YANovCon 2024

I went to YANovCon again this year. So I'll share some of the highlights! 

It started out with a writer's workshop by Lily Meade. She brought up some cool prompts that she has used in her writing:

Take a historical event and add a twist

Take one of your family heirlooms and give it a special power. 

Something passed down through your family that has been kept secret. 

Take an event from your past and rework it. 

Lily Meade handed out a worksheet, with space to plot out a story following one of these prompts. I chose a story from my family's past, adding a magical twist. I wrote through the given time, and a little past it. And now I want to turn it into a proper story. it's tricky, because the person died when my dad and his brother were little kids, and they know very little about him. We shared some of our ideas after. Everyone hesitated at first, so I shared my premise first. 

After that, the panels started. This year's theme was "Identity in the age of censorship." 

As usual, the authors had great things to say, and fascinating stories to tell. I liked what Ray Stoeve said: "Writer's block is an issue in another part of our life." I think that's largely true. Stress we're dealing with in some way can stifle creativity, etc. 

One of the African American authors talked her freakish editor. The editor said she should have an African American character accidentally punch a cop. What a nightmare, having an editor that asks you to include racist stereotypes in your book. 

After all the talks was the author signing. This time they handed out little notebooks that we could collect signatures in. As usual, I went around and got all of their signatures. And as usual, I bought one of the books. This time I picked out "Susie King Taylor: nurse, teacher and freedom fighter," by Candace Buford. It's about a real historical woman, but in novel form.  Signed by the author! 

When I got the autograph from Sean McGinty, he gave me one of his books! It's called "The End of Fun." He said it was bad, but I didn't think so. I got it signed too. 

AI Away

All this AI stuff freaks me out. To be fair, it has done some amazing things to help researchers solve problems, etc. 

But then you turn to the creative side. I've been on Deviantart almost 15 years, posting my art regularly. But recently artists have been leaving in droves for a number of reasons. Especially because Deviantart has pretty much turned its attention from real artists to AI artists. It features people who are selling AI art, which is made by a program built on the stolen artwork from people who have worked countless hours on honing their craft.  It's disgusting that Deviantart has become a place that supports people who don't do art, and instead steal art from others. I'd join the droves of real artists that are leaving, but I don't know of anywhere better to go. And how long would it take to transfer over ten years worth of artwork?But I still regularly consider it.

And then people are trying to use AI to write tv shows and such, which lets them fire the real writers who have always done it (previous post about it). It's at the point where there's mass speculation (no idea how much evidence there is, but I can definitely see their point) that Disney used AI to write Wish. Disney.

And of course, welcome to the world where people can use AI to take the faces and voices of other people and use them to make whatever they want. Thinking of people making videos using me, or using AI to copy my writing style makes my skin crawl. 

It's such a freakish world we live in where anyone can fake anything.

The Fictional Company you Keep

I recently read an article that talked about the people we're around. Of course the friends you hang out with are very important. The wrong people can bring you down, or even start to destroy you. Sometimes when I'm around people with a certain trait, it brings that trait out in me (for better or worse).

 Here's the quote from Paramhansa Yogananda:

“The company you keep is important. If you leave your coat in a room where people are smoking, pretty soon it will smell of smoke. If you leave it outside in the garden, later on, when you bring it indoors, it will carry with it the fragrance of fresh air and flowers. Such is the case with the mind. Your garment of thoughts absorbs the vibrations of those with whom you mix. If you mingle with pessimists, in time you will become a pessimist. And if you mingle with cheerful, happy people, you yourself will develop a cheerful, happy nature.”

The article continued on, expanding the concept to include fictional characters:

"We generally think of friends as the people we choose to be around. But we also spend time with the characters in our books and films. The next time you read or watch something, ask yourself, “Is this character smoke or perfume?” You might want to show the smoky ones to the door."

I too have felt fictional characters have an impact on me. That's one reason I hated almost everything we read in high school - most of the characters were awful people. But I've written about that before.

Guira cuckoo (keeping good company)

Everything Stays - in memories

I stumbled upon this video Rebecca Sugar (creator of Steven Universe) made about Spinel. 

Stories from you childhood can be great prompts for your own stories. Like losing your favorite toy in the garden. I've already written about how Spinel's story resonated so powerfully with how I felt.

The bunny didn't have a name. But now the bunny is Spinel.

Building a World's Countries

A few years ago, I reorganized all of the regions for Magic-Earth. My original version (probably done in high school) was random chunks of land. But I wanted them to follow natural landmarks, like rivers and mountains. And I wanted them to be all relatively the same size. 

 Now I have the monumental task of figuring out how the different cultures from our world will translate into the countries of the other world. Some countries are broken up, or combined together. Vaircress is the main region I use, because it coordinates with where I live so I'm most familiar with the land. 

