Writer's Weekend 2007, Day 1

Writer's Weekend is a somewhat leaner and meaner conference this year, taking place only today and tomorrow at the Roosevelt in downtown Seattle. This is kind of cool for me personally, since I walk past this place every single day on my way home from work; in fact, it's a very short walk away from my usual bus stop. So I was able to zip downtown on the 522 this morning and come back the same way, in comfortable time for dinner. I saw a few familiar faces and some new ones as well.

Many of the items on the schedule this year were familiar to me, and so I volunteered to help awritersweekend out as I could; she put me on timekeeping duty, to be the person who pops in, taps her watch, and goes "ten minutes!" to the folks giving the panels. This was very, very easy, given that we only had four rooms to work with and Karen asked me to keep tabs on only two of them. And since the schedule was reduced anyway, I only had to do this six times.

So I had some time leftover in between all of these little timekeeping jaunts. I wrote a couple hundred words on Queen of Souls finally, and got in on pitch sessions to Mary Louise Schwartz, and sat in on a few of the panels I was timekeeping for anyway.

( Pitching to Film and TV, with Mary Louise Schwartz )

( Breaking Boundaries: The Pitfalls & Pleasures of Writing Cross-Genre Fiction, with Louise Marley and Kate Austin )

( Criminals & the Law, with Kevin Trombold )

And that's that for Day 1. More tomorrow! I'm on tap to timekeep for more panels, but hopefully I'll get to attend at least some of several more.

Oh, and for the benefit of locals: the Daily Grill, recently opened on 7th downtown, has a damned tasty tuna melt sandwich and excellent key lime pie. Highly recommended. Yum. :9

2007 Book Log #43: The Moonspinners, by Mary Stewart

Continuing my Mary-Stewart-athon of the summer, I whipped through The Moonspinners in pretty short order, and have to say that of all the things I've read by her to date, I liked this one almost as much as I liked Touch Not the Cat. I mean, you've got everything here. Exotic locale, check. Wounded, handsome stranger with whom heroine must spend harrowing early night as she is introduced into the action, check. Initially benign and charming but increasingly suspect place where heroine is staying, check. Suspect locals, check. Helpful local who's best buds with the handsome dashing hero, check. Younger innocent brother serving as catalyst for the actions of the good guys, check.

Yeah, this was fun. ;) Sure, we have the Stewart-esque emphasis on the lavish details of the scenery, but at least this time around she used more words than "charming", or at least so it seemed when I remembered to check. I still have issues with her love affair with the comma, and indeed found myself frequently wanting to go through several paragraphs and yoink them out. And while her characters do spend way too much time yammering at one another to get updated on what's going on, this time around that was at least kept down to a reasonably dull roar. Overall? Fun read indeed. Three stars.