TBRCon 2025 Round Up

I kicked off 2025 by attending the fifth iteration of TBRCon! TBRCon is a free, virtual SFFH convention hosted by FanFiAddict. It streamed live from January 19-26, showcasing panels, podcasts, and RPG sessions for viewers to see and chat with authors, podcasters, bloggers, reviewers, and other creators in the SFFH space.

I attended the convention last year for the first time and loved it so much. This year was just as good. There were so many panels to attend. The ones I have detailed below are just the ones I was able to watch live during the convention, but the good news is there are many, many more to explore and all of them are recorded and available on the FanFiAddict YouTube channel, free to watch at your leisure.

So, if you are new to TBRCon, or you just didn’t have time to watch live this year, please allow me to give you a peek at my experience and encourage you to check them out for yourself.

Disabilities in SFF

Moderator: C.M. Caplan
Speakers: Laura Elliot, Caitlin Starling, Michael R. Miller, Justin T. Call, Mahaila Smith
Description: A discussion on how disability, neurodivergence, and chronic illnesses are represented in SFFH works; how authors who identity as disabled, ND, and/or CI interact with their own experiences and their work; and advice on how to accurately and compassionately engage with SFFH works featuring disabled, ND, and/or CI plots and characters.
Key Takeaways:

• Trust your character’s perceptions and let them act out those perceptions without judgment.

• Being specific with disability representation can help you avoid pitfalls into stereotypes or harmful tropes.

• Humans are messy. Disabilities are messy. Don’t get locked into “positive” representation as being the only way to showcase disabled characters.

• Sometimes disabilities just exist; they don’t move the plot or grow the character. That’s life.

• Everyone’s body is fallible. Everyone will become disabled—permanently or temporarily—at some point in their lives. Disability is a more universal experience than you think.

How to Market Through Email Newsletters

Moderator: Caroline Lambe
Speakers: Jessie Kwak, Wolfe Locke, Beth Barany, Konstance
Description: Like it says on the tin: how to build, maintain, and grow an email newsletter to market your work.
Key Takeaways:

• Newsletters give agency to the readers to choose you and your content in a way social media does not.

• Communicate your excitement—no one else will be excited if you aren’t first.

• You can easily scale and move from platform to platform, so don’t get hung up on the platform when you first start out.

• Consistency is better than frequency.

Jump Scares: How to Create Shocking Horror on the Page

Moderator: George Dunn
Speakers: Jenny Kiefer, Josh Malerman, Cynthia “Cina” Pelayo, Philip Francassi
Description: We’re all familiar with jump scares in film—the sudden music, the burst of action—but how can words replicate that same tension and sudden explosion of terror to keep readers on edge?
Key Takeaways:

• Create an unsettling feeling by throwing off the rhythm and pacing of the story—i.e. have something shocking happen right after the character survives an encounter and they think they are safe/dipping into a milder rhythm for the plot.

• Don’t overdo the jump scares or destroy the rhythm so much that the reader is left without any sort of understanding or expectation.

• Having characters say things that are weird or off in the absence of action can also create a jump scare effect.

• Treat the setting like its own character with flaws and interactivity to maximize jump scare opportunities.

Writing a Successful Inciting Incident

Moderator: Philip Chase
Speakers: J.D.L. Rosell, Rebecca Campbell, Sung-il Kim, Evan Winter, Jenn Lyons
Description: What are inciting incidents and how are they used in story—a discussion on the dos and don’ts of creating inciting incidents and favorites from all forms of media.
Key Takeaways:

• Inciting incident structure and expectations are closely tied to genre conventions.

• Create universals through specifics—what are the unique quirks of your story/world and what about it are you/your character interested in?

• Take a step back and decide where your story really needs to start. Early pages can often be notes for yourself and not necessarily information needed for readers.

