Yetis do Tulsa

Finally recouped from this weekend's Conestoga 12 conference in Tulsa, Okla. It was an inspiring weekend. Met awesome people and great authors, discovered new books to check out, and learned some secrets of the trade.

Made Mark Henry some brain cake. (See photo of Eliza and the bubble-gum pink icing.) (Guilty admission: Don't have a picture of the final cake. Anyone else?)

Learned interesting tidbits about life that I was better off not knowing. (Can anyone say "olive fetishes"?)

Bought a couple of books, had them signed, and I've already finished one of them (highly enjoyable). Received free books, bookmarks, buttons, postcards, pens and the like. Shay wants a shirt that says "Swag Whore."

The best part of going besides the fun times, cool people, was how the panelists made writing a book and being published seem not only easy, but an attainable goal. The projected mindset was "If we could do it, you can definitely do it."

New Ideas

I had a great Tuesday night. The only thing that could have made it better would have been being in two places at once. I needed that time-thingy Hermione had in Prisoner of Azkaban.

The other night I was looking for "What else is out there?" Or possibly, "What goes bump in the night?" I surfed Wikipedia and distilled it down to a smaller list. I just want something different. (Basically because I have separate vampire and werewolf stories right now.) I have an idea for a heroine and I needed a world to build that she could mold to.

Anyway, I was looking through my American Legends and Folktale books and found a great idea. I'm sufficiently stoked about it. I'm still trying to work the idea out in my head (and on paper). It does fall into one of those categories on the list, but is different enough with a "local" twang that I think it's a rare idea. It's not quite ready for me to share yet. I want to nail more things down before I do.

I have a question: How many projects (stories, etc.) do you work on at one time? Do you have all these other ideas, but only focus on one thing at a time?

Update

November ended up being a very rough month. My personal life hit the fan.

Things seem to be ironing themselves out now. I've joined the Forward Motion 2 Year Novel "class". About 6 others from my rl writing group have too. It's nice to be able to share that with a face-to-face support group.

I've put my NaNo story on hold for now. I did glance back through it and found that it's not all tripe. This heartens me. I'm focusing on my werewolf story for now, though I've been debating on simultaneously working on my vampire novel. I think that may be biting off more than I can chew.