I’m no expert in the backend of running a Con, and I won’t tell you that Farpoint was the be all end all. I have little point of comparison. (You can see the little list of Cons I’ve spoken at/will speak at in the future over to the side.) I’ve never been to Dragon*Con or San Diego Comic Con and I doubt I will any time soon. When I think of a convention, I really am thinking of small to medium sized fan-run conventions. Gencon Indy is the biggest I’ve gone too and plan to continue to go to since it’s such a big deal for pen and paper RPGs.

All that in mind, from a speaker/panelist point of view, I was happy and sane by the end of Farpoint, and sane at the end of a convention where you’re doing more than one panel is a sort of state of Nirvana. (Especially when you consider I was carrying around a three month old with me the whole time.)

The staff was knowledgeable and helpful without being fussy or snotty. (Sad fact, snotty staff at a convention kills a good day for me faster than pigs blood on my new prom dress.)

What’s more, things were set up so that I didn’t even have to talk to staff if I didn’t want to! Really, I actually had all the information I needed at hand from check in to leaving. How is this possible, you might ask? Pay close attention other conventions, I’m talking to you.

When we checked in, we got our passes, and typed clearly on the back was a little list for me of times, places, and panels I was supposed to be at. Holy heck, I geeked out about the convince of that pretty much all weekend. I know, it’s a small detail, and I don’t know how much time I took to prepare that little luxury, but it seemed like it saved me so much work and I hope saved staffers work as well.

Eli Senter was our point of contact and I think doing the main wrangling for the DIY portion of the convention. Great work, great stuff and he was oh-so-friendly. I’d work with him at any con in a heartbeat. He answered emails! Do you know how awesome that is with convention staff? Even weird emails like, ‘what panels am I on?’

Some of the panels had a bit of low turn out, but hey, that happens when Felicia Day is down the hall signing autographs. As my friend Kelly mentioned over at her Con report, a little descriptor on the schedule and by the doors might have been nice, but I’ve come to think that if I’m a speaker, there’s a little bit of self-advertising I need to do anyway.

That said, I plan on going back to Farpoint next year as a speaker or even just and attendee, the atmosphere was fantastic, the staff was great, and you can’t beat good solid organization.

Other People who rocked Farpoint for me:

Sally Catlin, who did a really beautiful job at the World Building panel and pointed me toward Little Details.

Blake Schreurs for the Angry Prostitutes.

Sarah Martinez spoke with a really level head about geeking-for-profit. This lady knows how to promote without being the least bit pushy of self-centered.

Gavin Schmitt for creating grudges left and right, as well as one hell of a game title.

Nobilis because Dragon Age RPG, Fuck yay! A perfect con game with you in charge, sir.

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So it’s a year since I started keeping track of this sort of thing. Despite last years cynicism, I don’t actually feel particualry bad about what I have to report for this year in told. What I said last year still holds– Tell me what you did this year and what you hope to do next to keep it public to add accountability.

• I guess the big one is I had another baby. That’s two. We have replaced ourselves with smaller, more beautiful and probably more intelligent hybrids of our combined DNA. I’m already a more recovered and happier mom than I was, but a lot of that is because I didn’t have major sugry with this birth and I’m no longer a first time mom. (Duh.) I’ll call that a win.
• Tina gets smarter and more beautiful everyday. We’re talking about getting her a desk top next year because she’s already so computer literate. Every time she shows me a craft she’s done or a picture she’s drawn on the computer I tell her, ‘just beautiful.’ Every time I say it, I’m really saying it to her.
• I’m still getting paid to write, and now I’m starting to eek out a qualified career making enough money to get by.
• I think I’ve sold about another 15o,000 words this year, writing about 170 to 180,000 in total. Next year I’ll have a better count. (HA!)
• I’ve spoken at at three Cons this year and helped David land similar apperances, which boosts both of our careers and rocks pretty hardcore.
• I’ve actually seen physical copies of books I’ve worked on, three of which are on my shelf as we speak.
• I wrote for and got accepted in my first anthology. Buried Tales of Pinebox, TX is awesome and you should buy a copy if you haven’t already.
• I’ve been published on The Escapist and now have a regular blogging job at Altern8.com.

Looking over last year, there’s a few things I didn’t get to I wanted to this year, but I’m not too down about it.

• I didn’t hit 250k this year, but I did have a baby so I’m just going to have to live with that.
• I didn’t write and produce any radio drama. I just… forgot about it. What a damn shame. Maybe this year, assuming they go to a 36 hour day all of the sudden.
• I did not get Unhero out, but I’ve come to terms with the rewrites I’ll need to do first so that’ll just have to happen over time instead.

Plans for this year?

