I’m finally home, to a sunny and slightly warm Seattle afternoon. Opened all the windows in my apartment to air it all out, a little disappointed at the mess I left behind in all my hurry to leave for the airport Wednesday morning.

The weekend at LTUE was really great. The committee and all involved in taking me out to meals were just the nicest people and made sure to take care of me.

  and Rick Walton and a number of great members of local writing groups especially deserve great thanks for feeding me over the course of the three days of th
e symposium. I had a great time chatting and getting to know everyone.

The other guests of honor also deserve great kudos–I had a great time getting to know

  , Gloria Skurzinski, and Julie Czerneda. The highlight of my weekend had to have been the gift of a caracature from Howard Tayler, who draws the popular and extremely entertaining webcomic Schlock Mercenary. He offered to do one as I was talking with Mette about editing a book, during which I happened to mention the phrase “killing some darlings”: 

Yeah, that’s gonna have to become a usericon.

More updates and plenty of blog fodder from the weekend. Welcome to any new readers via LTUE or any linkages via that! I promise to post soon a series from my main address, and I might even possibly have video, which will be a lot of fun–though it was dark and I faltered quite a bit at the beginning for two reasons: 1, not being able to read in the dark (lights were out for the slides) and 2, not being all there due to the sinus infection I’ve been nursing for a month.

On the bright side, all that time in the lovely dry climate of Utah (I love the sun! I love the sun!) I think helped dry out my sinuses. Hard to tell until I get a nap in this afternoon, which is the next item on my agenda.

I also told several people I’d try to blog about their questions, such as book recommendations for writers, so I’ll try to get to those soon too. All these interesting subjects to talk about!