weekend good bits :)

I’m doubting my ability to do a really full writeup of the con, so I’m going to hit some highlights and ramble happily about whatever comes to mind. It’s behind a cut tag, so if you wanna read it from LJ, you’re going to have to click through. :)


Arrived Thursday afternoon; Emily picked us up at the airport, after we snuck by her. We didn’t even mean to sneak by her, but we managed to admirably anyway. :) Hit Denny’s for lunch, gasped about the awful heat, and went to get checked in to the hotel. Emily’s reservations had gotten screwed up; she didn’t have a room for Thursday night and they told her they didn’t have an extra one to give her. Apparently this was only one of many screwups with the hotel, but I missed pretty much all of the rest of them. So she ended up rooming with us instead of having her own room, which was all well and fine.

After getting checked in and all arranged and all, we sat around staring at one another and then decided we might as well head down to the conference, although it was much plenty early. We got registered (“C.E. Murphy,” Ted wrote on his ‘how did you hear about us?’ card, “(wife)”. *laugh*) and sat down to see who showed up. And lo, people showed up! Chrysoula was there (“Kit,” she’d written on her ‘how did you hear about us?’ card. “What’s Kit’s last name?” she’d then thought to herself, and then, trimphantly, “MIZ Kit! No, wait…” Eventually, she said, she figured it out, with the help of the WW poster which had ‘C.E. Murphy’ written on it. :)) and when Trip showed up we all shrieked, “TRIP!” causing Trip to figure he probably didn’t need a nametag, if we were going to keep greeting him that way. Sadly, we failed, most of the time, to preceed him into rooms, so we weren’t really available for the identification shrieks.

Almost from the start people didn’t show up to give their presentations, so the schedule was sort of slip-slidey all weekend. Despite that, though, everybody seemed to kinda pick up the slack, hanging out in the lobby and just talking. Talking craft, talking about presentations, talking about lots of things. Some catching up from last year, all that sort of thing. I was really delighted with how many people were there for Thursday night–more than I expected! Probably forty or so. Leigh Anne arrived, Sarah located me, Rill showed up; many people I knew! I met Jess Hartley, who may very well be my clone, if not my evil twin Skippy, and there was a lot of boisterous cheer.

Having gotten up at 5:30 or something, I opted to collapse into bed like a collapsey thing around 10, I think. I was v. sleepy, and we had to be up by *shudder* 6am to get breakfast before the 8am seminar. We were all glad we’d gotten up, though, because it was a Bellevue police officer and he was really very interesting. And also very, very cute. :) That was followed up by Karen’s father in law, who is a law professor at UW, and that was *also* very interesting. I was really glad I’d gotten up.

I skipped Russell Davis’s “Tips for the almost published” and hung out in the lobby talking to people instead, which was fun. That afternoon I did what could have been a much better point of view workshop, then sat on a panel with several other people while we discussed the topic of, “I sold a book, now what?!” (Russell Davis said, “Write the next one.”)

Dr. Ola, who is from EGYPT, for heaven’s sake, gave a really fun seminar on how to kill people. *laugh* Well, more or less, at least. :) She’s a medical doctor and dispelled some really popular writing cliches (people do not get hit on the head, lose their vision completely, then get hit on the head again and regain it (although I had a friend in high school who did that, except I don’t know how complete his vision loss was), nor does amnesia work the way people want it to. She says people don’t lose their entire lives, but rather just the time around the trauma.) and then answered a lot of questions like, “So if somebody in a medieval setting lost enough blood to go into shock (a liter and a half), how long would it take to recover?” (Probably about eight weeks.), and, “Where’s the best place to stab somebody so they bleed to death instantly?” (Carotid artery, although they won’t bleed to death *instantly* anyway; she says that instant death from knife wounds comes from neurological shock that sends a jolt through every nerve in the body at once, which shuts the body down; that, she says, is what happens in movies when somebody dies instantly from being knifed.) Lots of good stuff. :)

Jim and Shannon Butcher’s plane was delayed, so nobody was entirely sure if they were going to make it, but lo! They did! So after ten years, I got to meet Jim IRL, and we gabbed and he said he had (of course) forgotten he was supposed to be URBAN SHAMAN and I told him I’d told Matrice I’d stand on his head at WW if he hadn’t read it by the time I saw him. I forgot, though, to stand on his head. No photo op. :)

His keynote speech was about breaking into the writing business, and called something to the effect of, “Outrunning the bear,” based on the old joke wherein two guys are walking through the woods and come upon a bear. “We’d better run!” says the first guy. “Are you mad?” asks the second. “We have to play dead! You can’t outrun a bear!” “I don’t *have* to outrun the bear,” the first guy says. “I just have to outrun *you*.”

