Westercon, and Query Crit on OA Today

Our second query critique is up on Operation Awesome today if you'd like to check it out! After you read this riveting blog post here, of course.

My husband and I went to Westercon over the weekend, and although he refused to dress up like Commander Ryker (hey, I was willing to try for Deanna Troy) we had a good time.

This was the first fan con that I've been to; I generally do writers' conferences and then I did a storytelling conference years ago. I only found out about Westercon because my friend Karen Sandler posted on Facebook that she was going to be on some panels there. And good thing she did, because otherwise I would have missed out on getting her to sign my book (yes, we do see each other outside of conferences, but I don't always carry a copy of her book around with me, lol).

Awakening is the second book in Karen's YA trilogy, which started with Tankborn, and now I'm re-reading Tankborn to refresh my memory before diving into book two.

I attended most of the panels to do with writing and publishing (found out about Westercon too late to sign up for the writer's workshop), many of which were concentrated on self-publishing, e-pubbing, and small presses. Got some great links and resources out of it, but I'd like to add some resources of my own here . . .

One of the panels was on using sf/fantasy in the classroom and they talked about K-12, but I noticed that most of the books they were talking about for the high school level were titles like Farenheit 451, 1984, and Brave New World. Valid books, all, but I must've not been the only one who noticed that the most recent book they mentioned was written 25 years ago because another audience member asked for more recent YA sf titles.

And the panel was stumped (they said they don't deal with YA as much). It was as they were wrapping and I didn't have a chance to speak up, but I did go up to the person who had asked the question and provided some YA sf titles that I'd read:

Beth Revis's series (starts with Across the Universe)
Veronica Roth's series (starts with Divergent)
James Dashner's Maze Runners series
Mike Mullin's Ashfall series
Paolo Bacigalupi's series (starts with Ship Breakers)
Scott Westerfield's Uglies series and Leviathin books
Marie Lu's series (starts with Legend)
Marissa Meyer's series (starts with Cinder)
Feed by M.T. Anderson (this one's actually on my TBR list)

There are so many more, of course, but these are the ones that occurred to me during the panel or right afterwards. If there was a Westercon in Sacramento in the near future (it moves to different cities), I'd definitely be proposing a panel on YA sf and fantasy!

Saturday was the masquerade but we left well before it started. I did manage to catch a few cool costumes with my camera phone though:

Would like to have seen what else people came up with, but I was tired from only two days of this! Kudos to the people who stuck it out for all four days. Since it's only about a 40 minute drive from our place, we opted to do the day trip thing.

So who would you have dressed up as, if you had unlimited time and money to make a costume?

Litreactor's Sci-Fi Writing Challenge

All the info from their website:

"Our sci-fi writing challenge, TELEPORT US, is open to submissions!
 

The time is upon us! LitReactor's sci-fi writing challenge is open for submissions!

So what does that mean?

If you're a writer, you have a month (until February 28th) to submit your story following the prompts we handed out in the beginning of January (which is right here, in case you missed it).

If you're a reader, you can read and rate stories that have been submitted. There's a bunch already waiting for you.
 

To submit or to read, click here. 
 

Remember, the whole point of this challenge is to stretch your writing boundaries, read some cool stories, and meet new and interesting people. That's why the entire thing is open and free of charge—you do not need to be a paying member of the site to participate. This is about all of us having fun and learnin' a little something from each other.

But also it's about winning prizes! We're not announcing everything just yet, but we do want to share this: Some of the top-rated stories will be read and critiqued by authors like Chuck Wendig, Adam Christopher, Kat Howard and Joseph Nassise! Read more about that here. We'll have more to announce soon. Think: Swag. And don't worry, non-writing readers, there'll be opportunities for you to win stuff, too!"


So what are you waiting for--go enter!