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Dune and Beagle - Wondercon 2010
http://www.rarityguide.com/articles/articles/264/1/Dune-and-Beagle---Wondercon-2010/Page1.html
By Douglas Shepard (Editor in Chief, RarityGuide.com)
Published on 04/7/2010
 
Two booths caught my literary interest: one promoting Dune and the other was Peter S. Beagle doing a signing. This covers my conversations with both.

The Dune Novels Booth and Peter S. Beagle – Wondercon 2010

For everything we found at Wondercon, there were two literary things that stood out. The first was getting a chance to talk with Byron Herbert, grandson of Frank Herbert about the Dune Novels. It was a surprise to begin with as I had not previously seen them present anything related to Dune so directly at a convention. I asked about this and found out they were trying to more aggressively promote the forthcoming books. At present, one new Dune book has been released, The Winds of Dune and there are two more Dune books that are coming out. It does some sense as the original Dune Series is a cornerstone for much of the science fiction community. I talked to Byron a little more about the films and found out there is a forthcoming Dune movie, though he did not say which. I also asked if there were any prizes in the family collection and was surprised to learn they had fourteen painting done for the storyboard of the original David Lynch film as well as several panels from the storyboard as well. While it was only a brief conversation, it was still an honor to meet these people (and get a free t-shirt).

The second person I met was Peter S. Beagle, author of one of my favorite books, “The Last Unicorn. He was there to help promote the screening for “The Last Unicorn” they were having that weekend as well as the six issue comic book series they were just beginning to release. I talked to him about writing and becoming a serious writer. The advice he gave was “be on time to work”. He went on to explain that he came from a family of writers and artists. He told me about how some of his family would get up, have breakfast, stretch out some canvas and sit down to paint. Some days he told me nothing would happen, but they would still try to paint and some days the muse would strike. He had met a number of people that he found to be more talented than him but they could not sit still. Because of this, they could not really write. That was one thing that he could do, sit still and write. The conversation drifted a little and we were talking a little about writing itself. He told me that he remembered being half way through “The Last Unicorn” and finding out he was just making it up as he went along, sometimes describing the characters as lightning, striking in ways that he could not quite explain. I could only sympathize as I knew only too well there are times a story grows in its own direction.

In the end, it was great to just talk with both of these people and get to know them a little bit. Being able to meet people like this is a serious benefit to attending events like Wondercon. You get to just talk with people who made some very impressive stories, movies or other pieces of art. This year was made very memorable from these encounters.