Caitlin vs. RT

Originally published at Dark Territory. You can comment here or there.

Actually, nothing VS. about it.  RT is treating me well (except for that one person at the vampire banquet, and the less said about her the better.)  I’m still faithfully blogging each day, and there are tons of pictures and some video over on Richelle’s blog.  Observe, in the video, as my bangs attempt to eat my head again.  I have GOT to do something about this hair malfunction when I get home.  It’s beginning to wear on me psychologically.  I have Fringe Paranoia: fear of goofy fringe ruining photos.

I’ve met some really great folks in the course of the con: Kim Harrison, who is sweet, gracious and lovely, Rachel Vincent, ditto, Jocelynn Drake, who works in the stock market as her day job, which just awes me because I fear numbers, Jenna Black, who has fantastic hair, and Keri Arthur, who’s Australian, which makes everything she says 10% cooler just because of the accent.  AND AND AND, I met Jeaniene and Melissa for the first time in person, after many moons of emails.  I can say with complete honesty they’re both just as I pictured them.  I just hope I haven’t frightened them, since I tend to be all “OMG INTERNET FRIENDS YAY” when meeting people in person for the first time.  Professionalism = not mine.

I owe some congrats to my peeps, too:  Richelle’s FROSTBITE hit #7 on the NYT bestseller list for Children’s, which is incredible, amazing news and something that Richelle well deserves.  My hat is off to my first fellow Team Seattle member to hit the NYT list.  And Jeaniene’s HALFWAY TO THE GRAVE took home Reviewer’s Choice for best urban fantasy here at RT, which is just fucking cool.

You know what else is fucking cool?  Me, not writing what I should be writing.  I am such a rebel.  I go through cycles where I’ll get zapped with a ton of ideas and distracted, and since RT is not real conducive to a writing schedule, I went ahead and wrote up an outline of Demon City, my post-apocalyptic vampire-zombie pandemic story, which is set in Dublin and features a zombivamp heroine and a dude with one leg who, in my head, talks like Colin Farrell.  Yeah, I’m so doing productive career-author stuff right now.  However, I think it’s important to keep your idea queue fresh and not feel obligated to old projects that will never work now that you Know Better.  I go through about once a month, delete stuff I’m never ever going to write (if it really is a Book, it will come back to me) and add new stuff.  I decided that from now on, I need to write actual outlines of new stories so I don’t have to worry about forgetting anything.  Demon City has been in my head for a while–it’s V for Vendetta x’ed over with 28 Days Later and all of it filtered through a John Carpenter lens.  (Yeah, I love sloppy film references, but I didn’t put them in my query letters, so hah.)  I’ve got 3 more to go, and then I think other than my always-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride superhero/urban fantasy novel, those will be the four ideas I go to for options over the next few years.  One YA, one steampunk, one straight UF, and one with zombies.

I can work with that.