Sunday Salutations and Wrapping Up Liberty Con
We spent last weekend at Liberty Con 2024. As promised, this post contains our huge update on that. In fact, according to Substack, it is so huge it will take two weeks to publish.
However, we are starting a new tradition by opening our posts with animal pictures and ending with animal videos. Our goal is for these to be originals from us, although we have a few ideas of ones we’ll ask to use.
Chaos Critters: Moments in Time
We start with our first chaotic critter, Aki. This calico is very picky about her water. Nowadays her favorite source of water is the dog’s water bowl - that is full of Newfie drool. In this picture, she is asking where the dog’s water and its raised platform is. (The water bowl was at Tod’s brother’s house, along with the dog.)
Next in seniority is the half Maine Coon, Beleth. This grey tabby is positive that he is really a dog, and will prove it by doing sit, stay, come, beg, and sometimes twirl. He is also Anna’s writing partner and will cuddle up with her while she works.
Now we come to the Crested Gecko named Fluffy. She’s pretty cool and generally relaxed about being handled. We based one of the pets in “Tablet in the Air” on Fluffy. https://www.amazon.com/Minstrels-Galaxy-Stories-Key-Tull-ebook/dp/B0D79FMH8S
And of course, there is the huge, drooling monster of a Newfoundland dog, Crokell. Here Crokell is paying rapt attention to the toy Anna brought to training class. Having a toy helps wake him up, so to speak, and get him engaged before class.
In case you could not tell, Crokell and Beleth are brothers. They hang out together, wait to see if there are dog treats in the groceries together, and even share food, water, and the aforementioned treats.
Liberty Con 2024
Liberty Con 2024 will be known as the Plague Year - all the con rooms in the convention center flooded the day before, necessitating last minute room reassignments. Then there was a fire alarm during the first day. The Artists Alley and one of the nearby hotel convention rooms had no air conditioning. The room at least was also rescheduled to elsewhere. There might be more, but that is enough to start.
Apologies to anyone whose name I misspelled, who I misquoted, or if I failed to attribute who said something.
Crowdsourcing Conflict - Is Granny Gonna Fight? (Fri)
We started with the Crowdsourcing Conflict panel. This panel had Doug Burbey, Rich Weyand, Dr. Stephen Grenade, and Crag Stanfill. One of the panelists mentioned an interesting group, Institute for the Study of War. This group provides detailed analysis from open source intelligence, like social media location metadata tags, and provides surprisingly complete and insightful reports.
Becky R Jones - Reading for Children (Fri)
Our friend from P-Con, Becky, was also at Liberty Con. She read her short from Adventure Stories for Young Readers. Becky did great at integrating the crowd into the story at one point. One young character is going to leave her jacket behind. Her friend tells her to bring it, you never know when you’ll want it. Becky was freezing cold, as the reading room was a good 10-20 degrees F cooler than the rest of the building.
Baen 40th Anniversary (Fri)
Baen is celebrating their 40th anniversary this year. Sadly, we missed the end of the panel. Remember the fire alarm I mentioned earlier? It was during this panel. But Toni Weisskopf did a great job at it. Some random bits of information:
Lois Bujold wrote the first fantasy novel published by Baen, which was also their first non-book club hard cover.
When Toni told Weber she wanted to buy his first book, Weber accepted without waiting to hear a price.
What’s New in Car Wars (Fri)
The What’s New in Car Wars was a combination of Three Ravens and Steve Jackson Games. The Car Wars books from Three Ravens are a constant seller for the publisher, and people that buy one book, come back and buy the rest. The Alpha Mercs are working on a Car Wars anthology with Richard Cartwright as the official editor. (Everyone but him knew this before the con.) We have a submission in for that anthology.
If you plan to write in that universe, GURPS Autoduel is recommended as a story bible and the AADA Road Atlas and Survival Guide is a good resource.
M.A. Rothman and D.J. Butler - Reading (Sat)
Our first panel on Saturday was a reading by M.A. Rothman and Dave Butler. They talked a bit before reading from Time Trials. We discovered they use a cloud provider to share chapters with each other. They don’t use formal backups, but each of them download the chapters as they’re uploaded, so there are at least three copies.
Dave cannot do accents. He says his kids can. (Tod can’t do accents either - when he tried as a game master, mid-conversation the accent changed to a completely different one. Think French to Scottish or something similar.)
Rothman and Dave outline when working together. They do two or three paragraphs per chapter and have all the sub-plots figured out. Then the book is divided into 2-3 chapter chunks. Unlike Tod and Anna, they don’t really “steal” or claim characters as “theirs”. Although, when Dave wrote with Erin Riche, Erin stole a character.
Malorie Cooper - Genre and Trope and Amazon Keywords (Sat)
Malorie gave one of the best presentations we saw. We were a little worried it would be a long advertisement for a subscription service. Instead, we found her a fount of advice, even for authors like us who aren’t publishing indie yet.
When doing covers for books, Malorie said to identify the Amazon genres and sub-genres the book fits. Make sure the tropes you use match that sub-genre. Then look a the genre best sellers. Don’t look at the huge names. (J.R.R. Tolkien is going to have any kind of cover and still sell.) Look at the authors with 2000 to 5000 reviews, depending on the genre. Look at the covers for common themes, serif versus sans serif, and colors - even how big the title is.
She also gave some advice - covers are for new readers. Not the author. Not the current fans. Because the cover is how you attract new fans.
