Minicon schedule

Non Western Cultures In Fantasy - 11:30AM Saturday - Krushenko’s
Writing in cultures beyond North America or Western Europe. Working in new geographies offers readers and writers chance to step out of their comfort zones or reclaim their heritage. What are some of the challenges and which writers do this well?
Panelists: Eric M. Heideman (M), Michael Merriam, Adam Stemple, Ricky Foos, Marissa Lingen

Don’t Read What You’re An Expert In - 1:00PM Saturday - Veranda 5 /6
"How can this character be an expert on Chinese calligraphy when he doesn't even know how to pronounce 'Qing'?" Fiction on topics we know a lot about can be cringeworthy. In the extreme, glaring errors can ruin an otherwise good work. What topics set off our expertise alarms, when do we just suck it up and what (beyond infinite research) can authors do to avoid these problems?
Panelists: Rachel Kronick (M), Marissa Lingen, Magenta Griffith

Marissa Lingen Reading 2:00PM Sunday - Veranda 1

I don't know what I'll be reading yet. Requests, either of specific stories or of categories/types of story, will be considered.

Careful examination of the programming whatsit will indicate that I am also on a CS Lewis panel on Saturday, but I've just written to programming about that; since things got shuffled around to make it all work out, it ended up in too close a proximity to my other panels for me to be able to handle it with my current state of health, so I won't be doing that one. Hope it goes well, though. (Also kind of makes me want to discuss it with the people on the Invisible Disability panel--and simultaneously makes me want to clam up and discuss nothing in that regard. Ah, tight-jawed Scando impulses.)

The duel gets kind of messy.

I just sold a short story, "The Witch's Second," to Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

This story came about because I was in the middle of writing "The Witch's Second Daughter," and due to line breaks or something I just saw the first three words, and I thought, well, that's another title.

I don't think I'll be trying to write either "The Witch's" or "The Witch's Second Daughter Simpers" or the like, but one never knows. (I chose "simpers" there because it was the verb that seemed least likely to tempt me; my brain has already supplied "recants" as an alternate verb of more interest. Hush, brain.)

ETA: Uh, that appears to make my 80th short story sale.

I totally get sushi.

Collectible

So I was thinking about short stories today, for obvious reasons, and specifically I was thinking about short story collections. My records indicate that I've now sold about 300,000 words of short fiction. For those of you who don't keep track of such things, the range of lengths for what we consider "a book" varies considerably, but 40K is the minimum novel length for Hugo Award purposes, and 100K is more typical these days. So that's roughly three books' worth. Say that some stories are too recent to be reprinted but that on the other hand there are other stories I like but never sold. Still. Three solid books' worth. At least.

If you were dividing up short stories, how would you want them divided? Thematically? Chronologically? Seasonally? (Winter, winter, winter, and not-winter, in my case.) By genre and/or sub-genre? By the thing that allowed for the cleverest titles or most apropos cover images? What else would you want to see here?

If this short story writer wrote stories in a series with one set of characters, in addition to all the other stuff she did, but there weren't enough of those for a collection yet, but there would almost certainly be at some point, would you want to see them dispersed, put in one collection, or left out? If instead of the reader you were the writer, would your answers be different?