• I hope I can get more personal writing done, fiction and the like. I have a few creative writing classes this Spring so I don’t have much choice on that, but after the classes and in terms of novel writing we’ll see.
• I am dying to see Maschine Zeit finished up. I love it so much and believe in it it’s just a matter of time, like everything else.
• I’d like to speak at more cons this year. I have a few lined up, but really any excuse to travel and get out of the house is better than the last.
• I want to read more books this year.
• I want to get back to learning Italian. This entirely novel-writing related.
• And how about a totally arbatrary goal? I want 500 twitter followers by 2011. I have no control over that, it sees like a pretty random thing, so that should be fun to look at next year.

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You can find me, (or at least my writing) all over the place now and in case you hadn’t heard via twitter, (my primary source of communication with the world these days) go ahead and take a look at what I’m reporting to you here.

A second short story of mine has appeared over on www.spacewesters.com! No Child of Mine is a second story that takes place on the same Mars as found in my other spacewestern short, Mars Ain’t No Place for Ladies. All this thinking of Mars as a harsh frontier makes me crave that as a setting for a game. I might have to look a little more closely at Mars in Eclipse Phase. But that’s beside the point.

I’ve started having regular article writing over at Altern8.com. The dude running it is enthusiastic, excited, and smart. I must highly recommended also checking out David’s articles there as well. (And if you’ve missed his RPG in an hour Panel, let me recommend checking out the written version he’s gotten up over at The Escapist.)

Speaking of Panels. David, myself, and our roleplaying shock troops will be running games and partying at this years Haunter Convention. (That’s the latest Con we’ve heard a green light back from, though I’d say we’ve got a number others in the pipe line, information to follow as I get it.)

And here’s a short list of games you should be looking into because, hey, I might have material out for them soon:

-Traveller’s, the Mongoose Edition as 3rd Partied by Terra/Sol.

-Gumshoe, you need to be playing this, my writing not withstanding.

-New Gods of Mankind. Really, you need to check this out. It’s a little bit like an old favorite game of mine, (Act Raiser,) but in table top form. You can do it like an RPG, as a sort of SIM, even as a board game. It’s out with IPR, and those guys pretty much can do no wrong from what I’ve seen thus far.

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So, I had the baby the 9th, and everything is wonderful with that. (Thanks for asking!) With the baby here you have to understand that baby matters are forefront on my brain. (Milk, poop, sleeping, not sleeping, that sort of thing.) Since it’s my blog, and you clicked here of your own free will, I can talk about any body fluid I want.

The second thing you need to do is go here and read a short story I just got published. Nathan Lilly runs Spacewestern.com, and it is fantastic. There’s a connection here between breastfeeding and this short story, but I’ll get there.

If you’ve never breastfed, here’s what you need to do. It takes time. It is hella time consuming. I’ll break down the numbers for you, in case you aren’t yourself a mom. Ever two to three hours you need to sit down and give your infant a full twenty minutes to half an hour of your time. Maybe, you can do something else with a free hand, (pick out an email, read a novel, whatever,) but mostly you have to sit down and be still. You have to wait and be patient while nothing appears to happen. It isn’t as if you can watch your newborn fatten up or grow bigger right before your eyes. There’s a lot going on behind the scene, but in all that time you devote to breastfeeding, (and lets face it, the nipple tenderness and engorgment pain,) you don’t really see change or success until much later.

Why mention this and my short story for Spacewestern? Because it’s a truth of publishing as well that you need to know upfront. I sold ‘No Child of Mine’ to Nathan over a year ago. Things happened and as a result things over at the site went on hiatus for a while. Sometimes this happens with a sold short story, sometimes there’s no clear reason why it takes a year or years for something to show up in published form. Sometimes it never shows up at all. (But that’s another post.) As a writer, you’ll spend years out of your life sitting still, nurtring your writing, your connection with editors and fellow writers and for many long stretches at a time you see absolutly no return. You can ping editors, you must keep writing, but at the end of the day, sometimes all you can do is wait and be still.

Here’s the other thing you may not have been told when you were reading a million articles on writing: Assume you aren’t getting paid this year.

You think I’m joking, think again. Whatever you’ve written, no matter what you’ve sold, and sometimes in spite of what your contract says, you can’t assume your going to get paid early, on time, or even this year. I’m not saying you won’t get paid, (that’s up to you to fight for every penny,) but I am saying that there are no immidate rewards in writing. Just like breastfeeding.

(Okay, yeah, there’s the bonding, the feeling of love, bla bla bla bla. But love doesn’t get your baby to college alone, and love doesn’t buy dinner.)

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…I call it procrastination. It means your heart isn’t in it, you haven’s sucked it up enough to do it anyway, or you actually don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing. (What, you didn’t outline? Well now, whose fault is that? Certainly we’ve all warned you about not outlining.)

