Two Breakthroughs in One Week!!

One of the many positive fallouts for me, regarding Eastercons, is the renewed interest and focus on my works that I gain. Often this takes the form of mentally digging out some of my older, unfinished, pieces that I've been stuck on and thinking through them again with the goal of getting back to what I'm most interested in, instead of sidetracking myself with other projects.

This year, such renewed attention paid some nice dividends for both a short story and a novel. Without giving too much detail away (you'll have to wait until their published!):

For the short story, in the alternate future genre, I always had an opening page that I quite liked. It set the tone, setting, characters and conflict up well... I just didn't know where it should go from there. This was two years ago now, and finally after Eastercon this year I revisted the story only to hit upon the perfect theme. I even know the ending. Now it just remains to finish writing the thing.

With another long standing novel project, a fairly far future of humanity tale, the 'eureka' moment wasn't as story breaking as with above, but it was significant. With my novels, bits and pieces often fall into place over long periods of time. And this was no different (truth be told, I started this story in 2003!). One small part of the story revolves around a true AI (AGI = artificial general intelligence). I had a backstory and had even written the scene describing the meeting of the AGI with the protagonist. Only... I wasn't conviced. I couldn't justify why my AGI was doing what it was doing. Even to me, my explanation seemed lame at best and cliche at worst. But finally, in the week after Eastercon, the pieces came together and I came up with what I think is an interesting, credible reason that fits well with the backstory.

Two story problems resolved in one week. Thank you Eastercon (and thank you family, for giving my some piece by visiting the inlaws that week). They're little victories, but they're still victories.

Insight and longevity.