TIS-
Can you give us a synopsis of the juicy bits of the CSI panel? I missed that one.
--- Magis
Well, we DID have the whole thing recorded, but at 55 out of 60 minutes, Trot's cell battery died and erased the ENTIRE video! :'-(
It was Mr. Butcher and three other authors (whose names I think are incorrect in the program because there's no L. Bickle and I'm pretty sure she was the Sparks and Embers author there...), all of whose series I am now very interested in! Some of the questions were the standards, tell us about your setting, about your character, first person/third person, etc. This the panel where I learned what "closed" vs. "open" means with regard to the supernatural element of urban fantasy. Dresdenverse is "closed," for example - the existence of the supernatural element is largely NOT known about by the common person, and widely disbelieved and doubted. The Merry Gentry series of Laurell K. Hamilton's, for example, is open. Everyone knows about the fey.
This is also the panel where the authors were asked by an audience member the following question, paraphrased by my exhausted memory: Often an author will come across the problem of their main character becoming too powerful, too magical - that there are few problems he or she cannot solve or overcome. What do you do to your characters to limit them, if you notice them becoming too powerful?
Jim Butcher clamped a hand over his mouth. The audience erupted laughing.
Laura Bickle (I think?) also mentioned the importance of NOT neglecting your antagonists, depth-wise, to which Jim Butcher nodded vehemently in agreement (she was elabourating on his answer to the question about his opinion about a diplomatic faction in Codex Alera). Bad guys aren't the best when they're moustache-twirling, 2-D villains who know they're villains. Usually they think they're doing the right thing, too. And then the author to Jim's left, whose name I also don't remember (I was REALLY relying on being able to review that video, drat :-( ) spoke about how sometimes the protagonist does NOT win and does NOT solve the crime.
There was also a question about the importance of sidekicks, and Laura Bickle brought up her fire salamander (she had a stuffed plush one on the table
) and Jim Butcher said his sidekicks rotate depending on need. He said he thought it particularly funny and apropos to choose a mortician as a sidekick for a zombie plot - someone whose specialty was to look at dead bodies which were *NOT* moving around trying to kill you back.
