I’m an admitted convention newbie. My first experience was Animation on Display in San Francisco this January and now FogCon at the Walnut Creek Marriot yesterday. FogCon is a convention that brings together genre fiction writers (and their fans) of different of types together to talk about issues that surround this field.

I heard about this really late after my teacher at the The Writing Salon Nick Mamatas told me about it a couple of days ago. It was a great experience and worth the money. This won’t be the last convention that I go to this year.

The biggest things that I got out of this were the contacts and also some inspiration for my own writings. So often writing is an individual task, but writers need to commiserate with their own kind and network. I felt inspired just hearing people talk about the things they are passionate about and that made me want to write a lot more.

I went to three panels on Friday. The first was a 75-minute writing session. The writing session was fun for the idea-generation exercises, but the biggest benefit was meeting other writers with the same goals as me. I’ve met a few people with stories similar to mine that have agreed to exchange their work with me.

The first Panel I went to was called “Apple Pie, Rayguns and Galactic Ovelords,” which dealt with the tropes that show up in genre fiction. The panel featured talked about how writers use different tropes and how readers view them. It’s something I knew about before, but I’m now a lot more aware of them when I read. I’ll definitely research this issue a lot more

The second panel was “Equal time for Non-Vampires” which dealt with the prevalence of vampires in genre fiction and other monsters in mythology that have shown up in writing. This was particularly interesting for my story Goddess INC, which deals with a variety of spirits so now I have some new myths to research and possibly incorporate into my story.

The third panel was on the “The Redefined Body” which dealt with body modification, cybernetics and how non-fiction and fiction authors deal with that issue. One of my favorite anime and manga shows is Ghost in the Shell, which deals specifically with the issues that come of from this. This panel certainly sparked a few short story ideas that I want to pursue.

There a still a couple days left in the convention so if you want to go check it out here.