Thanks for talking me down from the ledge, y'all. I'm feeling better. Not wonderful, but better, and looking forward to meeting my friend tomorrow for curry and venting.

Anyway, I just got my PNWA registration confirmation...including editor and agent appointments which I didn't actually request. I don't know if this was an accident and I got someone else's appointments, if the helpful woman who registered me just decided as a finalist I must want them and picked them for me...or if these people actually want to meet me. (Editors and agents have access to the finalists' entries.) Anyway, I hadn't planned to take appointments, because the book isn't finished yet, and in any case I already have an agent. But if this editor actually wants to meet me specifically, I'm not about to turn down the chance.

With that prelude, does anyone know anything about Fleetwood Robbins and/or Wizards of the Coast? (Which I didn't realize took original as well shared world fiction, but his bio at the conference site says they do...)

Oh, and do y'all think I need to delete and/or edit any of my stuff from today?

Why would you need to?

Well, my first post was pretty heavy on the f-bombs, which sort of works against the whole "pretend I never get upset about anything" thing I'm trying to develop. And I've been trying to keep this story idea a secret for so long that it feels weird to have it out here in front of God and lurkers.

Well, edit your f-bombs if you want. But the likelihood of lurkers hanging around to steal story ideas is pretty slim. Plus, like everyone said above, an idea is an idea. How you execute it is what makes it yours.

Well, it's not that I think lurkers are going to steal my story. It just feels weird to have it not be a secret anymore. But I guess I'll leave it up as a reminder to myself that it's not the idea, it's the execution. And maybe leave the f-bombs, too, as a reminder that it's fine to control emotions, but I'm never going to be perfect at it.

Wizards of the Coast?

They're the game company that makes Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, and are owned by Hasbro. Them looking for original fiction is news to me, but I may be out of the loop.

I found a little bit about it online: [link]

So far I've only been able to find submissions guidelines, not a list of what they've published recently. Anyway, I'm waiting to hear back from the conference coordinator about whether this is someone who asked to meet me based on my contest entry. If so, I'm going to learn as much as I can about what he acquires and go to the appointment, since it seems stupid not to meet someone who's already interested in me. If nothing else, it's a connection. But if they just assigned me the appointment based on the genre of my book, I think I'll cancel, simply because I'd rather not make a big push to market it until I've at least finished the first draft.

I'm feeling a bit better about life this morning. I mean, if there can be multiple romance series about school friends with corny nicknames who fight Napoleon together, or friends with even cornier nicknames in a spy brotherhood, or large families with cornily memorable names, there's room for two series where Arthur Wellesley fights Napoleon in England, right? And if I sell this book, it's unlikely to come out before 2010 at the earliest, so by then the similarities to this one particular Temeraire book won't seem quite so stark. I hope. Maybe. I haven't completely recovered my optimism yet, and I have a little over a week left to buck up, because even if I'm not pitching to an editor at the conference, I need to be prepared to talk about my work with confidence and not apologize for it.

Turns out the conference organizers just scheduled the appointments for me because I'd left them blank.

Oh well. So much for that ego boost!

coughdrabblescough