Here is an example Malorie gave of different items in the same slide. The picture has two covers for the same book. She also changed the title, because nobody knew the Destiny Lost title - everyone called it The Lost Colony Ship. I wish I had her exact words about the covers. In essence, the older cover (on the left) basically says “lesbian romance space opera” - which is fine, if that’s what your book is. But this book is not. The cover on the right (The Lost Colony Ship) has more of the current cover elements for the genre - spaceships in battle and an individual figure in silhouette.
Malorie recommended budgeting for new covers every five years or so.
The company Malorie is a part of that teaches these sorts of things is The Writing Wives.
Baen Roadshow (Sat)
Baen brought in their Roadshow. Anna scored a hardback copy of Time Trials - the book we got to hear Rothman and Dave Butler read earlier in the day.
Some Baen news:
There is a big website upgrade coming.
There is an email address to which you can send service-member addresses to have Baen care packages sent to serving military! (We planning this for one of our RPG group players and Tod’s nephew.)
And James Cambias, who Tod adores, has a new book coming out soon! (His books aren’t all Anna friendly, as sometimes the pets die!)
World Building (Sat)
The World Building panel featured Chris Kennedy, Malorie Cooper, Kacey Ezell, Monalisa Foster, Terry Mager, and Chuck Gannon. Despite also being a domain expert in this area, Chris kept his role of moderator by directing the conversation and asking questions. Turns out Malorie does an incredible amount of work planning her universe. She started with the 10,000 stars closest to Earth, and then adjusted their positions for the timeline in her stories. Kacey, being a visual thinker, likes to use the AI art generators to create characters, locations, and rooms, so she can actually see what she is writing about. Monalisa does her story bible after she writes, otherwise she’s trying to transcribe the bible into the novel. (Anna has a lot of this too. We have smaller story bibles for this reason.) Terry is kicked out of the story by silly extremes - in worldbuilding this means having too many “virgin redheads” in a story than is remotely plausible. Finally, Chuck Gannon reminded everyone not to fall into the trap of letting your (totally necessary) story bible become a black hole of resources.
What’s New in Young Adult (Sat)
The What’s New in Young Adult was paneled by G. Scott Huggins, Marina Fontaine, Becky R Jones, Jared Austin, and K.B. Carlisle. The neatest backstory goes to K.B. who became a writer by telling bedtime stories to his kids. He was trying to be a supernatural thriller author and struggling. His kids told him to just write down their bedtime stories. The rest followed. One reader was surprised to find out K.B. was not female, since his female leads are so good. Turns out that first, he grew up with one brother and over a dozen female relatives around the same age. And second, he has one son and three girls. So by observation, he knows how to write women well. The quotation for the panel (maybe from K.B.) was “Real life sucks for everyone and everyone needs to learn to deal with it.”
How the Public Consumes Fiction (Sun)
The panel on How the Public Consumes Fiction was Toni Weisskopf, Ben Yalow, Gary Pool, and Michael Gance. The panel covered a lot of historical information. The two most interesting takeaways came from Ben Yalow and Toni. Ben said, “indie is the new pulp,” which I’ve heard echoed elsewhere. He was referring to how indie has a constant release cycle and if you are indie, you have to stay on that to stay in the reader’s minds. Toni said the main curators for readers nowadays seem to be video and podcast book reviewers. Everyone indicated the problem of being able to publish a book is mostly solved (via Amazon) but the problem of distinguishing yourself from the pack as an author is still a problem. For readers, finding quality new authors easily is the other side of that coin.
Three Ravens (Sun)
The Three Ravens update was moderated and ran by Hillbilly (W.J. Roberts). Three Ravens publishes some works from Silverberg and Karen Haber (Silverberg). For the readers, her collection of shorts was recommended as Heinlein-esc. For the writers, Hillbilly loves post-apocalyptic stories and reminded everyone that the most explicit Three Ravens’ publications will get is “fade to black”.
Godzilla (Sun)
The Godzilla panel was the last panel we attended, with Jason Cordova, Gini Koch, M.M. Shill, and Thomas Blanks. Jason stole the show for us. “Big stompy robots versus big stompy kaiju? Who cares what the plot it?” His response to Godzilla Minus One was “How dare you make me feel?” He likes the lack of details (like in Hitchcock movies) as a method to building tension. Like not seeing the shark in the original Jaws or the alien in the original Alien. Also popular as a response to questions of science was “Handwavium! It’s cool!”
Chaos Critters: Snippets of Life
As promised, here is our video of one of our animals. This is Crokell doing a jump during a rally practice. This session was pretty tough for him because it was so warm inside. But he relaxed in front of a fan before this run.
What does this have to do with our writing?
Liberty Con has a lot of the writers from which we learn, publishers that print our books, and fellow writers whose works we beta read and vice versa. So, meeting some of the people behind the scenes gives some perspective.
And of course, we get story ideas and writing hints, that you may end up seeing in print.
The Chaos Critters stills and films should be obvious to long-time readers. These are the main and secondary characters of our stories. Seeing how the act, react, and move is part of the work behind our writing.
Writing Update
With Liberty Con, we made little headway in writing. Tod has done a little more edits on the start of our second novel. And Anna has done a little more on her pass at the first two chapters of our first novella (by which we mean 50,000 to 60,000 word story).
We’ll see everyone next week with People from Liberty Con and “The Many Faces of Jason Cordova”.
~Tod and Anna
Good boy, Crokell!