Archived Posts — January 2010

This blog is filling up fast, and rather than having endless old posts unrolling down the page, I’m shifting posts more than a month old either into archives or onto their own topical page. Below are some posts that aren’t important enough to merit their own page but interesting enough to merit keeping around for a while longer …. Enjoy!

January 2010

In a few short days I’ll be attending my very first convention as a guest author: MarsCon of Williamsburg, VA. I’m lucky enough to be on three different panels, but all I have in hand at the moment are the panel titles, so I have no real idea what I’m in for. I’ve never presented before, and normally I’m too busy with chair massage to attend convention panels.

I’m as jittery as a freshly kicked colony of ants whenever I think about this upcoming weekend. So I’m going to deal with it the way I always do: by researching the panel topics. And if I’m going to research, I may as well write about it (that IS what this blog is for, after all); so over the next few days, I’ll be posting short pieces on topics ranging from vampires to aliens to tips on creating believable monsters.

I’ll also be baking, partially because that’s another Sure Cure For Nervousness, but mostly because conventions are a perfect opportunity to combine my love of baking with my desire to offload the bulk of the results onto someone else–someone not battling the scale every day!

I’m also combining my three Avoiding Alcohol Abuse For Writers articles into an ebook format, moving the full articles over to my web site, and composing much shorter samples for this blog.

So overall, this is shaping up to be a really fun and really busy week. I’m looking forward to the work–I love being busy–and I hope to see you at MarsCon 2010!

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To avoid boring people who don’t care about sci-fi/fan conventions, my posts on the Awesome Experience of MarsCon 2010 have been moved to their own page.

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A great tip from someone at MarsCon this year (I think it was Michael Sullivan) is proving invaluable: On the Google site, there is an option called Google Alerts. You can enter in search strings there, and have an email (individual, daily, or weekly) sent to you when the ‘bots find that term on the web. For research and promotional purposes this is AWESOME. If you make, say, stuffed dragons, and want to know whether your friends really are praising you to the blogospheres, what your competition is like, and if there’s a support group for people who can’t stop making stuffed dragons, you could set up all those things in an alert. If you want to know whenever Coyote Run comes to your state, ditto. There’s no limit on how many searches you can set up, so be creative, stretch your brain a bit, and welcome Google Alerts into your life.

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