My Schedule for LTUE 2017

The annual Life The Universe and Everything writing conference is in Provo this week. I love it. It isn’t really a Con. The whole thing is aimed at helping people become better and more successful writers. I believe this is the 9th one I’ve been to in a row. I’m the toastmaster this year, which basically means I give a speech at the banquet at the end.

This is my schedule:

Thursday 

11:00 Urban Fantasy vs. Horror
Where is the line between urban fantasy and horror? What are the similarities and the differences? (Bryce)
Courtney Alameda, Michaelbrent Collings, Larry Correia, Steve Diamond, Craig Nybo (M), Adrienne Monson

12:00 So You Want to Write Horror…
Get tips for writing horror. How do you know if horror is for you? Tips for beginners. (Arches)
Courtney Alameda, Larry Correia, Steve Diamond, Terra Luft, David J. West (M)

1:00 Writing Villains
How do you make a believable villain? What are the clichés you should avoid? Why is the villain important to the story? (Canyon)
Larry Correia, Paul Genesse, Christopher Husberg, Adrienne Monson, Julie Wright (M)

2:00 Writing Tie-in Fiction
Writing tie-in fiction can be very different from doing your own thing. Why do it, and what should you be prepared for? (Zion)
David Boop, Larry Correia, Steve Diamond, Carrie Harris, Callie Stoker (M)

3:00 Monsters in Fiction

Why do you put monsters in your fiction? What is their purpose? (Zion)
Larry Correia, Kevin L. Nielsen (M), Holli Anderson, Craig Nybo, Nathan Shumate

5:00 The Art of the Hook
First lines and first chapters matter. How do you get readers interested in your story? In your characters? (Arches)
Larry Correia, James Ganiere, Scott R. Parkin, J. Scott Savage, Andrea Pearson (M), David J. West

Friday

10:00 Writing Action
Guns, fistfights, chases, wars, duels…how do you implement action scenes in your fiction? Does it change depending on the genre? (Zion)
Courtney Alameda, Michaelbrent Collings, Larry Correia, Steve Diamond, Peter Orullian, Adrienne Monson (M)

1:00 So You Want to Write Fantasy…
Get tips for writing fantasy. How do you know if fantasy is for you? Tips for beginners. (Canyon)
Larry Correia, Paul Genesse (M), Christopher Husberg, Brian McClellan, L. E. Modesitt, Jr., Peter Orullian

2:00 Choosing a PoV Character
Is your main character the hero? The villain? Somewhere in between? How do you decide which to use? (Bryce)
Larry Correia, Paul Genesse, Brian McClellan, Janci Patterson, Tristi Pinkston (M), Aneeka Richins

Saturday

3:00 Plot – The Beginning, Murky Middle, and End
The pros share their tips and strategies for plotting their stories and series. (Canyon)
Larry Correia, Brian McClellan, Cortney Pearson, Peter Orullian, Amber Argyle, Adrienne Monson (M)

6:00 Death is the Least of your Worries: Writing Lovecraftian Fiction
How does writing Lovecraftian fiction differ from other styles? Why are we fascinated with writing this type of fiction? (Canyon)
Courtney Alameda, Larry Correia, C. R. Langille, Nathan Shumate, Andrea Pearson (M)

7:00 Gala Banquet (2 hours)
Please join us to top off a great year! Tickets must be purchased in advance. They are limited, so get them now. They might not be available at the Symposium, and they will not be sold at the door. Also, come hear controversial bestselling author and toastmaster Larry Correia and master storyteller Todd Gallowglas as part of the festivities. (Zion, Bryce)

Putting Together a Collection of My Short Fiction
An Interview Talking About How and Why I Became an Author

25 thoughts on “My Schedule for LTUE 2017”

  1. I’ve read all of Lovecraft, but how is Lovecraftian defined nowadays. My take on him is that his imagination was very fertile but his writing style was sometimes terrible. So hopefully we can pick and choose and still call something Lovecraftian.

    1. Anything that draws on the Mythos is considered Lovecraftian. Hardly anybody writes in that style (well spoken New Englanders telling scary stories in the dark) because it is dated and doesn’t sell today.

          1. Well Larry:
            In my book you excel HPL by orders of magnitude. Not only is your prose style superior but your ordinance kicks his butt. You once nuked a Great Old One and later killed it dead. The most anyone in an HPL story ever did was splat Cthuhlu with a motorboat and all that accomplished was to temporarily turn it into a busted snot bubble. Technologically speaking the best HPL use of science was pouring several hundred gallons of concentrated sulfuric acid into a hole that contained a monster’s gigantic elbow. Hopefully the rest of the creature was attached and was also dissolved in all that hydronium ion goodness.

          2. But Lovecraft used submarines to attack a Deep One city in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and the use of a submarine played a big role in The Temple. Cool Air also went into some detail about the methods the fellow used to preserve himself. In The Colour out of Space and Mountains of Madness Lovecraft also went into a lot of detail about the investigative methods employed on these alien artifacts.

      1. It takes a certain mindset to get used to the style: usually in the form of second or thirdhand accounts of some weirdness, which forces the reader to do a lot of the work, but I find the reader gets a sense of immersion as a result. One thing I find that helps is listening to the audiobooks and audiodramas adaptions that have been done on HPL’s work.

