An Evening in San Francisco

Yesterday San Francisco was full of people demonstrating against Proposition 8. Kevin and I could not be there because we had to attend the SFSFC Board Meeting. However, we did arrive in The City at around 4:00pm to do some shopping at attend SF in SF. By some miracle of synchronicity, the readers for the evening happened to be Geoff Ryman, Ellen Klages and Nalo Hopkinson. We couldn’t have done better if we had tried.

As it happened, however, there was little about gay politics in the readings (though Geoff did manage to read one except about a lesbian couple and one about a gay couple). The discussion afterwards concentrated mainly on the craft of writing, with much being said about how to give information without doing obvious infodumps, how to make sure each character has their own voice in dialog, and how to convey character emotions without actually writing things like “she felt sad”. It was one of the best sessions we’ve had (and the place was packed out). There will be no more events this year, but a schedule for 2009 will be released soon.