A last minute dose of fantasy

 Last weekend I attended Fantasycon at Heathrow at very short notice.  On Friday afternoon I took over someone else's membership and hotel room, and at 6.30 on Saturday morning I  left to travel to the con.

I haven't been to this particular one before, but having studied the programme before I said yes to going, I  knew I'd be in for an excellent weekend.  The con itself was also last-minute, having been organised in just ten weeks, a massive feat of organisation.  It wasn't exclusively about fantasy, there was as much discussion of science fiction on the panels too.

The first panel I attended was a discussion of families in science fiction and fantasy.  I was particularly interested in the discussion on found families.  One of the panelists pointed out that in the Harry Potter books Harry meets his found family on the Hogwarts Express, and that these are the people he sticks with throughout his school days.

Another interesting type of found family is a starship crew, thrown together to serve.  Star Trek is one of the best examples, with ship families encompassing members from several species.

Most of my stories involve found families, and I got lots of useful story ideas from suggestions made by the panelists.

I was also keen to hear the discussion on older characters, but it was  slightly irritating to see that most of the panelists were in their forties, not really old enough to discuss the experiences of older characters.  Only one was in her sixties, and she was younger than me.  I wanted to interject at times and challenge some of their assumptions about ageing - at least, as they apply to humans,  

But this was a con about fantasy, so we talked of other species too.  The panelists pointed out that you never see old elves in fiction, and I immediately wanted to go away and write some.  Also, we don't see portrayals of elves who arent's beautiful.  I could get a lot of story mileage from writing about non-beautiful elves to challenge our ideas of beauty.

Another panel I wanted to attend was about the editing process.  Like most authors not mainstream published, I have a certain amount of anxiety around what changes an editor might want to make to my work.  I came away feeling reassured about the process.

The panelists all stressed that the aim was to make the writer look good, and that it was important to preserve the author's individual voice.  Having had some horrendous experiences with agents to the contrary in the last, this was good to know.

Getting to the con required a lot of last-minute organisation and running around, and a very early start on Saturday, but it was well worth the effort.