels.  He is an opinionated man with a wealth of experience, not all of which he was able to express.  He was honest in a way only older people tend to be, pulling no punches.  For instance, he insisted he couldn’t pass along any advice on how to collaborate, as he has with Niven and others to huge commercial success.  But then he had advice on how to do it.  For instance, you both have to do 90% of the work.  I didn’t get around to getting him to sign anything for me (I only had one obscure book of his), but I valued his advice.

John Ringo, on the other hand, signed a copy of my friend’s book for me.  He assured me it was a collector’s item — a (now signed) hardback Hymn Before Battle, his first novel, I believe.  Sadly, not my book.  But Ringo had plenty of thoughts to share.  I was astonished how much research he could pull off the top of his head.  I missed his presence at the Hard Science Fiction panel (he was hydrating through it), but did hear his opinions on the writing of military sf, probably more his dish. Not an easy guy to converse with, I suspect, but if you can hold his interest, he’s quite brilliant.

Another author I was quite impressed with was Connie Ryan, author of The Forest of Hands and Teeth.  So impressed, I picked up that book today at Wal-Mart.  I was impressed to find it there, despite being a New York Times top ten YA book — our Wal-Mart doesn’t have much of a book selection.  She was kind enough to step in for a panel that was completely canceled, the one on breaking into the writing business.  It was well attended and she didn’t want to disappoint all us wannabes, so she gave a brief history of her career and fielded questions.  She wasn’t even supposed to be on the panel.  She was very personable for someone on the verge of super success: FHT has been optioned for movie rights and is (as I mentioned) on the NYT best seller list.  In all I think I saw four of her panels (including the impromptu one) and was impressed by her each time.

I met other authors.  The ones from Codex will likely even remember me.  J.F. Lewis kept greeting me by name.  I had a good discussion with IGMS editor Ed Schubert about what he wanted to see for his zine and other less on-the-nose stuff.  Nice guys, both.  Allen Wold impressed me tremendously as both moderator and teacher; tons of wisdom, that man has.  Like Yoda with a long beard.

The costuming was amusing but not my thing.  I was never there late enough to see the NC-17 costumes, but I saw a few revealing ones; they all seemed to lack the effort that went into the more authentic costumes.  The Sesame Street alien was pretty funny.  I think that may have been crossing into the real of furries, so I’ll digress.

Having never been to a con, I wasn’t sure what to expect of my fellow attendees.  There were a few that cranked the nerd scale way over to the socially deficient side, but most were just folks like me, enough that I’ve decided I need wilder Hawaiian shirts if I’m going to stand out as “the Hawaiian shirt guy.”  Oh well.

I did wish there was time for more audience involvement in the panels.  They were mostly a table of Guests having a discussion among themselves for our amusement without quite addressing the questions we wanted to hear.  A few attendees were brazen enough to butt into the dialog, but not many.  I did manage to heckle the first panel I saw, but one of the guys made a (alleged) joke and he told the crowd we were allowed to laugh.  I just suggested he should say something funny first.  It was an auspicious beginning; I reigned it in afterward.  🙂

I hope to return next year, preferably as a guest.  *crosses fingers* Next year’s writing GoH is alternative history guru Harry Turtledove.  It doesn’t seem to be in the cards for me to make it to any other cons this summer, just the WotF workshop.  As if that’s not enough networking.