4th Street Fantasy and a bit of catchup

[catherineldf]

This weekend is 4th Street Fantasy in Minneapolis and I will be attending on Friday night and Sunday and am on a panel on Sunday morning. Why am I skipping Saturday? I need to work at DreamHaven, seeing as last weekend I did an event in Lindstrom at Wolfe Tomes Books and next weekend, is Twin Cities Pride and that will eat the weekend. So, bit of a bummer and I won't get to see as much of out of town friends as I hoped.
At any rate, the panel I am on:

Don’t Feign the Reaper: How To (Fictionally) Cheat Death

11:30 AM
Catherine Lundoff, Scott Lynch (M), Phil Margolies, Merc Wolfmoor, Maureen Zahn

Reincarnations, resurrections, and outright retcons; identity swaps and confused narrators; convenient comas, handy misunderstandings, and when, all else fails, a big divine handwave. Killing a character and then taking it back might be quite literally the oldest trick in the book* and yet, to this date, it feels as if we still haven’t quite figured out how to do it right. A clumsy aversion of fate can leave readers feeling just as cheated as the guy with the robe and the scythe. And yet, a well-orchestrated escape from the noose, axe, or other instrument of death can be the most rewarding moment in a story. So let’s talk about how to cheat death, and how particularly to do it in fantastic fiction where characters faced with death may well indeed have the power to flip the chessboard and change the rules.

* It depends on if you count Tablet Twelve as part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, or an extra scene tacked on to explain things to the audience. Seriously, we’ve been doing that forever too.

What else is going on? Working at the bookstore, plugging the Pride StoryBundle, writing, trying to line up sources of income and so forth. I did get a short story that I liked completed and submitted, so there's that.