World Fantasy Convention, Here I Come!

Hi, blog friends! Life continues to be a whirlwind of craziness. I keep telling myself that after my trip to WFC in San Diego, everything will settle down. But, that's a total fabrication to keep me from screaming... though I am totally excited the holidays are coming up. I've decided to forgo my usual Monday Meme to share a random list of things I've been doing lately:

1) I saw Three Musketeers on Saturday and Real Steel today. They were both pretty awesome. Three Musketeers had a pretty rad airship battle. Yep, I said airship. You know you wanna see it.

2) My son's fourth grade play is on Thursday. He's going to be a pirate. For Halloween, he's going to be a knight. So, there's been a lot of discussions of the wardrobes of both pirates and knights. And weapons, naturally.

3) I posted the first page of Countless in the Miss Snark's First Victim October Secret Agent contest. It pretty much got eviscerated. When I participate in public critiques, I like to give honest feedback, but always make sure to find something positive about someone's excerpt. Not all people have that same philosophy. The especially annoying thing is that everyone was saying I had too much of the antagonist's backstory on the first page, when the whole reason I added any backstory at all to the first page was because an agent I met at a conference critiqued it and told me I needed some backstory. So, this kind of makes me feel like poking my eyes out. Okay, venting done. Backbone thicker. Moving on.

4) My colt got castrated earlier in the week. Yeah. So, that was interesting.

5) Planning for my big trip. Weather forecast - check. Reserve shuttle from airport - check. Edit and print up pages of Countless and new novel (tentatively called Noir) - check. Buy a couple new outfits just for the heck of it - check. Bring books for Charlaine Harris and Neil Gaiman to autograph - check.

I'm going to be in California in three days! Holy cow! I'm freaking out a little. Mostly in a good way. A heads up - next Monday I will skip my meme as well since I will have just flown back from Cali late Sunday night and have a big meeting at work on Monday, plus taking my son trick-or-treating Monday night. I'll probably post links to my November issue of Raven Moon on Tuesday. I've got a cool author interview and a book review in addition to the usual fun stuff.

So, wish me luck. Did I mention I'm going to be flying all the way across the country all alone? And I won't know anyone when I get there? Okay, I'm babbling now. Talk to you guys next week!