I looked in my little American Indian encyclopedia and found all of the tribes that lived in that area of land. It's broken up into different groups, such as Northwest Coast, and California. I listed out the tribes in these groups, and to my excitement the groups actually lined up remarkable well with the borders of the Vaircress region. There are just a few outliers.

Though I came across a different complication. My useless little encyclopedia took the California region and listed ten tribes. But as I got online to do further research, I found nearly 50 tribes. And that's not even counting some tribes that are broken into smaller categories.

And California is one of six regions I have to go through for Vaircress. The others don't have over 40 tribes, but some of them get close. So, yeah. This is gonna take a while. And Vaircress is just one of many countries. 

Juvenile Magellanic penguins

Always Something New

If I've grown up with a movie and seen it repeatedly throughout my life, I don't really think about it when I watch it. I guess they've just ground a groove in my brain and have trouble getting out if it. Which means I don't always notice things about movies I've seen a million times. Then occasionally I will notice something that I'd never really paid attention before. 

For example, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indie and Elsa go into the knight's tomb under the library, and wade through a petroleum well. While they're in there, someone drops a match and ignites the petroleum. Indie and Elsa have to swim to safety. But when I just watched this again, I noticed that Indiana is wading through the petroleum with a torch that's dripping embers all along the way! How come that doesn't light up the highly flammable liquid? 

Or Disney's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (I read the book, but it was too long ago for me to remember many of the details, so this is just about the cartoon). As a kid, I assumed you were supposed to root for Ichabod, since he's the protagonist (even if I didn't know what "protagonist" meant back then). Eventually I kinda realized that he's not a stellar example of a hero. And I just watched it again, and finally put it in words. Do you really want to root for him? He wants the girl because she's pretty and her dad's rich. And the narrator says that Brom is a prankster, though there's no malice to his mischief. Except he's about to punch Ichabod's lights out at one point (and if he is actually the horseman, that's full of malice right there. Though we never know if it's actually him). So neither guy is much of a role model. But that's life sometimes. 

When I got back from Europe, I watched several movies set in places that I visited. It was a cool perspective!

Titanic was built in Ireland, so I decided to watch the film when I got home. I was crazy about this movie when it came out. I think that when I saw it as a kid, it just struck me as a really flashy movie that my best friend happened to love, so we loved it together. But this time, when I watched the movie it struck me that this really happened. Of course I knew it was true - Cameron does his research. But this time the details hit me as if they were real life. It's not just a movie. 1,500 people went into the ocean when Titanic sunk. And only 6 of those people were rescued from the water.

Sometimes I learn something new that helps me see a movie in a new light. 

In Paris, I saw some of the unicorn tapestries. The Last Unicorn was one of the films I watched on my return, because they use some of the historic unicorn tapestries. The entire opening sequence animates one of these tapestries. And now I can see that the unicorn's forest is illustrated to look like the foliage in the tapestries! Cool! 

 

Flutes on Screen

When I was little, there were a number of movies I liked, and at the time I had no idea they were from Japan. Such as Totoro and Kiki. Unico in the Island of Magic was another. Made by the same person that did Astro Boy, which is more familiar to American audiences (Tezuka is wildly popular among manga fans - he's considered a classic mangaka).

Unico in the Island of Magic is a sappy movie about a little unicorn who brings joy. I loved it as a kid - my dad had recorded it from TV for me. And as I grew older, I kept the nostalgia for it. And one day, to my surprise, I found that movie was actually a sequel. I watched the first one, but I guess the second one is just mine.

Anyway, that sappy nostalgic cartoon sequel has a really cool, haunting flute song in it, played by someone who is a villain for a while. 

I gave myself one of those ridiculously crazy massive projects that I occasionally come up with. This one is to find cool flute songs from movies, and get sheet music for them. 

Easier said than done. For many of these flute songs, I can't find sheet music. Either I don't know where to look, or it's just not there. And for some of these songs, I doubt anyone would have gone through the effort to write them out.

Toby's flute songs are in this latter category. So I took it upon myself to write out the sheet music. By hand, because I don't have a computer program for it (I had one once, but it was a nightmare to use. Maybe there's something better now, but it seems easier to just write it). Transcribing it was crazy. Especially since I had to go into the movie to get some of it, and try to listen to the music through dialogue. But it made me appreciate the songs all the more. The first song is slow and haunting, and the second variation is much faster-paced. And to my immense relief, the third one was exactly the same as the second one.

I've written out a few more flute songs from other movies, but Toby's were the trickiest. Even trickier than Cardinal Knowledge, because it's less repetitive (Cardinal Knowledge is played in the end credits of Secret of Kells - I've almost finished that one, but not quite). 

So, I'm playing my hard-won sheet music. It will be cool when I get these tricky ones under my fingers.