My Salt Lake Comic Con Schedule

Hot on the heels of Dragon Con last week, I'll be at Salt Lake Comic Con this week.

Both conventions have kept me very busy, and I'm looking forward to Salt Lake. I'll be sharing a booth with the rest of the guys from Big Shiny Robot! and some other great artists. I'll have plenty of books and will be signing them, including The Serpent's Head.

For those interested, here's my panel schedule:

Thursday

4:00 pm - An Hour With Sam Witwer
5:00 pm - Room 250a - What we know and what we think we know about Episode VII (Moderator)
7:00 pm - Room 255c - Salt Lake Comic-Con Film School Part 1: Development, Screenwriting, and Pre-production
8:00 pm - Room 255b - The Big Shiny Geek Show Pub Quiz

Friday

1:00 pm - Room 250a - Star Wars Rebels (Moderator)
2:00 pm - Room 151g - The Future and Legends of Star Wars Canon (Moderator)
8:00 pm - Room 255f - The Cinema Behind Star Wars (Moderator)

Saturday

2:00 pm - Room 255b - Nerds vs. The News
3:00 pm - Room 255c - Salt Lake Comic Con Film School Part 3: Post-Production, Marketing, and Distribution
4:00 pm - Room 255c - How to Create and Run a Successful Kickstarter Campaign
5:00 pm - Room 251a - Star Wars Roundtable: An in-depth discussion of Film, Comics, Television, Novels, Toys and more (Moderator)
6:00 pm - Room 151d - Full of Sith podcast recording
8:00 pm - Room 255e - The Princess Bride, John Carter, and other movie marketing failures (Moderator)

This is all still subject to change. I've heard tell they want to add some things to the schedule, but we'll see. In the meantime, I'd say your best bet to get a book signed will be on Friday, which is my lightest panel day.

I also promise I'll be updating this space more often. I've just been writing. A lot.

Anatomy of an Opening: The End of the Affair

Instead of breaking down a scene from a movie, this time we'll break down the opening of a book. (Previously, I've done scenes from City Lights, Citizen Kane, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I've also broken down the opening to Starship Troopers.)

Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is absolutely one of my favorite books. The writing is lyrical and story heart-wrenching and beautiful. Greene's style of writing is such that he always has me gripped, whether it's the beginning of the book or the end. And he shows you so much about the character in his opening lines.

So, here are the first two paragraphs from the book:
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which, to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who - when he has been seriously noted at all - has been praised for his technical ability, but d…

The Symbiotic Relationship Between Art and Politics

Art is inherently political.

Let's just get that out of the way. We all have things we want to say (or things we want to not say) in our personal lives that shape the art we make. And artists, more often than not, are trying to say something with their art, even if their goal is to not say something.

There is no doubt that this has been a turbulent week in the country I live in. There are many of us that are confused and shocked and afraid of what might be to come in the future. That's understandable. As artists and writers, I feel like we're typically more empathetic than the general population. It's easy to think about what it's like to be in someone else's shoes because we spend so much of our creative time almost literally in someone else's shoes. And we need to pass that understanding on to our readers or viewers or however else they're consuming this art.

I've seen this troubling idea, though, that art needs to be purely for escape and that p…

Writing is Listening

In many social situations, I'm a talker. I like to think of myself as a raconteur, but it's more just like I don't know how to shut up. At least in the right situation. I've done a lot and know just a little bit about so many different things, it's easy for me to find something to talk about with people. When I can come out of my social anxiety shell, I actually like talking to people. But there are times when I can't really talk, I don't have the energy, emotional or physical, to do it. Instead, I just drink in the surroundings.

I like to listen. I like to observe.

It's something we writers have to do. We have to take in all the input we can. And sometimes that means shutting the hell up and just listening. Listen to your friends tell their stories. Listen to how they talk about other people and describe them. Listen to the words they use. Listen to the emotion in people's voices as they're talking. Watch how they talk. What sorts of things th…

The stories of Bryan Young

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