Kevin's Watch

Greetings all,

This year's International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts fast approaches (March 19th, I'll be in Ft. Lauderdale) and SRD is on the schedule for an author's reading on Saturday the 22nd. I will be in attendence, as usual (front row if I can manage it), but I'm thinking I might try to catch him outside of the reading session and ask him if I could sit down and chat with him, as a long-time reader, fellow IAFA member, and (of course) fan.

If I get up the guts to ask, and if he says yes... I'm don't know exactly what I could/should say, other than to gush a bit. So, I'm open to suggestions as to what to ask him. If I get a lot of ideas from you all, I can tell him I'm representing a web community of patrons of his work (and have an excuse to slip in some info about this board) as well.

What should I ask?

-Mouseglove, the nervous.

heh. ask him if he's ever been here to the Watch and if he'd care to grace us with his presence once in a while.

i wanna go! people are always talking about how great chicago is, but there has yet to be an event here i've really wanted to attend. as soon as i transfer, tho...

Use all the charm you`ve got (plus some more) and try to get some inside information about the Third Chrons..a few hints of what it`s all about, main characters etc.

And maybe you should give him one of those cool t-shirts they sell in the store here. I`m sure he`d love walking around with "100% Unbeliever" on his chest.

If you get a chance to talk to him, good luck!!

Ask him when he's planning on visiting New Zealand - that's a joke that's sure to get him talking

And an autographed Watch note thingy would be cool !! Especially if you could scan it and put it up on the Gallery !!

i wonder what his personal e-mail address is... send him a link lol

how far is he on the third chrons? any publisher lined up yet? any dates set to finish/publish?

Sylvanus wrote:heh. ask him if he's ever been here to the Watch and if he'd care to grace us with his presence once in a while.

You know... which other online fan-communites of SRD are there? No other site and no mailing list worth mentioning I know of. There might be a big newsgroup, don't know.

Why don't we as a community write to SRD through his publisher and kindly ask if he'd be willing to answer, say, ten questions via mail whenever he finds the time? Wouldn't put pressure on him since we'd not be pestering him in public or during a rushed meeting.

great idea sev...

Sevothtarte wrote:Why don't we as a community write to SRD through his publisher and kindly ask if he'd be willing to answer, say, ten questions via mail whenever he finds the time? Wouldn't put pressure on him since we'd not be pestering him in public or during a rushed meeting.

Well, I'm going to ask if I can talk to him. If he says no, I won't pester him (obviously). If he says yes, he's given his permission (he's seen me at this conference for two years, so he at least recognizes my face now) so I won't be pestering him then either.

I already have a short list of questions for him, but I'm trying to come up with intelligent ones, questions he won't have been asked before (or at least, not often). I plan on having a couple printouts of the board's main page and the Kevins Watch main page (with the map, I think that's kinda cool) to show him and let him keep, so if I get to talk to him at all, he'll know about this place.

-Mouseglove

Oops, I didn't mean to imply you'd be pestering him.

Trouble with these things: The short questions are the very used ones ("When will the next book be released?") and the really original, good questions take too long to ask and answer...

Don't forget to write the URL in big letters on your printouts.

If you have the time to ask any long questions, I would love to hear his take on some of the big debates we've been having lately on the Oath of Peace and let's hear it for mhoram threads...you know, the "tavern brawl" ones.

We could always go for THE BIG QUESTION ...

Dude, why are all these people in your books so totally weird and screwed up?

1. How reliable is TC as a narrator?

I don't mean he is dishonest. But I often get the impression that his perceptions are too colored by his disease and self-loathing for me to take what he is saying as 100% gospel. I definitely think he frequently jumps to the wrong conclusion and misinterprets the actions/motives of others. All of which makes him a great character and totally human.

2. Which of the races of the Land would he like to write about outside of the context of the Chronicles? The Ramen? The Haruchai? The Giants?

3. Great actors often keep certain aspects of a character's personality or experience a secret from the audience to add dimension to the role. Did he do that with any of the characters in the Chronicles? Is there a secret about any of the characters (Bannor???) that would surprise his readers?

From what I understand, Donaldson needs to stay pretty focussed on his writing when he's working on something. So I would recommend that you don't email him a list of questions. If he's in a "writing trance" on the next book, I'm sure noone here would want to take the chance of breaking that.

I think the route of the conference would be much better. He's a very approachable person, and I don't think he would mind taking a short list of questions. If he's at the conference, he's already broken his writing trance (on his own), so this would be less of a distraction. Having the questions written down would be good, in case he doesn't have time to answer them in person (I've noticed that he doesn't sit still very often at conferences) - that way he could take them with him and answer them at his leisure (then perhaps email the answers to you).

Wait. Whoa. Hold it. Did you say Ft. Lauderdale? Would that, by any chance, be Ft. Lauderdale, Florida?

*prays the answer is yes*

~Foamy~

Foamfollower1013 wrote:Wait. Whoa. Hold it. Did you say Ft. Lauderdale? Would that, by any chance, be Ft. Lauderdale, Florida?

*prays the answer is yes*

Yes, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA. Check out www.iafa.org/ for info, it's at the Ft. Lauderdale Airport Hilton. SRD's reading is on Saturday at 2:00pm.

-Mouseglove

when, on god's green and very polluted earth, is the beeping third chronicles coming OUT. i'm going insane with people saying it might come out on a certain date, or that you are half way through writing it.

or...

When is the thrid chronicles coming out? (twitch)

SRD's reading is on Saturday at 2:00pm.

Grrr...

Of course. SRD comes within reasonable driving distance of where I live, and the reading is on Saturday. Everything always has to be on Saturday.

~Foamy~

One of the topics that caused a heated debate in the "Dissecting the Land" forum was the relationship between Covenant and Joan before he contracted leprosy. I would really like to hear SRD's take on this one.

Another theme that recurrs in his work is contradiction. I'd like to ask him about that.

And last but not least I'd like to hear SRD's perspective about evil.

-pitch

Just a casual comment from someone who isn't usually good at asking questions, but sometimes it's interesting to ask authors what other writers/genres they like to read themselves. Expanding in that vein, since there's moral/ethical issues aplenty in TC, one could also ask if any particular philosopher or school of thought had particular influence (for example, the acceptance of paradox in the end of the First Chronicles, instead of insistence on the Land being either real or not real, is a fairly non-Western thing).