Clip Show
/LTUE, Life, the Universe, and Everything, a local academic symposium for genre writers, is right around the corner. I've started getting requests for advice from first-time panelists and moderators. I've written a few posts on this subject in the past, so I decided for this week, I'd pull them together into one place. I've discovered, in doing this, that putting together a "clip show" version of a blog post isn't actually less work than just writing a new post. Go figure.
But, I had to do this anyway, and I didn't want to do both. :)
So. Without further ado.
I wrote this post back in 2015. It's a list of advice on panels, both as a panelist and a moderator. In this post, I concentrate on the panel experience itself.
https://www.robertjdefendi.com/main/2015/10/10/your-fiftieth-convention-part-1-panels
In this post, I discuss conventions in general and my overall convention philosophy. All the advice in here won't be right for everyone, but it's all right for me and I'm sure you'll find a lot of stuff that will work for you. There's advice on panels in here as well, but there's also advice on how to act in the halls, how to act in the restaurants, and how to conduct yourself in general. Remember, if you have any kind of name for yourself: this might be your hundredth interaction of the day, but this may be the only interaction the person you're interacting with has with you in their entire life:
This last post might not be for the faint of heart. If you're prone to anxiety and about to attend your first convention as a professional, might want to hold off on reading this one until after:
https://www.robertjdefendi.com/main/2016/7/31/biography-of-a-disasterous-panel
That's the most important advice I've given on conventions, I think. The big thing is to remember that this is your job. Give it your all. And take enough time off after to recover. I find my sleep after a convention is just as important as how I conduct myself at the convention itself.