All over the intertubes there are about a million pages worth of advice on how to ‘get past writer’s block.’ I don’t need to rehash any of that, mostly because I don’t believe in writer’s block. (Why? Well, Chuck Wendig said it far more succently than I feel like right now.)

So what do I do when I’m procrastinating instead of writing because I’m having trouble making words go? About a million goofy things, but the only thing I’d actually recommend is getting up and cleaning.* No, really, step away from the desk and clean the office, go do the dishes, get some laundry out of the way.

Why? Because you need to do it anyway, so it’s way better than three and a half hours of computer solitaire. You might not have the wordcount you want yet, but at least you won’t have roaches leaning over your shoulder giving advice on sentence structure. (You know what house/apartment I’m talking about. You KNOW that artist/writer friend. Weird how they’re rarely productive despite their clear lack of procrastination-cleaning. Correlation?)

It gets your blood going, and as Chuck reminds us in his post, your brain actually needs blood to function. (Not to mention the fact that as a writer, if you don’t get blood in your legs pretty regularly you risk getting blood clots AND DYING! You heard me. Clean or die.)

You probably don’t want to clean, anyway, so after a while, getting back to that writing project will be preferable to scrubbing the toilet, and before you know it, your writing a million words a minute just to avoid cleaning the garage.

Your spouse/roommate/family will be way less likely to give you a hard time about ‘getting a real job’ because you aren’t playing another round of World Craft of War and instead making their home nicer to live in.

Messes are distracting. No really, you might be used to living in a hovel. Many are, but at the end of the day most human brains get cluttered in cluttered environments. (Note: I have no scientific data on that, it just figures.)

Cleaning can (and in this context MUST) be a finite activity. If you are on a deadline and have no passion for it, now is not the time to paint the nursery and dig up all the infant clothes to put into said nursery for the upcoming baby. (Really. I can’t do that right now, no matter how much I want to.) Now is the time to say, file all the tax information on the desk, and after that, reconsider your desire to write.

While cleaning, you must be sorting through your writing project in your head. You must be thinking about it, batting it around in your head, finding what parts are preventing you from getting motivation. Like Agatha Christie told us, “the best time to plan a book is while doing the dishes.” Dull, idle tasks + thinking = ideas. It’s math. How can you argue with math? That’s right, you can’t.

Now how to stop Cleaner’s Block, that, I got nothing. Sorry.

*Please note, cleaning as a replacement for anything and everything may in fact have something to do with the fact that I am a few weeks at most away from having this baby, nesting is like that, but the advice remains solid. I think.

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We’ll be down at GameXpo this weekend geeking it out like rockstars, running games, talking table top gaming and partying like we were cool enough to get invited to the parties with the real alcohol.

David will run his RPG in an Hour panel.

David, Chuck Wendig, Martin Henley and myself will be talking about writing for rpgs, which may or may not involve a discussion of genitalia. Martin will be moderating, because he’s a champ like that.

And don’t forget, if your a woman who games, or interested in welcoming and celebrating women who are part of the hobby, stop by and talk to me about A Letter to the Gaming Industry. We had some interesting developments over there that demand more great conversation!

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So aside from a nice load of freelancing projects I’m gearing up to go into a post-birth hybernation sequence that should last about an entire day if my last baby was any indication. In the meantime, what will I be up to while I wait for the egg timer to go off?

• I did Phauxcon the week before last and it was a certified blast. The smallest and coziest convention I’ve been to yet, I loved the chance for a real personal experience with the other attendees. I want to thank our hosts Robert and Sierra, they were awesome, I’d do it again next year without hesitation, and I think David and I created some new gamers in the crowd. That always makes a nerd-mama proud. While there, I got to hear from writer L.A. Banks, her story is beyond inspiring and developed a pretty immediate admiration for her. David talks about her talk here. The stuff of inspiration.

• My first fully independent role playing game is now up for you to buy at RPGNow. Torn Apart by Radiation Wraiths is a teaser, demo style game written for Maschine Zeit, a full Horror/Science fiction setting David and I are working on and hope to have out next year. Torn Apart by Radiation Wraiths is a full contained game complete with five developed characters full of secrets and motives. Torn Apart is also my first experiment in my Dominadora project. It’s less than $2 bucks over at RPGNow, so head over there and pick up your copy. (Note to new customers. Torn Apart had some strong language in it, so you have to login to view it. Login is free and required to buy anyhow, so it saves you a step later!)
• Next weekend I’ll be at GameXpo just a hop skip and jump from Philly. I’m going to be there pretty much all weekend manning tables, running games, getting people excited and hopefully selling more than a few copies of Torn Apart. In addition to all that, on Sunday David will be doing is WILDLY successful “RPG Design in an Hour” Panel and I’ll be joined with him, this dude, and this other sketchy character to talk about pen and paper RPGs and how awesome our writing is. (Erm, you know, not too much self promotion, I’m sure.) Come on down and hang out or we might have to bring the whole con to you, and trust me, you don’t want that sort of shenanigans going on at your place.
• I’m getting some real movement and support over at A Letter to the Game Industry. If you don’t know what that is yet, in short, it’s an open conversation going on about being a woman gamer and all the highs and lows that entails. Professionals to casual players are welcome to join the conversation, and I hope you will too.

