ArmadilloCon 2007: I fell in love with an octopus

There were several ArmadilloCon panels with slightly adult content. Some of them had great titles, such as “I Fell in Love with an Octopus”, which promised to discuss whether the paranormal romance has gone too far. “When does a really weird love story cross the line between plausible and really weird? What are some of the most implausible stories out there? Which ones work, and why?” Unfortunately, it exhausted the topic in 15 minutes and turned into a session of kwetching about publishers and editors. A common gripe was that they don’t want to push the genre envelope and try to pigeonhole writers into marketing categories.

Laura Anne Gilman (left) and Debbie Lynn Smith on the “I Fell in Love with an Octopus” panel

Lillian Stewart Carl on the I Fell in Love with an Octopus panel

Speaking of genre boundaries, here is an interesting quote from the panel: “If you spend more than 50% of the time saving the world, it’s urban fantasy. If you spend more than 50% of the time saving your relationship, that’s paranormal romance.”

Stina Leicht and Rachel Caine

There was another panel with a title I won’t publish here, because if I did, spambots would hit my site extra hard, and search engines would stupidly hide my site from search results. Anyway, the panelists reminisced about the times they allowed their mothers read their stories, forgetting that those stories had steamy scenes in them. Even better, one of the panelists was reading her story out loud to her mother, before remembering… ooops….