Writing.wise Nov.13.07 review

Radha Yoga and Eatery is a gorgeous venue and quite unexpected. It's on the border of one of the tougher parts of town and located on 2nd floor of a building that's been there since 1907, a very old building for Vancouver. It doesn't seem all that promising as you're going up the two flights of stairs but once you arrive, there's a long,old fashioned wooden bar, old brick walls, ceiling fans, lots of tables and chairs, and a very warm environment.

Before the proceedings started, we had a Thai Butternut Squash soup with home made crackers for the panelists and the partners who got there a little early. Attendees started arriving pretty quickly, even before the doors officially opened. We sold 35 advance tickets and we probably had about 10 people get tickets at the door.

The moderator, kc dyer, had a demanding task given how the panel's eclecticism and it turned out well. I always  think that if people are saying the evening should have been longer (which they did) then you've had a successful event.

Here's what I remember of the content...anybody who cares to dispute or contradict, please do...

Ian Verchere started the night with a discussion of games and some of the frustrations of dealing with people who don't understand the technology. He recounted a story about having to apply a colour to some object in a game where the 'bosses' wanted to choose a pantone colour for it when all he had available were 16 screen colours (one of which was transparent and not a colour at all). He also gave us his latest idea for a game story. It's an alternate history. "What if a Chinese explorer come to North America first and it had been colonized from west to east?" It's one of those moments when the audience gets silent and you can feel the excitement.

Shari Ulrich talked about writing songs for performance and film as well as scoring films. She pulled together some of the conversational threads on copyright, owning ideas, and the demands on writers that popped up throughout the evening. Ulrich provided some reality-based answers to questions about preventing people from stealing your work.  The consensus between her and the other panelists is that your idea matters less than getting it produced, published, written, distributed, etc. Sidebar: I had the most pushback about including a songwriter on the panel. Ironically, it was the songwriter who drew the most questions from the audience.

Sue Thomas, our guest from the UK and a new media expert, made a big impact when she told us about how her students worked with Penguin Books last year to create a wiki novel. The idea was that Penguin Books would get readers from around the world to sign up and collectively write a novel using a wiki. As I recall, about 1000 people participated and wrote over 80,000 words with a lot of thrills and chills for the students trying to manage the project along with the Penguin editors. Thomas also discussed her work in transliteracy and some her latest writing on cyberspace and nature.

Mira Sundara Rajan was our expert on intellectual property law. She talked about copyright in general and something I'd never heard of before, moral rights. Apparently, as writers (and other creative folks too) we have a moral right to our work. It's recognized in all countries except the US. Sundara Rajan also recounted a story about an Indian poet who was exiled from British India and later lauded for his work. Eventually his copyright was nationalized and given as a gift to the people of India. The good thing about the story is that everyone has access to his work. The dark side of this gift is that people change his work, fail to attribute his work, and sometimes misattibute work with the consequence that it can be difficult to figure what he actually wrote. Luckily, his family has an oral tradition where his work has been passed on from one generation to the next.

Kaare Andrews talked about the realities associated with working on comic books where the property has been created and developed by someone else and you're brought it on contract to write the next issue. It sounded like technical writing except Andrews had worked on the Matrix comics, Amazing Spiderman, Ultimate X-Men and other high profile properties. He' also commented about having worked in film and the contrast between that and working on a tv pilot. Writers are treated very differently in those various sectors.

There was more and if I have a chance I'll see about writing it up.