Final WOTF Remembrances

It's been a little over a week since WOTF.

The Saturday after the awards ceremony, we went to a Pasadena Borders for a book signing. The first book signing was right after the awards ceremony; we were all signing each others' books. Of course, sometime during the night I placed my signed copy of the book down amidst all the hundreds of copies of the book and didn't discover it until I opened "my" copy in my hotel room at 2 AM.

So everyone had to sign my copy again at Borders.

I got to sit between Tim Powers and Stephen Kotowych, this year's WOTF Gold Award Writer. KD Wentworth was on the other side to Tim. If you look beyond KD, you can see Tony Pi (my roommate for the workshop) and Damon Kaswell (fellow Wordo). Cory Docto Sean Williams was on the other side to Stephen (and Lorraine Schleter was on the other side of Sean). Stephen is a really nice guy -- I haven't had a chance to read his story ("Saturn in G Minor") yet, because I'm only about half-way through the anthology. Tim was tolerant of my antics, and just before he went off for a break he said that if I managed to sign one of his books for a reader I could have one of his Cokes. Unfortunately, nobody wanted a faux Tim Powers signature. Luckily, Mark brought me some food shortly thereafter.

Now that I've had a little time to compile my notes and take some time for writing, I'm seeing how my approach to writing short stories wasn't exactly the best choice -- and I'm evaluating all my past work. It's going to be really hard not to go through my manuscripts and try to tweak them a lot.