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Post-Penguicon

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The final tally from the rape crisis center fundraiser was $1553. My thanks to everyone who donated. Congratulations to Maria Lima, who won the ARC of Snow Queen’s Shadow. I’ll be notifying the other three winners in the next day or so.

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Each year, Brenda Novak runs an auction to raise money for diabetes research. Her efforts passed the one million dollar mark last year, and she’s still going strong. My contribution to this year’s auction is a critique of a short story or the first chapter of a novel. The auction runs through the end of the month, and you can bid here.

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Penguicon was a blast, as always. No con is perfect, and there were a few bumps over the weekend (like the dealers room having zero of my books on hand), but overall I had tremendous fun meeting and talking to people, being a smart-ass on panels, and just generally catching up with everyone.

April was a busy month, and I’m still working on getting my brain back up to what passes for functional for me, but here are some of my thoughts from this weekend.

  • I know a lot of very smart, funny, nifty people.
  • No matter how successful I become, I will never be as popular as a simple cardboard box.
  • The first rule of princess mafia is that you don’t talk about princess mafia.  …Aw, crap. Never mind!
  • Apparently my jacket contains its own TARDIS. (This observation brought to you by John Scalzi.)
  • I sometimes struggle to balance the need to present useful, intelligent information on panels with the need to be a smart-ass. (But it’s the smart-ass stuff that ends up on Twitter!)
  • For male authors, there may be a correlation between hair and number of books published. Evidence is here.
  • Never tell a former NASA scientist that the moon landing was faked. (Also, ouch, my poor face…)
  • The longer I hang out at the bar, the more profanity slips into my conversation. Need to remember to flip that switch back before returning to work!
  • I trust myself to do a good job as Toastmaster at ConFusion, but I don’t know if I can top Howard Tayler in a tux.
  • Some good photos from John Scalzi and Al Bogdan.

I’ll have more thoughts about the cons and some of the panels, but for now, I’ll just say I’m glad I went. I ended up doing an episode of Writing Excuses with Howard Tayler and Brandon Sanderson, which was fun. Sold a goodly number of books, had some great conversations (and some bizarre conversations), shared a super-DAW-twin reading with Saladin Ahmed, got a Tom Smith song stuck in my head (for two days and counting), and just generally had a great time.