Flights of Foundry 2024 Quick Recap, Day 2 (first half)
Catherine Tavares posted her recap of what she attended at Flights of Foundry immediately after the convention. I took a little longer to collect some of my thoughts and notes, but I hope you enjoy! (You can find my day 1 recap here.) I’m going to have to do mine in chunks by day, so this post just covers the events on the first half of Saturday (day 2)!
Folklore from All Corners: With thousands of cultures, past and present, worldwide, why focus on a narrow set of folklore? Let our panelists introduce you to some lesser-known but infinitely fabulous folklore, and discuss folktales from across the world. (With Rebecca Bennett moderating, and Shantell Powell, R. K. Duncan, Melissa Ren, and Malina Douglas speaking)
I was excited for this panel because I moderated a similar panel at another convention, but because each panel has different speakers on it, you always get a different mix of information! This time around, there was great information on some Indigenous North American groups, very early British Isles folklore, and some Western European folklore. In addition, the panelists touched on the idea of modern folklore, including urban legends and internet legends. I really enjoyed the addition of the modern folklore to this panel, as there’s a neat overlap between modern folklore and horror that you don’t necessarily have with traditional folklore. I scribbled a lot of notes while watching this panel, and I was thankful that Rebecca Bennett also shared a Google Doc of some of the stories and recommendations that came up!
Dabbling in Drabbles: A discussion about how to write drabbles. What makes them fun and interesting? Where can you get them published? (With Kai Delmas moderating, and Gideon P. Smith and myself speaking)
Next up for me was another panel I was on, this time about writing drabbles (stories of exactly 100 words). While I realized ahead of the panel that I haven’t written near as many drabbles as Kai and Gideon have, I still had a good amount to say about them. I talked about having written my first drabble before I really knew what they were, and then as I got more into writing flash fiction, I kept aiming for smaller and smaller stories until I got down to the drabble size. We had a great conversation overall about some of our tips and tricks for distilling an idea down to exactly 100 words, we each read a drabble of our own and talked about how it had come about and some of the interesting aspects of it (mine was primarily dialogue), and we also talked about places to get them published.
Get Your $#!^ Together: Organization Tips and Strategies for Creatives: It’s not all listening to the muse and dreaming of the perfect ending to a story. It’s not even mostly that. Come learn how to get and stay organized (or at least, slightly more organized), discuss strategies for meeting deadlines and paying the bills when life is creative chaos. (With me moderating, and M-Jo Baker, Steven Radecki, P.A. Cornell, and Celia Lake speaking)
This was the first panel I moderated over the course of the weekend. The panelists ranged from authors to a publisher and an accountant, all of whom had a variety of suggestions on what worked for them in terms of organizing their life and what might help other creatives, plus some bonus information on organization when working with a publisher and organizing financial matters for creatives.
Preserving the History of Speculative Fiction & Fandom: Guidance on creating a personal archive of authorial papers + records management and preservation of your work for future generations. (With Monica Louzon moderating, and Samantha Mills, Lynn Strong, and myself speaking)
The other panel I spoke on Saturday was this one, with me representing the oral history/interview side of history preservation, and the others talking about the archival side of things. Though I’ve spent a lot of time in archives, and I’ve even helped organize some company records, I don’t have any official training on that, so I learned quite a bit from the other panelists on that subject, including recommendations to not be overly reliant on digitization for archival purposes. I primarily talked about the idea of oral history as being a form of storytelling, thus making speculative fiction authors wonderful at being the subject of an oral history interview, because they can tell the story of their career or a specific part of the the speculative fiction or fandom world well.
Next up, the slightly less busy second half of Saturday!
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