Most of you guys know by now that part of my random squeeage has to do with gaining two guests for writercon. And today, I got an actual request from a well-known author to be a guest. I'm sort of bowled over by the response we're getting.

There's been a bit of personal triumph along the way, as well. There's an anthology project I've been working on, and we've got a serious publisher bite and an actual agent. A big part of the squeeing was related to that aspect of my life, as well.

And, maybe most important on a personal level, Nano didn't stop on 11/30 for me. I'm not sure I 'won' in technical terms, since the goal is both word count and to produce a novel. I could put the words "the end" at the point I hit on 11/30, but it's not finished by 1/3 to 1/2, so that continues on. But getting past the halfway point is, for me, a HUGE personal triumph. When I was fan-writing, I always got stuck somewhere around the late-middle of longer stories, and I've had that problem in the past with longer original work, too. But this time, I took a bunch of lessons from Holly Lisle's online stuff (which I *highly* recommend for anyone who's thinking of pursuing original fiction, no matter what her feelings about fan fiction are), and I managed to keep from sinking into the quagmire. This beast (still untitled) has a very long way to go: much of the work that's there now will have to be revised pretty extensively, cliches diminished, sentence structure cleaned up, etc. And the last parts have to be written so as to tie everything together properly, but...SQUEEEE. I am honestly ecstatic to be this far along with something fictional.

Oh, and one more thing. I got my BPAL shipment. My nose is all stuff, so I will have to wait a bit on some of them, but impage has finally arrived!