I'm back from DucKon 2009 (www.duckon.org) and exhausted... but happy.  Kids had a good time, and I did, too.  I must admit that Jim Butcher is much younger than I expected him to be... or I'm getting old, one of the two. 

And, as usual, I can't leave well-enough alone.  The new head of Writer's track left the room open from 5-7pm on Saturday evening, so I borrowed the room and did an impromptu 2-hour talk on plotting.  The reason being that I'm teaching a 6-hour class on plotting this coming weekend and wanted some guinea pigs to try out my material on.

I'm really glad I did it, because their questions made it really clear that I need to rearrange the order of most of the talk.  And they stumped me with a couple questions, one stumped me so badly that I yelled "HELP!" to Phyllis Eisenstein, who has taught writing for many years... "help me put this thing that I instinctively understand into words that others can understand." She took the time, and I now have the answer, which I very much appreciate.

And... to top off the con.  My chosen-sister is head of programming at the con, and she was taking the agent-guest-of-honor out to dinner Thursday night... and being the wonderful person that she is, my chosen-sister called me up and told me I was driving.  :-)  So, I had dinner with the agent-guest-of-honor, followed my a 2-hour long conversation were we discovered a fair amount of common interests and common ground... which resulted in me finding out that one of her favorite genres to read is one my current manuscript falls into... how cool is that!  Which is topped off by the fact that she loves to read and represent all the genres that I suspect that I'll find myself writing.  :-)  Wow!  :-)  So, given the machinations of my chosen-sister... I have a real-live agent who wants to see my full manuscript.  How cool is that!!  :-)

So, it was a good weekend.  Kids had fun, I had fun, and now kids are finally in bed and quiet and hopefully I can catch up on my sleep.