And this is kind of what breaking into publishing is like. You don’t have to be better than published authors; you’re not competing against them. You’re competing, if you want to call it that, against other unpublished authors, and basically you’ve got to go the distance if you want to make it. You’ve got to go the distance and you’ve got to have some luck. It was a good, funny speech, and Jim and I heckled each other during it. :) (To my amusement, when he was concentrating he remembered to call me Catie, but by halfway through the speech he was calling me Kit. *laugh*)

We had a private investigator and legal messenger guy come by and give a talk, which was full of really entertaining stories, and then Jaqueline Carey gave her keynote talk, where she talked about sheer stubbornness being part of the road to publication. In fact, that seems to be a common theme. :)

We hung out and talked til about 11 that night, I think, before crashing again because of the great sleepies and the having to get up early again. The morning started with Rebecca York’s talk on creating and maintaining suspense in your writing (she’s a romantic suspense novelist herself), and then … then I think I spent nearly the entire rest of the morning hanging out and talking to people, which was just *fun*. I got to talk to Jim a lot, and I had a lot of people ask me about the Luna line and about making the sale, which was also fun.

Sarah and I had a writing partners workshop that afternoon which *I* thought went *really* well. There were questions asked and we talked about the good *and* the bad of writing partners (Ted was apparently proud of us, because we actually talked about the huge, huge fight we had a few years ago when the subject of contracts came up. Whoo boy, what a fight. :)), and it was really fun. Then there was a panel on plotting, where it was determined the 5 of us on the panel all did things completely differently :) and then the evening was full of the masqued ball (I borrowed a dress from Jess and looked spiffy!) and awards. It was much fun!

Sunday, comparatively, was incredibly low key. We had the post mortem, for which a startling number of people stayed, and a lot of good ideas were brought up. Next year’s conference is going to be in North Carolina, and we’re kind of hoping to flip back and forth between NC and Seattle in the future, I think. After that everybody who was left went to lunch at the IHOP next to the hotel, but not quite as a unit. There were 7 in our group, and … other numbers in other groups. :) After that, those of us who were left thought we might try to go to a movie, but the mall the hotel shuttle brought us to didn’t have a movie theatre, so we grabbed some dinner and talked about some plot for Trip’s YA novel that he’s going to write this year (O.O!) and then went back to the hotel and crashed, tud!

4 thoughts on “weekend good bits :)

  1. The Kit -> Mizkit -> C.E. murphy transition made me laugh. I did something similar at Comic Con this past weekend, talking to the person at the Luna Booth. She was surpised I knew about the imprint and wanted to know where I’d heard of it. When I mentioned ‘from an upcoming author’ she wanted to know which one and I couldn’t remember anything other than Mizkit. Then I remembered I wasn’t sure I knew your full real name. Thankfully she started saying book titles.

    I remember book titles. *nod* *laugh*

  2. Man, there were SO MANY PEOPLE I would have liked to have seen who were at Comicon this weekend! It’s the first year I’ve really wanted to go, and there just wasn’t a chance!

    You talked to Christie Golden, maybe? Author of ON FIRE’S WINGS?

  3. I talked to some nice sales rep sort of person. Christie Golden was goign to be there and signing later in the day. Her pile of books was bigger than any of the others *chuckle*.

    I did get a free copy of Anne Kelleher’s Silver’s Edge which I liked right up until the line ‘To be continued’. I hope the next book comes out quickly.

  4. Well. I’ll *think* about writing _Serendipity_ this year, anyway!

    I am also tempted to try ripping _SMS_ apart and grafting the few good bits (which may or may not include any of the sex scenes) into a new novel.

    Or, of course, there’s always dying in a pit!

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