I will be at WFC in Madison, WI, arriving late Wednesday afternoon and leaving the following Monday. I'll be staying at the oh-so-lovely Best Western, which was the only place where I could find a room since I made my plans to go at close to the last minute. Fortunately it's only three blocks away from the convention hotel, so it shouldn't be too bad. If any of my readers are going to be attending, drop me a comment here, or just look for me in the bar.

Okay, I won't always be in the bar, but in the evenings it might be a good place to start looking.

Also in November I'm going to be doing a modifed version of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month.) I really don't want to work on a novel right now, but I do really want to get cracking on more short fiction, so my goal is to write at least 50K words of short fiction in the month of November. They may suck, but at least they'll be written. I think it's important for me to really get serious about the short fiction for a while, and get more stories under my belt and on the market. Yeah, I won WOTF, but that's not going to mean dick if I can't follow up on that. I've looked at the lists of past winners, and yes, there are plenty of names that are Names now. But there are also a lot of names who have done nothing since that win.

So, I want to get 50,000 words written. That will probably be ten or so stories, unless a novella suddenly pops into my head. But the next thing I want to work on is NOT rushing through the rewrites and getting those stories on the market as fast as possible. I've been down that road before. I think it's a trap that a lot of new writers fall into. We're SO hungry and we want to be published SO badly, that we send the stories out as soon as we've filed off the rough edges a bit because it feels like there's just no time to waste. And then the story makes the rounds of all the major markets, and maybe some of the minor ones, and after a fistful of rejections, only then does the writer stop and look at the story and say, "Hmmm.. okay, there are some problems with this thing that I didn't see before. But, hey! They're fixable!" Only problem is, even if you fix it and it becomes a Hugo-worthy story, you can't submit it to any of the decent markets because it's already been there. So you end up trunking it in the hopes that another market will come along.

I have several of those in my virtual trunk right now. I'd like to not add to their number. So my plan is, once December comes along, to set all of those stories aside until after the first of the year. Let them steep a bit. Then go back through them nice and slow. Do the rewrites and edits. Put them through my critique group. Then let them simmer a bit more. Then set the fuckers free and see what happens.