I had hoped to bring you some colorful photos of the ConText opening from last night, but alas—the camera refused to co-operate with the whole colorful opening photo meme.\u00a0 So regrettably, I shall have to rely on words to paint in the details instead!<\/p>\n
Intriguingly, dance was the main theme of the opening ceremony, with a solo jazz performance by international literary Guest of Honor, Catherine Asaro<\/strong><\/a>, and two colorful and entertaining sets from belly dancing quartet, Arabian Rendezvous<\/strong>. Angie, the leader of the belly dancing troupe, also performed a solo dance with a sword balanced on her head—an impressive display of dexterity and balance.<\/p>\n Immediately following the opening I was off to do my first panel, on the ‘Wild wild world of the writing blog’ <\/em>with fellow author and SpecFicNZ<\/strong><\/a> president Ripley Patton<\/strong><\/a>. The focus of the ensuing discussion was both around why we decided to blog as opposed to using other social\/internet media, and why we felt the need to use the internet at all—i.e. why not ‘just write’?<\/p>\n The answer was that blogging offers us a way to communicate and interact with readers and the wider writing community—an opportunity that is more important because of the physical isolation of living in New Zealand, a long way from the areas where many\/most of our readers are located. A ‘far step’ too, from\u00a0 regular conventions and conferences of the kind that we are getting to enjoy this weekend, which offer a realtime opportunity to communicate with readers.<\/p>\n So the internet is an important medium for two-way communication with readers and the wider reading\/writing community. In addition, Ripley and I both found that we preferred blogging as our main medium of communication because we want the primary focus of that communication to centre around our books\/writing, as opposed to being more socially orientated.<\/p>\n Questions were asked around privacy and how much information should be shared, but we both felt that to a large extent decisions around this would be personal to the blogger and probably driven by the primary focus of the blog. In general, Ripley and I both feel unease when the content of a blog, particularly a writing blog,\u00a0 becomes too heavily personal or pursues controversy for its own sake—again, our focus is primarily on writing-centered content.<\/p>\n And that, folks, by and large, was the opening evening of ConText<\/strong>, the 32nd National Science Fiction Fantasy Convention. Tomorrow I have panels on Keeping It Real in SFF <\/strong><\/em>(with Catherine Asaro and Russell Kirkpatrick), the Grand Symbiosis between History and Fantasy<\/strong><\/em> (with Steve Litten and Andrew Robins) and a kaffeeklatsch<\/strong> to keep me busy ahead of the SpecFicNZ<\/strong><\/a> party tomorrow evening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had hoped to bring you some colorful photos of the ConText opening from last night, but alas—the camera refused to co-operate with the whole colorful opening photo meme.\u00a0 So regrettably, I shall have to rely on words to paint in the details instead! Intriguingly, dance was the main theme of the opening ceremony, with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-what-im-doing","category-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5917"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5960,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5917\/revisions\/5960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}