{"id":2922,"date":"2012-03-09T10:09:20","date_gmt":"2012-03-09T18:09:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=2922"},"modified":"2012-03-09T10:14:50","modified_gmt":"2012-03-09T18:14:50","slug":"odd-man-out-the-starship-sofa-online-workshop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=2922","title":{"rendered":"Odd Man Out: The Starship Sofa Online Workshop"},"content":{"rendered":"

Starship Sofa<\/a> (the phenomenal, out-of-nowhere, Hugo-award-winning brainchild of Tony Smith) is hosting an on-line event<\/a> on March 31.\u00a0 It’s being promoted as “a workshop for aspiring science fiction writers”, and at least two of the speakers bear this out: Ann Vandermeer<\/a> will be talking about “Unlocking Your Creativity”, and Nancy Kress<\/a> will describe techniques for “Creating and Maintaining Tension”. Both authors have loads of cred; both are talking about subjects vital to the writing process.<\/p>\n

Then there’s me.<\/p>\n

I’m going to be talking about “Why Science Fiction is Too Important to be Left to the Scientists”. Tony seemed quite enthusiastic when I spitballed the idea.\u00a0 I’m not quite sure why. \u00a0It’s not really a how-to talk at all; it’s more of an argument that, public perception notwithstanding, formal scientific expertise might actually be a bad<\/em> thing when it comes to writing science fiction. The only reason I suggested it was because I originally misunderstood the nature of the workshop; and by the time I realized my mistake, Tony was irrevocably sold on the title.\u00a0 So it stands: not a How To<\/em> talk at all. More of a How Not<\/strong> To<\/em>, actually. Which, now that I think of it, might be Tony’s point.<\/p>\n

Anyway.\u00a0 At Tony’s request I’ve whipped up a three-minute promo to provide a glimpse into where I’m going with this. It’s now been posted and, and, well, I kind of look like a goof in it. (I think this is what they call “Truth in Advertising”.) It does give a good sense of what I’ll be talking about, though. So check it out. If you like what you see, go register<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you don’t, there’s always Kress and Vandermeer.<\/p>\n

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Starship Sofa (the phenomenal, out-of-nowhere, Hugo-award-winning brainchild of Tony Smith) is hosting an on-line event on March 31.\u00a0 It’s being promoted as “a workshop for aspiring science fiction writers”, and at least two of the speakers bear this out: Ann Vandermeer will be talking about “Unlocking Your Creativity”, and Nancy Kress will describe techniques for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-public-interface"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2922"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2925,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2922\/revisions\/2925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}