February 27, 2020

Ready for FOGcon and Beyond

It's one week until FOGcon, and I've been busy preparing for the tenth year of this awesome speculative fiction convention. This year, for the first time, I took on responsibility for the program book that contains information about the honored guests, the programming schedule, and so on. The book is professionally printed, with gorgeous cover art, so it serves as a nice souvenir of the con as well as being useful.

As program book coordinator, I collected all the different pieces that go into the book, edited everything, and did the layout. I had very little knowledge of layout or design going into this, so that part was a challenging but fun learning experience. I think it all turned out pretty well. You can see the PDF version on the FOGcon site.

Creating the program book was a big job for a couple of weeks, and the timing was good for me to handle it because I'm between things. Behind me is the completed novel revision, and I'm currently at a waiting stage with that manuscript. So now that I've taken time to recharge, caught up on other stuff, and finished this volunteer project, I'm ready to move ahead to... something.

If I'm honest, the program book timing also worked out well in that it provided a virtuous excuse to put off figuring out what comes next. I wish I had a solid novel idea that I could get started on drafting or outlining, but everything swirling around in my head is half-formed. I hope that if I settle my mind down to focusing on the possibilities, things will gel. But that requires convincing myself to get started, and I keep finding more reasons to delay. It's time to get back to writing. Definitely after FOGcon, anyway.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Christopher Gronlund considers inspiration: "There's a fine line between seeking out inspiration and working. When it's time to put in the effort, do the work -- don't look for inspiration because you'll likely find what little time you may have taken up by the literary equivalent of hollow calories."

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