Whether the romance is front and center or side plot, less spicy stories are blossoming in fantasy. Whether your characters care less about sex or are just cautious about jumping in the sack, sex doesn't have to be in your face. Explore how authors are navigating the increasing demand for these slower burn romances.
Heather Rose Jones
Event session
Every historic culture has included queer folks: people with non-normative experiences of love and desire. The stories of their lives are shaped by the varied ways in which their cultures understood gender and sexuality, which can sometimes seem as alien to us as a science-fictional setting. Authors talk about both situating their queer characters in their historic surroundings and rewriting those settings to create the stories they want to tell.
How do you create a realistic but fictional language from the ground up? Linguists and authors who have done just that discuss what it takes to create a convincing language, from cultural contexts to sound systems to grammars to vocabularies.
Heather is an author, blogger, and podcaster, focusing on queer and historic topics. Check out her Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog and podcast! Talk to her about her queer Regency-era fantasy series, researching sexuality in history, or diving headlong into geeky analysis of SFF award history.
(Please please please join my virtual table talk.)
Come see me with things to sign or just to say hi.
Heather will be reading from an in-process short story “Expiration Date” about an author with writer’s block and a harpy moonlighting as a muse. If there’s additional time, she may share some excerpts from the next Alpennia book, Mistress of Shadows.
Conventions are exciting, chaotic, and sometimes… a bit much. For the more introverted guests, navigating the crowds and constant activity can take some strategy. Listen to con-goers share the tricks and survival tactics they’ve developed to help introverts not just get through conventions, but have a great time doing it.
Group reading
Sapphic romance has always been radical—celebrating joy, intimacy, and happy endings that the world often denies queer women. This panel explores how love itself can be an act of defiance, using intimacy, chosen family, pleasure, softness, rage, and survival to push back against erasure and heteronormative expectations.
As far as I'm concerned, being named a finalist is an amazing achievement and recognition. I prefer not to speculate on anything more. (Though of course I have a speech ready, just in case.) All of the finalists in my category are amazing and I would be proud to see any of them win.
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