  Watch Inciting Incidents Panel

Sidekicks and Secondary Characters that Steal the Show

Moderator: Eleni Argyró
Speakers: Andrea Stewart, Fonda Lee, Sebastien de Castell, Luis Magalhaes, J.S. Dewes, SourpatchHero
Description: A discussion on the differences between sidekicks and secondary characters, their roles in story, and the dos and don’ts of letting them shine next to and sometimes ahead of the main character.
Key Takeaways:

• Sidekicks help the main character but they also help the reader, acting as a conduit for the reader to get into/gain access to the main character and the plot.

• “Steal the scene, not the show.” If your sidekick is stealing the show, then it’s their story and not the main character’s.

• All characters are the main characters of their own lives—give sidekicks agency even when they agree with the main character.

• Sidekicks can be complimentary or contrasting, whatever your story needs them to be.

What Are the Limits of Cozy Fantasy?

Moderator: Marshall Moore
Speakers: Marti Dumas, Mariana Costa, Sarah Beth Durst, Stephanie Burgis, Travis Baldree
Description: With the rise of cozy fantasy taking over the market, is there anything the genre can’t/shouldn’t do? How should a writer go about purposefully creating and editing a cozy story?
Key Takeaways:

• Cozy fantasy’s ultimate goals are attainable fantasies—starting a new business, finding your person/people, making a home for yourself—things that a modern reader can easily relate to and see happening for themselves.

• Cozy relies on agency, or the characters having some small ability to choose/control their lives.

• Vibes are just as deliberate as any other plot element and should be treated as another tool in the writer’s toolbox rather than a nebulous, serendipitous occurrence.

Religion in Fantasy

Moderator: Kaden Love
Speakers: Sarah K. Balstrup, Michael J. DeLuca, David T. List, Tori Tecken, Yuval Kordov
Description: What does it look like to have religion—real or imagined—in fantasy works? Why have it there? What can it do/not do for the story, for readers, and for the authors themselves?
Key Takeaways:

• Religion worldbuilding should grow organically out of the story’s themes early in the process rather than be tacked on after the fact.

• Faith ≠ Religion, Religious ≠ Spiritual, Individual Belief ≠ Organized Religion

• In addition to having multiple religions in a story, you should also consider having multiple expressions/depths of how a person engages with their chosen religion, i.e. practicing versus non-practicing.

• Religion has an inherently tragic context to it that can be used to explore plot and character.

• World religions don’t exist in vacuums—they influence and are influenced by people, cultures, history, etc.—blending and branching and changing, for better or worse, all the time.

Publishing in More Than One Genre

Moderator: Eleni Argyró
Speakers: Anna Stephens, Django Wexler, Christian Cameron, Quenby Olsen, L.R. Lam
Description: A discussion on the benefits, drawbacks, and overall journey of writing and publishing in multiple genres and how it affects your skills as a writer and your career.
Key Takeaways:

• Pen names for each genre you write in are largely a thing of the past and can be cumbersome now that authors are responsible for their own branding/marketing.

• SFFH readers don’t tend to limit their consumption of multiple genres in the same way other genre readers might prefer to do.

• Find an agent that does represent multiple genres/formats so they can support you in all you want to do now or in the future.

• Working within IPs is a whole other ball game and there is fierce loyalty to the established fandom over/above the authors that write for it.

• Write what you want—your readers are out there.

The Role of Humor in Horror

Moderator: Ed Crocker
Speakers: R.A. Busby, Tanya Pell, T. Kingfisher, Geoffrey W. Cole, Angela Sylvaine, Jonathan Janz
Description: A discussion on the interplay of horror and humor and how to use both effectively within a story.
Key Takeaways:

• Moments of levity allow the reader to breathe AND makes them let their guard down to receive another scare.

• There’s a cathartic need to both laugh and cry and indulge both in moments of tension and stress.

• Humor can intersect with horror within the ultra realistic, mundane, and/or practical aspects of life—i.e. there’s so much blood on the floor, gosh I sure hope I have enough towels.

• Humor in the face of horror can be an expression of empathy, compassion, etc. in the wake of seriousness.

