Day 3
So, was ReaderCon worth the 40 dollars? Yeah, I'd say so. I don't think I'd pay more for that. I certainly wouldn't have come as far as some of these people and paid $100/night at the hotel. The joys of living nearby (and I knew where the best restaurants were :).
While I picked the optimal panel discussions for my interests, the authors involved in those panels weren't the ones who proposed the concept and therefore didn't always know how to follow the proposed concept. Some of the authors didn't really know how to speak to a crowd either, which made what would have been a meaningful comment into an interminable experience.
Still, there were some good panels, including this morning's look into the oft overlooked sciences in hard SF: beyond genetics, physics, etc.
Something else I've come to, and I've been dealing with this fact for a little while now. Writing a novel, I've been shooting for 150,000 words. It's not too big and it's certainly not too small. Given that I tend to overwrite, a revised draft might get chopped down to 135,000 so it's a safe bet all around. For some reason, all the books I remembered reading (which all turned out to be from when I was younger--as none of the books I read now hold to this) had about 20 chapters. This means that an average of 7,500 words/chapter. For this book, I had originally planned 15 chapters, so all the chapters I've written so far are 10,000 words. It's twice the length of an average chapter. I like what I've written, though, and don't think I could chop 5,000 words.
In the books I read, it seems like there is so much. How is there so much description and action with such a low per-chapter word count? I feel frustrated
While I picked the optimal panel discussions for my interests, the authors involved in those panels weren't the ones who proposed the concept and therefore didn't always know how to follow the proposed concept. Some of the authors didn't really know how to speak to a crowd either, which made what would have been a meaningful comment into an interminable experience.
Still, there were some good panels, including this morning's look into the oft overlooked sciences in hard SF: beyond genetics, physics, etc.
Something else I've come to, and I've been dealing with this fact for a little while now. Writing a novel, I've been shooting for 150,000 words. It's not too big and it's certainly not too small. Given that I tend to overwrite, a revised draft might get chopped down to 135,000 so it's a safe bet all around. For some reason, all the books I remembered reading (which all turned out to be from when I was younger--as none of the books I read now hold to this) had about 20 chapters. This means that an average of 7,500 words/chapter. For this book, I had originally planned 15 chapters, so all the chapters I've written so far are 10,000 words. It's twice the length of an average chapter. I like what I've written, though, and don't think I could chop 5,000 words.
In the books I read, it seems like there is so much. How is there so much description and action with such a low per-chapter word count? I feel frustrated