#nerdcon stories

[thelingspace]

Our director Adele was at NerdCon: Stories in Minneapolis on October 14 and 15. She met a lot of cool authors and creators, and took the opportunity to interview Paolo Bacigalupi, Rachel Kann, Liz Andrews, M. T. Anderson, and Blue Delliquanti about their favourite words. They had some interesting choices to share!

[garrettauthor]

Day 2 of Nerdcon: Stories is captured, though in a woefully inadequate way, in today's video. Seriously y'all. It's practically impossible to even begin to explain this event.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBww8pd_Kmg)

[brehatano]

Many artists and storytellers do live with mental illness. But many don’t. And what I want to say today I guess is that you can be sane and be an artist, and also that if you are sick, getting help — although it is hard and exhausting and inexcusably difficult to access — will not make you less of an artist.

John Green, My NerdCon Stories Talk about Mental Illness and Creativity

[imaginationnerd]

My experience at the 2nd Annual NerdCon: Stories!

[paintmyspirit-opal]

My friend got these for free from Karen Hallion this weekend! She heard my story and decided to gift me the postcards and the sketch. So nice!!

[pleiadeshenderson]

One Month One Book - October: Shadowshaper

Shadowshaper - Daniel José Older (2015)

When I heard @danieljose reading from Shadowshaper during the first morning variety show of NerdCon: Stories this past weekend, in Minneapolis, Kevin MacLeod was providing live background music for this exhilarating scene of the book’s protagonist, Sierra Santiago, discovering some of the things she could do with her newfound ability to magically infuse her art with willing spirits, and it was GREAT. And I pretty much immediately ran to the Expo Hall and bought his book for my friend Moti, as a thank-you present for catsitting for me while I was away.

Of course I read it first.

Shadowshaper is incredibly fun and exciting and delightful and tense in all the right ways. It is full of smart, caring, fallible people who feel real, whether the stuff they’re dealing with is familiar (body image, crushes, owning your heritage) or unfamiliar (necromancy, animated murals, etc). The world Older builds is a riot of colour and movement and heart, rooted in contemporary Brooklyn and rooted deeper in the many traditions carried by the borough’s diverse inhabitants. The whole thing is shot through with magic that feels old, magic that feels vibrant and as incredibly full of life as the shadows that inhabit the corners of the world (”The dead were so alive! They carried their whole lives with them in those tall, walking shadows, brought each second, each thrill and tragedy with them wherever they went.”). There’s so much energy there that reading Shadowshaper feels like plunging into it, like being buoyed up by the same timeless force of life and love that surrounds the characters in the book’s most spiritual moments.

Also Sierra is a freaking badass and I love her. 

She’s a badass like anybody would actually want to be a badass, like I would want to be a badass. She’s braver than she is careful, but she’s also got some pretty solid common sense, and is aided by a group of friends who refreshingly avoid the genre tropes of miscommunication and making dumb decisions. She carries this great power and loves it; even when it frightens and confuses her, she embraces it and what it means, and uses it to help others without feeling weighed down by the responsibility it brings. She has playful, positive relationships with most of the people around her, and even when she gets into disagreements with her family, the mutual care and respect there is always evident. It’s really really hard not to want to be Sierra Santiago. And I haven’t even mentioned the cute boy.

Older’s characters might make mistakes, and they might have disagreements, but I love how most of them actually want to do the right thing, and are often willing to listen to others to help them get there.There are moments where it might feel a little too neat, a little too ideal - Sierra’s judgment calls are almost always correct, and her friends believe and support her even when she comes at them with really unlikely supernatural shit and death-defying plans. But it’s still really refreshing to read about a bunch of caring and sensible teenagers, when the opposite is so overrepresented in fiction.

I’m going to finish off with a quick mention of the writing itself - it’s fantastic. Sierra’s voice is clear and honest, and the book gallops forward in a fluid idiom that draws me seamlessly into the life of this young Afro-Latina woman and her passion for art and her Bed-Stuy neighbourhood. I’m really excited that this was the first book I chose for my “read a book a month” project, because hell, if somehow I don’t end up feeling inspired to read any other things later, I can always devour the rest of Daniel José Older’s excellent stuff. 

GO READ SHADOWSHAPER IT’S SO GREAT

[julianicolemaes]

when your rose petaling workshop is poppin off and you’re tryna trash a hotel room in the most beautiful way possible

[pleiadeshenderson]

One month, one book

So, I love books. I’ve always loved books - as a little kid, I would check out as many hardcover bandes dessinées and flimsy, illustrated chapter books as I could (conscripting my parents’ two library cards along with my own for MAXIMUM BOOK), and I read voraciously throughout my school years.

Then university happened, and grad school, and reading became that thing I needed to do in order not to fail my classes; still, fiction was my constant friend, and in my free time I devoured sci-fi and fantasy novels, manga, mystery.

But as time wore on, I eventually found myself in the situation of needing to work full-time (and then some) to make ends meet, plus writing a novel and some short stories and some educational Youtube videos because when the Sorting Hat landed on my head it said HOUSE HAMILTON so things have been noooon-stop.

I think over the past year I have read about five books. When that magical thing called “free time” happens to me now, I usually feel like I need and want to spend it writing; if I don’t have sufficient brain for writing, I’ll watch Bones or something on Netflix, or revisit Skyrim, or take a glorious nap. But this past weekend I went to NerdCon: Stories, and an idea that came up a few times in panels could be paraphrased as this:

If you want to write, read widely. 

Now I have in the past treated my writing like it’s a tenuous thing, like reading too much will irreparably damage my personal authorial voice and turn me into a pale copy of whatever I’m reading. I think, at this point, that this perspective is actually crap. Sure, I can tell in the revision stage of my novel which part I wrote while I was reading The Poisonwood Bible, earlier this year. But the result is not any less my writing, and it doesn’t even stand out unless you already know it’s there. Really, there’s never been a time when reading hasn’t improved my writing, overall. And reading - especially reading widely, diversely, reading perspectives and priorities different from my own - tends to make me feel like it improves me as a person, too. There’s really no downside, except TIME. 

Ahh, time. Given that the full-time-and-then-some-plus-myriad-projects life is still one I’m very much in, I don’t really feel like I have the luxury of reading as widely as those helpful NerdCon panelists tended to suggest. I would love to try reading things that will challenge me and delight me and make me grow as a writer and a human. But I also need to like, sleep, and do dishes.

Which is why I have decided to embark on the AMBITIOUS PLAN to read ONE BOOK PER MONTH for the next while. Maybe it’ll last a year, maybe less, maybe more. I’m not putting myself any limits on genre, period, age group, or topic. I’m not letting myself feel inferior to those cool cats who aim for fifty books a year or whatever. Twelve books will be more per year than I’ve read for a long time, and the idea is really exciting to me. So I’m just gonna read one book per month starting now, and see what happens. 

Also, to make this even more fun, I’ve decided that I’m also going to write something about each of these books right here. :D Probably something review-y, although I’ve never written book reviews before now. Certainly some kind of summary of my impressions. So keep an eye out for those posts - I will be tagging them one month one book on tumblr.

The book for October: Shadowshaper, by Daniel José Older. I’m like 30 pages from the end, so expect a review soon!