Upcoming Appearance – VCON 39

It’s that time of year again! VCON the local annual science fiction and fantasy convention is coming.  I usually attend and meet old friends.  Also, act as costume assistant for Jessica.  She constructs some great costumes – the cyborg tree for example!

This year I’m a panelist again!  It’s fun to be on panels and interact with other authors. It’s a great way to meet new writers and editors.  VCON is fairly small so I doubt that there will be agents there, but I’ve met book agents at cons.  Some small publishers such as Five Rivers and Edges SF will be in attendance, too. They offer  ‘pitches’ session for novels. As a prose writer, you can learn a lot at a good convention. This one is also the Canadian national awards host for this year: Canvention 34.  This is a very prestigious set of awards, called the Auroras- given for outstanding performance in several arenas of SF/F art.  It includes writing, art and media. (Full Disclosure: I have 2.)

If any of y0u would like to join us, see:   Information on VCON.

I’m doing 3 panels: Everyone’s a Critic, Finding Inspiration and Best Writing Advice Ever.

IMG_0173I’m also pleased to announce I’m moderator on a panel with the top writer guest there: David Weber.  He’s a well known and respected military SF writer.  Maybe best known for his Honor Harrington series, he has an interesting new Safehold series out.  I read Off Armageddon Reef recently.  See information about David Weber.

Challenges of writing in the summer

At 56000 words of novel. A week off really helped. I multi-task like a crazy thing most of the time. It takes it’s toll.
Some nights I wake up thinking- did I send that last email before signing off day-job computer? One of my rules is no going back on till the next scheduled work period. I learned to do this after getting up and emailing producers (Lynne Booth and Larry Raskin) at 3 am. Larry kindly convinced me that nothing in our documentary show was that urgent.
So, now I separate my ‘work lives’ as much as I can. The home computer has my novel on it. There is no tech writing on my IPad, etc.
I really got a lot of words done on my novel during my week off– about 6 thousand! But, alas, today it’s back to the corporate job, dance lesson ferrying and, soon, child in new school.
No wonder people dream of a solely creative writing career. I can’t do it – unless my ship comes in, I sell big time, or my teaching gig goes full-time (unlikely ) ! But then again, I often create new stuff under pressure!

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