    2. As an Imagist, HPL is exceptional. As a writer, his prose can often be more than a bit clunky and he seemed to have a religious thing against rewrites and some other forms of editorial input. That said, most of his stuff is well worth reading at least once, even when it’s a bit of a slog. Among other things it makes it easier to tell who’s been influenced by Lovecraft, and who’s just playing with Lovecraftian ideas. The folks who have gone to the source tend to do a better job with their presentation.
      These days Lovecraftian usually refers to the general feel that he created; unnameable horrors from beyond that even knowledge of drives men mad, implacable gods who don’t really give a flying fig about humanity, that sort of thing.

      1. Well I try not to judge his talent by some of the problems I find with his story lines but it always seemed to me that the protagonists were sort of dense and never tried hard enough to win. I mean take as an example the Whisperer in the Dark. The Old Guy on the farm is writing a long series of letters to a guy in Boston. He keeps describing how trapped he feels because the monsters are attacking his house very night. But every day he’s making long trips to other towns to buy replacement guard dogs and even travelling into town to post the letters! Why didn’t he just get in his truck and head south till he reached Montpelior in about an hour and hop a train for Boston. And how come the protagonist couldn’t tell that the buzzing sound in his host’s voice meant he was a disguised monster. Everyone else who ever read it knew that within twenty words.

        1. I think it captured the ability of people to rationalize away danger, especially when the danger is far outside ‘normal’ life, so it probably would seem foolish to a reader who is outside the story.

          And also, many of Lovecraft’s MCs weren’t typically men of action, but scholars and civilians, so of course they would be outmatched by the monstrosities they deal with, but HPL could relate action characters when he wanted to. The escape from Innsmouth was tense, and his explorer characters in Mountains of Madness had guts to spare, and before exploring Cthulhu’s risen island the crew of that ship had just engaged in a fight to the death with a ship full of Cthulhu cultists.

          1. Well, I like his story lines but except for a few of the stories I think the writing suffers from some pretty serious prose problems. I always thought his stories would have made better movies than books. They’re very visual. They remind me more of fever dreams than stories. The words get in the way of the effect.

      2. I’ve found that one of HPLs greatest strengths was in worldbuilding and creating a picture of a specific time and place in history. In many ways I think his masterpiece was The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, where not only is there a tense mystery, but there is a sense of pieces of the past coming forward and practically invading the present.

    3. Try listening to the audiobooks and audiodramas. The HP Lovecraft Historical Society has done some amazing things with adapting Lovecraft’s stories to the sort of radio show format that would have been heard at the time.

      Personaly, I find that Lovecraft is one of those writers whose work you need to hear read aloud to get the full effect. C.S. Lewis and Gene Wolfe are a couple of others who I find are best suited to audio formats, but with HPL you get a better appreciation of the prose when hearing it than reading it.

  2. Controversial? Larry Correa?

    All he does is write great fiction, speak his mind, and leave everyone else ruthlessly alone from his mountaintop fortress.

    Isn’t that the American dream?

    1. Yeah, I wondered about that. Reading, “come hear controversial bestselling author and toastmaster Larry Correia,” it made me wonder what kind of ruckus the sensitive SJW-types are going to make because the organizers recognized Larry was controversial but made him toastmaster anyway.

      Ruckus will be made; mark my words, it will be made 🙂

  3. Fantasy and horror? I’ve always found that they both share a basic theme: that the characters (or the reader, through the characters) steps out of the regular world and finds him or herself in a place where things that would not normally happen are occurring. Whether it’s elves and unicorns or a serial killer and/or a vampire rising from its sepulcher, whether you walk through a wardrobe into Narnia or find crashed alien spaceship full of eggs and bodies with burst-open chests, you’re not in normal life anymore.

    But in fantasy, the reaction is primarily wonder and adventure.

    In horror, it’s: GET ME OUT OF HERE!!!!!!!

  4. Hi Larry, is there any chance of these talks being recorded and you releasing them after the fact on something like audible?

    I can’t make the trip, but these all sound like excellent listens.

  5. I am so happy to have found you!!! I am a 42 yr old mother of 2 in Jacksonville, NC (husband is a retired Marine). I have a newfound love of fantasy fiction, and have found myself contemplating writing my own. I have to say that I have been obsessed with Sarah J Maas, and Naomi Novik. My son adores the Percy Jackson books, so those inspire me as well. But I began to notice a huge trend of political commentary coming from many authors. (relentlessly). The exception is Sarah J Maas, who is a Democrat, but left it alone after the election, and didn’t say too much before. I appreciate that respect for her non Liberal readers. This is all a long winded way of saying that I am thrilled to see that writers like you exist, and I am going to happily dig into one of your books very soon. Not sure which one….the first one? 🙂

    1. The first Monster Hunter International is free on Amazon if you want to try it out, but I’ve got a bunch of different series so it just depends on what you are looking for.

    2. The first MHI book being free definitely makes it a good entry point. My personal favorite, though, is the Grimnoir series, and it being a complete trilogy, IMO, also makes that a good starter.

      1. thanks my wife loves to write and I have stories in my head that I can’t easily put on paper if only just to get them out of my head.

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