Reporting from WorldCon...

As so often happens, we ElectricSpec editors found each other almost by accident within the giant swell of humanity that is WorldCon. The earlybird line for pre-registration was 35 minutes long. The Colorado Convention Center is, in a word, HUGE. Crazy big. It suits WorldCon, as there are no less than ten things to do at any hour of the day and night, especially if you're counting parties.

We saw Connie Willis and George RR Martin discuss books they liked. Yes, as in past tense. We would have preferred to hear more about current books they like, but we heard about that from some editors/writers at Locus later--irritating in that there was obvious bias against ezines. They did make the valid point that few online magazines actually edit their writers; we at ElectricSpec couldn't think of even a very good story that we hadn't tweaked in some way. And our authors are remarkably accepting and even happy with our edits. Intriguing enough, one of our editors' stories for Analog was printed as is. It would have been a good counter-point, if only we'd thought of it earlier. :D

We tried the writing track panel for "Rising Stars" to drum up business for the magazine and maybe promote our own work; it was all "This is an agent. This is a query letter." so two of us bailed and went to a small press panel. Interesting in that we heard two varied concepts. Red Jack press has print runs of 1000; Flying Pen does POD. Both seem to be going along at a decent clip.

As for parties, it was a quiet night tonight, hanging in the SFWA suite. Everyone seems a bit tired. Maybe tomorrow might be more exciting, and Friday we are booked up, including throwing one of our own.