I was not a Boy Scout for long — one of many childhood endeavors I didn’t complete, and opportunities I squandered — but I was a Scout long enough to remember the motto: “Be Prepared.”
Would that I had lived up to it last night.
It’s not that I didn’t prepare at all for my part of the “Speculative Fiction Night” sponsored by Bull Spec magazine (fourth issue on newstands now!). Before I left the house, I thumbed through Orson Scott Card‘s Characters and Viewpoint and a couple of novels to check my memory of their treatment of point of view — including, for instance, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast, with its multiple first-person storytelling.
Then, having made no notes and instead trusting to my memory, I drove to Durham. My intent was to conduct a thoroughly unscientific poll of the forty or fifty attendees on their reading preferences (which I did, though not well) and to ask them how much an author’s choice and handling of point of view affects their reading enjoyment (which I botched most thoroughly). That’s right: after stumbling through the first few questions, I forgot the key question I meant to ask the audience.
Overall, and despite my poor performance, the event went quite well. I chatted with several author friends and SF&F fans, and heard some nice praise from the audience for Baen Books (and especially the new Baen website). I finally snagged a copy of The Greyfriar — with a name like Gray, how could I not? — and got Clay and Susan Griffith to sign it, and also picked up Forbidden Cargo by newly local author Rebecca Rowe. If I didn’t have to go to work this morning (thanks, Tuesday’s ice storm, for throwing off my schedule), I could’ve spent more time with Samuel M. Blinn, Bull Spec editor and our host for the evening, Ada Milenkovich Brown, James Maxey, et al. But, alas, my devotion to Ben Franklin’s dictum forced me home.*
In sum, it was a nice evening — I just wish I’d done better for my part. For anyone who might have been there, I apologize for my unpreparedness. The next time I go to something like that, I’ll just plan to read from a short story and be done with it.
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*I don’t know why I follow his advice. So far it hasn’t made me particularly healthy, wealthy, or wise.
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