Yesterday, I posted how I intend to do one panel as a moderator. Today, the other.
Fantasy In the (Modern) City
Description: With the rise in popularity of urban-based fantasies, so increases the complexity of storytelling. Sure, you know what's happening in a modern world. But does including a fantastical element have its own challenges? Discuss the challenges of writing fantasy in a modern setting, and how the different choices made by authors influenced their stories.
This one should be a collection of basically easy questions.
- Introduce yourself, and tell us of your Urban Fantasy Cred.
- One of the reasons that this panel is named the fantasy of MODERN urban fantasy is that urban fantasy goes back at least as far as 500 years, back to Thomas More's utopia. You don't get much more fantastic than a society with toilets made of gold. Urban fantasy as we understand it today could be defined as Bram Stoker's novel Dracula -- as he was a mythological monster in an urban sprawl like London. How would you describe the difference between urban fantasy and horror? Or should we just say that in horror, it takes more than an air strike to destroy the threat?
- Every city has their own quirks, nuances and attitudes. San Francisco isn't New York, and isn't Chicago. When working with urban fantasy, how much do you tend to focus on the city and their interactions with fantastical elements? Do you figure the inhabitants of each city would react differently to the supernatural, or is the city just a backdrop where events happen?
- How do each of you handle the interaction between fantasy and urban elements in each of your novels? Are they open and out of the casket? Are they secretive? Or are only certain elements of society, like the police, aware that something else is out there?
- Now that we've beaten the urban element to death a little, let's focus a bit on the modern. How do you have modern technology interact with beasties? Are vampires visible on digital cameras? Do the fae use cell phones? [Note to self: discuss fighting the supernatural. If only to impress the reader with how badass the bad guy is by dropping a MOAB on him]
- The Description of this panel asks "does including a fantastical element have its own challenges?" So, does it?
Hopefully, that'll be enough
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The Love at First Bite series.
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