writing rondevous 2

Wow. I’m weary. It’s been a long, social-filled day, especially for somebody who doesn’t get out of the house much.

It was a tremendously enjoyable day. Laurie King’s speech this morning was again entertaining, and then I spent the next three hours following Sue Henry from one room to another, which we both thought was funny by the third hour. :) I went to listen to Tom Spezialy’s film & tv Q&A, and he said, “Get an agent and send it to SciFi; they’ve been buying a lot of new stuff recently and they buy year round,” when I said I had a SF tv pilot and what should I do with it now. Monday I’ll email Jenn about her Hollywood contact, if it’s cool with Sarah.

Hung out with some of the local RWAers on and off all day, talked to Wendy Douglas a lot about writing and revision letters and RWA Nationals (going next year! Reno!), talked to a lot of people in general, had a very nice day overall, and at the end of the day during the dinner, they introduced a couple of teens (well, a 7th and a 10th grader) who’d written letters to authors about books that’d affected them. The purpose of doing this is something called, I think, Letters for Literacy, and it’s a way to get kids to read and think about what they’re reading, then to write to the author not actually to write to the author, but to enter a contest which has local (ie, state) and then national prizes.

The 10th grader, whose name is Allison, wrote a letter to Anne McCaffrey about reading Dragonsong when she was 9, and it was an incredibly affecting letter. She talked about a lot of things in the letter, including the fact that ultimately reading that book had led her to wanting to write her own stories. The letter would’ve been powerful even if Dragonsong didn’t hold a very particular place in my heart already, but I vividly remember the first time I read my cousin Alanna’s dog-eared, torn, yellow-paged copy of the book — which very copy I brought with me to Ireland so I could get Anne McCaffrey to sign it when I was 19. That copy is on my shelves, retired with honor, and I bought a new copy for reading.

So after dinner I went over and talked to her and got her email address and gave her mine, and talked for several minutes, and I most certainly hope to maintain a correspondence with her. *beam*

I even got up and edited chapter 12 this morning. I think it probably still needs more work, but it’ll do for the moment. The next few chapters have to be gutted and thrown out and redone entirely, though, so I gotta think a little about what I’m doing. I mean, I’ve talked a whole bunch of it out with Sarah already, so really it’s a matter of doing it, but I don’t know if I’ll be doing it tomorrow or not.

For the first time this month, I didn’t walk today. Tomorrow’s a much shorter conference day, so I’ll walk tomorrow, although probably I won’t make up today’s miles.

And oh! I wore two of Stella’s necklaces today, the red-purple bead one and the gold bead one, both of which I thought went incredibly well with the deep red silk shirt I was wearing. I felt very pretty. *beam* Thank you so much, Stella. I really love these necklaces.

music: Evanescence, Fallen
ytd wordcount: 132,600