"What do you mean, Readercon approaching?"
For the 3 of you out there that I just earwormed with Flash Gordon, I apologize for nothing
I’m off to Readercon today! I’m excited to see any of you who make it to Burlington, MA this weekend. You can find me at the program events below. A couple days ago I mentioned that I planned to be hanging out in the sitting area after my reading at 4, but it turns out I have an appointment that means I’d have to leave after a half hour or so—so I’ll head to the sitting area around 2:15pm instead, since that fits nicely after my 1pm panel and before my 3:30 reading. See you there, I hope!
This month’s Countdown to Craft book is Four Roads Cross—the book club’s on July 29 and the AMA will be July 31. Happy reading!
Friday, July 18, 2025
16:00: Autograph Session: Max Gladstone Autographer's Table
18:00: Writers Without Internal Monologues Salon G/H
What is the writing experience like for those of us who do not have a voice in our heads that describes what we're doing (and, perhaps, why)? When we don't think in words, how do we make the words flow? What other writing challenges can be posed by a lack of internal narration, and what strategies and techniques have different writers developed in response?
19:00: Sense of Wonder, Sense of Conviction: Salon I/J
In his 1960 WorldCon guest of honor speech, James Blish argued that genre science fiction was not more popular and influential because readers seek "not the sense of wonder, but the sense of conviction.... the feeling that the story is about something worth your adult attention." Too much science fiction, he thought, was content to offer only "comfort and safety"; yet "good science fiction is neither." How does this assessment hold up today, particularly given SFF's dominance of popular culture?
21:00: Levels of Interiority Create / Collaborate (which is a room presumably?)
There's been a discussion lately about bad books being written so "cinematicallly" that they have no interiority at all, giving the reader no more understanding of character motivations than if they were viewed on a screen. Is it possible to write a good book with no character interiority, such as a deeply withholding first person narrator? How have expected levels of interiority, or ways of signaling interiority, changed over time or across genres? And what stories could be improved by less interiority?
Saturday, July 19, 2025
10:00: Recycling, Reusing and Renewing Stories: Salon G/H
At last year's Readercon, Max Gladstone said that he modeled his Craft Sequence on Samuel R. Delany's principle that the answer from one book in a series should become the problem of the next book. Some authors like to take multiple runs at the same story premise. What other ways do authors revisit their own work, what uses can that serve, and what are the pitfalls?
12:00: Kaffeeklatsch: Max Gladstone Suite 830
Kaffeeklatsch with Max Gladstone
13:00: The Author as Public Persona: Salon F
In a recent Publishing Rodeo episode, the famously anonymous author Chuck Tingle argued that being an author is at least somewhat a public engagement, and that writers should not shirk that duty or shrink from that relationship. How can authors, from frontlisters to backlisters to self-publishers, navigate their careers as public figures? What responsibility do authors have to their audience, their society, and themselves?
15:30: Reading: Max Gladstone Empower / Embrace (which is also, purportedly, a location)
Sunday, July 20, 2025
13:00 "After the Revolution" Salon F
The phrase "After the revolution" can be a rationale for abandoning principles for expediency, a promise for a better world after the fighting is done, or a setting fraught with questions about how to rebuild and whether the prize was worth the price. Join us to explore the tensions, potentials, and ambiguities of the phrase in imagined worlds and in our lives today.
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