some media coverage of Amber and her panel presentations
http://www.sequentialtart.com/cv_1005_4.shtml
[The panel most immediately apropos to the present occasion was entitled "Fanged and Furry Fiction: Horror and Monsters and Spooks, Oh My!", and was moderated by Hart. The panelists included Amber Benson, who played Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and, after co-writing several Buffyverse-related comics, has gone on to collaborate with Christopher Golden on the new Ghosts of Albion series of horror novels (Del Rey);………….. Maryelizabeth Hart opened the discussion with a few introductory remarks about how modern, post-Anne Rice horror fiction frequently features beings who have traditionally been regarded as monsters as protagonists, not just antagonists. Amber Benson agreed that monsters can make effective antiheroes, noting that it can be more interesting to write about characters who are outsiders or even villains. She cited the example of the protagonist in Richard Matheson's classic SF/horror novel I Am Legend, who is the last surviving normal human in a world of monsters and, because of that, an outsider…………..The third of the prose fiction panels I attended, which was once again moderated by Maryelizabeth Hart, was called "The Yonnic Factor: Do Women Write Differently?" Amber Benson was on this panel, too, along with horror/fantasy writer R. H. Stavis, author of the supernatural novel Daniel's Veil (Medallion Press), and Del Rey Books editor in chief Betsy Mitchell………Attempting to define the historical differences between male and female writers, Benson remarked that traditionally women wrote very woman-centric fiction because the female sphere was all they were allowed to know. (Perhaps the best-known example of this is Jane Austen. Although most of Austen's novels were written during the Napoleonic wars, they are so intensely focused on the often brutally pragmatic female world of courtship and marriage prospects that virtually the only allusion to this major political event in any of her books is a discussion in Persuasion of how protagonist Anne Elliot's once and future suitor, the formerly poor naval officer Captain Wentworth, had gained unexpected prosperity since his initial attempt to win her hand due to the prize money he had been awarded by the Crown for his role in capturing several French ships in battle.)………. Amber Benson cited the analogous example of Sarah Caudwell's mystery series beginning with Thus Was Adonis Murdered, whose protagonist Hilary Tamar's gender is never specified. According to Benson, all hints as to whether Hilary was male or female remained so thoroughly ambiguous and indeterminate throughout the series that "I just kept picturing [the unidentifiably androgynous] Pat from Saturday Night Live." On a somewhat contradictory related note, Betsy Mitchell pointed out that there is an essay called "The Kyu! Factor" whose author contends that the average male has some kind of innate ability to reproduce the sound effect of bullets splattering off a wall without ever having been taught………This anecdote somewhat tied in with a comment from a female audience member about how many young female writers produce stories featuring Mary Sue-type heroines (that is, protagonists who are obviously thinly disguised idealized versions of the author) or yaoi (male/male romances) with stereotypically feminized ukes ("uke" being the Japanese term for the character who assumes the stereotypically female "passive" sexual role in a male/male relationship). Amber Benson responded to this by pointing out that, especially at the beginning of their careers, many famous male writers had also written blatantly autobiographical fiction--most notably James Joyce, whose first novel was actually entitled A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Benson's view, female writers had not been a significant part of the landscape during the historical period when producing such thinly fictionalized autobiographical or "self-inserted" work was standard operating procedure, although this has apparently not stopped many female fan fiction writers active today from engaging in essentially the same practice……..Other, somewhat more scattershot comments of interest included Stavis' anecdote about a conversation she overheard between her eight-year-old daughter and a little girl from a traditional religious family. The other little girl had told Stavis' daughter that she didn't think she'd get married, but might want to live with her friend Julia. Stavis' daughter promptly informed the other girl that she could marry Julia even though she was also a girl "and then you could have twice as many kids."
This led Benson to reminisce about the portrayal of Willow and Tara's relationship on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At one point, Benson said, she had become highly indignant over the network's reluctance to let the two lesbian characters do anything overtly physical together on camera. A gay props guy had sympathized, but told her that ultimately Willow and Tara would accomplish more by making a long-term lesbian relationship seem normal without overtly pushing the envelope than characters who were more in the audience's face about making out, etc. According to him, the more low-key way the relationship wound up being depicted on Buffy would subtly change viewers' attitudes through a sort of stealth normalization process.
http://www.computercrowsnest.com/featur ... nz8636.php
Everyone was going crazy for Amber Benson, who was signing advance galley copies of THE GHOSTS OF ALBION: ACCURSED her novel with Christopher Gordon. Richard Morgan (Altered Carbon, Woken Furies) and Charlie Huston (Already Dead) were a hit as well.
Have fun everyone!!
