Pushing Ahead

It's been a week since the Ad Astra convention, where I spent almost every waking hour surrounded by writers, editors, publishers, and adoring fans... Ok, they weren't my adoring fans, but they were still adoring fans. Biggest fan moment for me, seeing Robert Sawyer and Ed Greenwood sitting on the same panel. Drinking in my room until 4:30am with Gord Rollo, Ken Lillie-Paetz, and Miriam H. Harrison was another big moment for me.

I attended most of the panels I had planned, with only a few minor modifications at the last minute. I ended up having to skip Marketing Yourself for the second half of the Instant Fiction panel. It was well worth hearing the winners read their pieces aloud. One author had written a story from a responding traffic officer's POV about a demon coming out of a pothole on the 400. That was an absolutely fantastic short short (250 word story). My own piece needed an extra 20 words to give the ending I wanted, so I ended up using the crappiest ending imaginable. I've since rewritten the ending the way I wanted it at the beginning. With some more tweaking, I may stretch the story to 500 words and turn it into a half decent filler piece for a science fiction magazine.

I also skipped out on the panel on Paranormal Research, Urban Legends, Tesseracts Anthology, and First Contact. The last couple happened after the Sudbury Hypergraphic Society decided to return to Sudbury, and the first two were on the Friday night and were really just optional in my mind anyways. I have a full notepad of notes that I have to digest and a list of books longer than my arm to try to get my hands on. While at the con, I kept my purchases modest and ended up coming home with only a mounted Shadowrun poster and a chainmail teddy bear for Sabrina.

Since I've been back, I've been busy. I haven't updated my works in progress page yet, but I've completed a few more short stories, and am just one or two stories away from tieing up my necromancer series. The SHS had its meeting at Mimi & Lulu's, covered what we picked up at the con, and chatted about a few upcoming events: The Northern Lights Festival, The Sudbury Hypergraphic Society Radioshow, and the Sudbury Hypergraphic Society Summer Book Sale.

The Northern Lights Festival: We will be getting a table to help promote our members and their work. We'll also be promoting Script Frenzy and NaNoWriMo. I'm going to be booking the weekend off my day job so I can man the table most of the weekend. Hopefully I'll have something up for people to grab.

The Sudbury Hypergraphic Society Radioshow: Starting in June or July, the SHS will be performaing readings on the local radio station. We'll be reading and performing our own work to the listening masses. It's another way to get some exposure for ourselves and the art community here in Sudbury.

The Sudbury Hypergraphic Society Summer Book Sale: Sometime in August, the SHS will be hosting a summer book sale. We'll have a load of fiction, craft books, and some other great books up for sale. All proceeds will be going to a literacy charity. We haven't chosen one just yet, but once we choose one, I'll pass it on. At the moment, people wanting to donate books for the summer book sale can drop them off at Mimi & Lulu's (c\o Danielle), The Source by Circuit City at the New Millenium (c\o Shawn), or to any SHS member they happen to know.

And finally, Script Frenzy started on April 1st. Day 5 is just about over, and I'm sitting happily at 25 pages of script. As some of you may already know, I've writing a Dark Romance script temporarily titled "Maiden of Pain." Think of it as Pygmalion meets Saw. I've been chewing through it pretty steadily, and I'd be very surprised if I stopped at the 100 page mark. I plan on expanding the description after I've completed the rough of the script, and turning it into a proper novel. All in, I'm thinking 300 pages.