R. F. Long

Less than a week left to the wonderful Phoenix Convention (or P-con as it is affectionately known). I’m really looking forward to this one. P-con was the first con I attended as a writer (as an adult) and found an abundance of people with all the same interests as me.

This year I was invited as a guest and have panels. So exciting!

Saturday, 6th

10am Is it time for “Return of the Werewolves”?

Nick Harkaway, Brian J. Showers, Laura Anne Gilman, Maura McHugh, R. F. Long

And then all Saturday is mine to play with!

Sunday, 7th however is a different matter – I will be a busy girl.

12pm Keyboard or pen – Room for both?

R. F. Long, Oisín McGann, Maura McHugh

2pm Has the Internet become indespensible?

Cheryl Morgan, Bob Neilson, R. F. Long, Maura McHugh

4pm E-Books

R. F. Long, Nich Harkaway, Colin Smythe, Derek Gunn

So far I’ve got the following answers “Yes”, “Em”, “YES”, and “Yay!”

But we’ll see how that goes. I’m in with some pretty impressive individuals so … yeah… wow! This is going to be fun.

Thanks to the recent Steampunk Workshop on Romance Divas (which was brilliant btw) I managed to blackmail persuade the fantastic Sarah A. Hoyt to write a guestblog for me. We also discovered that we share a brain have a lot of similar interests – Robin Hood, Musketeers, Swashing and Buckling, Brave New Worlds – preferably those we create ourselves.

With Shovel and Pail

Sarah A. Hoyt

I’ve been building worlds as long as I can remember.  I started with legos, paper and glue, and – at the beach – shovel and pail.  I built houses and cities inhabited by tiny, plastic dog figurines, I built huge sand castle complexes and filled them with imaginary princesses and knights.

It is not that the real world wasn’t good enough, but that it often wasn’t INTERESTING enough.  I wanted people doing heroic or silly stuff and, from a very early age, I found the need for a world that my characters should inhabit.

The details of these worlds, particularly as I moved from stories in my head to stories on paper, were harder to establish.

For instance, while I was making stories for myself and enacting them with various materials, no one much cared if I were building elaborate cities to be inhabited by dogs who, lacking opposable thumbs, couldn’t possibly have built them.  Turns out readers care more about this than my young self did – who knew?

So I started the long and stumbling road of world building.  I never had such bad judgment as to assume that my world didn’t need to be internally consistent, or that I could wave a magic wand and change everything halfway through and no one would mind.  No, I always knew the first commandment of world building:

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