Beyond that, I have about a dozen new projects sitting on various burners and various plates. I cannot wait until I can tell you more about them when I can. Really very exciting stuff.

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First off, Happy Release Day Jim Hines!

Today, The Mermaid’s Madness hits the shelves of your local book store and if you haven’t yet, I’d like to suggest you run out the door (screaming) and get your copy. No, really. Right now. I’ll wait.

Okay, so you have your copy in hand and I have ADDED CONTENT for you direct from Jim’s fingers to your eyes. See, rather than post the same interview with the same flat questions all over the place, Jim challenged his readers with blogs to send him one good question each to post today. That means the internet is literally FULL of unique questions for the writer. That’s like the best scavenger hunt evar! (Okay, if your lazy and don’t want to hunt all the questions down, you can go here for the round up of links. I can’t wait to read them all.)

I asked Jim, “Before you started writing this series, what fairytale Princess (Disney or not) did you most identify with personally?” Because hey, what’s funnier than asking a grown man what little girl icon he saw himself as.  Here’s what Jim sent back to me.

Jim: I saved this one until the last, because it’s a good question and I wanted to come up with an equally good answer.  I’m not sure I succeeded, but I tried.

I started writing the series when my daughter was going through her princess phase.  To be honest, before she instigated what came to be known as the Great Princess Invasion of 2004, I didn’t pay that much attention to the princess phenomenon.  If I had to pick one, I’d probably go with Belle from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.  Not technically a princess, but if Disney can lump them into the princess marketing machine, I can do the same, right?  I can definitely identify with the one who wants to lose herself in a good book.  And like Belle, I’ve never really been impressed with the whole testosterone-pitting, pectoral-popping, beer-guzzling idea of what it means to be a real man.

There’s a fair amount I dislike about the story, starting with the perpetuation of the idea that a good woman can “tame” an abusive man if she just loves him enough, but I’ve probably got more in common with Belle than most of the others.

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What are you doing this weekend? If it isn’t dinner with the President, and your within a hundred thousand miles of Philadelphia,  you should probably drop it and come down to Phauxcon 2009. http://www.phauxcon.com

Why? Well, because you can get you geek on, talk about vampires AND see my husband, (David Hill’s,) hit panel “Design an RPG in an Hour.” Come see that, grab some lunch, and after lunch come back to see us talking about Vampires at your gaming table. Here are the blurbs.

Design an RPG in an Hour

We’re making a pen and paper RPG, and you’re invited to the design meeting. During the panel, you’ll address the problem-solving and analytical questions required to design a successful game. During the discussion, we’ll discuss the basics of game theory and how to outline, centered around an example you’re participating in. Soon after, the fruits of your labor will be published online as a downloadable ebook.

and

Filamena Young, a fiction and game writer, and David Hill, an Ennie Award winning game writer, want you to bring more fang to into your roleplaying. Both Filamena and David have worked on numerous products from White Wolf Publishing, (publishers of Vampire: the Requiem,) but also write for many types of pen and paper games. With a strong understanding of the vampire myth from early Slavic plagues of the undead to the modern Paranormal Romantic dreamboats, there isn’t a vampire that can’t find a comfortable way into your game, no matter what you play.

They’ll be lots of other stuff going on, but I wanted to make sure you all knew to check it out. Have a great weekend and if I don’t see you at the Con, tell Obama I said hi!

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So here’s the skinny.

After hosting my first panel on women in gaming I got a head full of great ideas and exciting thoughts and suggestions from women and men who game.

But it was only a start. There’s a lot more to do and to talk about. I know a lot of women in the industry, I know a lot of women who game, but I don’t want to start spamming you with an email to discuss the idea that’s boiling in my brain. That said, drop me a ‘hey, I want in’ here in comments, at my email, in DMs on twitter, or send me smoke signals if your local and I’ll include you in on the discussion as it gets off the ground. Also, spread this around, send it to your women friends and have them drop me a line.  Really, my hope is that this is a big beautiful thing, but I’m going to need the voice of as many as possible to get a complete picture.

Thanks, ladies, for your time.

(This is not discouraging you gentleman. You’re welcome to be involved as well, but the message is first and foremost to women.)

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