Okay INKers, it's Orycon time again. Orycon has a really nifty online program. Hopefully this link will take you straight to my schedule, forever. Maybe. As long as it lasts, anyway. I'm not sure if the individual program schedules stay on their respective websites forever, or if they get overwritten by the current year. I suppose I could go test it out, but ... meh. Anyway, I have a reading. A fifteen minute reading. I'm more than a little nervous about that. Put me in front of lots of people to blather about pretty much any ol' subject, I'm good. Put me in a room with 1-12 people where I read my stuff aloud? I get all shaky and shy. What's with that? It's not like my words on the page are all that different from the words I say out loud during a panel. Are they? What's the difference?
Maybe in conversation and on panels my words have no soul, no emotion, no life. Zombie words. But on the page they come alive! They have fears and courage, pleasure and pain ....
It seems kind of backwards. I mean, I've had time to revise and polish words on the page (though I'm not supposed to, ahem, do too much of that.) In theory I'm prepared, right? All I have to do is read those words. I'm much more likely to make a fool of myself saying something wrong while yammering on. And yet, I'm more nervous about the works that I picked carefully. Very weird.
Maybe it's because I wrote them without any feedback. I mean, you can get feedback after the fact, but that's not the same as talking. When you're talking, you have the opportunity, even if you can't or won't take advantage of it, to read your audience's expression and reactions and adjust accordingly. When you're writing a book or short story, you just keep marching on and hope that you aren't marching right off a cliff.
Or maybe I'm just being silly. That wouldn't surprise me in the least.
I'm also Nanowrimo-ing. I've got a personal goal of 80,000 words this time. It's kinda touch-n-go as far as whether I'll make it or not. I'm on track for 50,000 so far (can't get cocky, especially this early on. Remember the time my office flooded? Yeah, me too) but behind if I want to make the eighty. And so I'll spend part of my time at Orycon adding words.
This year I'm doing something YA-ish. I'm not convinced it *is* YA. I'm not familiar enough with YA to make that call. But that's not my job. Right now my job is to write. Lots. Lots and lots.
Which I should go back to, but I think instead I'll make some tea because my butt is going numb.
See some or all of you at the con!