Romance, Sex, & Sexuality in Horror

Moderator: Agatha Andrews
Speakers: Rin Chupeco, L.B. Shimaira, Hailey Piper, Lynn Hutchinson Lee, Desirée M. Niccoli
Description: A discussion on the intersection between romance and horror and the purpose and power behind giving characters sexuality/sensuality amidst the terror.
Key Takeaways:

• Romance and horror are both very carnal genres, delivering and eliciting primal emotions in love and terror, so there is a mutual understanding between the two.

• “Spice is the device.” Spiciness is not the point, but rather it is a tool serving a purpose within the plot/character arcs.

• What’s sexy/scary is very subjective—write from your own honesty, vulnerability, and curiosity and it will come across as sexy/scary to the reader as well.

• Be aware of othering or fetishizing—write from a place of compassion and understanding and avoid baseless shock factors that lack respect and/or intimacy.

What Makes a Great Prologue

Moderator: Adam Bassett
Speakers: Claire Legrand, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Andrew Watson, P.L. Stuart, Rob J. Hayes
Description: Exactly what the title says—dos and don’t of using prologues.
Key Takeaways:

• A prologue can set the tone of an entire series to hook readers into the individual books.

• Prologues let the reader know what they’re in for, which can be especially important for genres like horror and grimdark.

• The difference between infodumping and interesting lore is all in the delivery.

• Give your prologue a complete emotional arc.

• Everyone is pro prologue so long as it is written well and serving a purpose.

• Check out the prologues of other forms of media to help you write your own.

Space Horror: Monsters in Zero Gravity

Moderator: Emily Hughes
Speakers: Halo Scot, S.A. Barnes, Ness Brown, CJ Aggett, Chris Hooley
Description: A discussion on the unique ways space as a setting can work within the horror genre.
Key Takeaways:

• Space is inherently hostile to human life, it doesn’t care whether you live or die, it’s dark, it’s vast, it’s largely unknown—it is absolutely ripe for horror.

• Being both alone and not alone in the universe are equally terrifying possibilities.

• Space represents in a way human potential and progress. Space horror is finding all the failure points within that progress to explore.

• Technology, the more advanced it is, the more failure points it has and all of those can be exploited for horror scenarios.

How to Kill Off a Popular Character Well

Moderator: Andy Peloquin
Speakers: Lucía Ashta, Tim McKay, Jen Williams, Philip C. Quaintrell
Description: A discussion on the methods of killing off a character, when to do it, why to do it, and what happens to the surviving characters as the plot moves on.
Key Takeaways:

• The important place to “earn” the death of a character is in the aftermath with the rippling consequences of their death.

• Use character death sparingly and handle it sensitively. Death is a very serious thing.

• Character deaths are impactful when you as the author invest in the character as if they are not going to die.

• Emotional fallout is something to keep an eye on—grief and trauma comes and goes and can affect the characters/plot long past the immediate aftermath.

• Killing, not killing, resurrecting—all need to be kept in balance.

Vampires, Werewolves, and Zombies, Oh My: Keeping Classics Fresh

Moderator: Mike’s Book Reviews
Speakers: Nat Cassidy, Laura Purcell, Johnny Compton, Liz Kerin, Ed Crocker, Ciel Pierlot
Description: Talking about all the classic monsters and how they have been, currently are, and might someday be represented in fiction and the interplay between horror and monsters.
Key Takeaways:

• There’s so much “lore” out there surrounding classic monsters that’s not as well known and has yet to be explored. Do some research, find some new weird stuff to write about.

• Ground the traditional mythos in the setting you’re working with to give it a fresh vibe—i.e. no one is carrying a wooden stake in their purse in 2025, so what else can kill the vampire?

• A lot of monsters fill the gaps of things unknown, like yet to be discovered science or medicine, and play on that fear.

• Use your monsters to highlight something other than fear—anxiety, depression, stress, discomfort, etc.

And that is a wrap on my TBRCon 2025 experience! I had an absolute blast. I highly recommend you check out their YouTube channel to watch the panels, and then check out their website for a ton of great SFFH content.

Huge thanks to the folks behind TBRCon, FanFiAddict, and all the authors, reviewers, bloggers, gamers, artists, etc. who make cons like this possible. See you next year!