Last week I was at AWP, but you knew that already. In fact, some of you probably saw me there. I probably saw you there. We probably talked. Or we didn't. Either way, it was a really fun time. I could do a breakdown of everything that happened -- or at least what I did -- but I won't. If you're that interested, check out my Twitter feed starting all the way back to last Wednesday. Basically, I met a lot of great writers I've known online for quite some time, and everyone was super friendly. There was a lot of talk about writing and publishing. There was also some drinking. Okay, there was a lot of drinking. Even some karaoke-ing as you can see from this picture:
I sang "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" by the Charlie Daniels Band. And yes, by that point I'd had a drink or two or three or four.
Anyway, Friday was the Hint Fiction panel. It went very well, despite the fact that at the beginning I feared we wouldn't have enough material to fill the allotted hour and fifteen minutes; then, an hour later, I realized we didn't nearly have enough time for everything I had wanted to discuss. They put us in one of the smaller rooms that they had at the conference, so it was standing room only. In fact, there were even people standing out in the hallway listening.
Later the panelists -- Randall Brown, Roxane Gay, Michael Martone, Daniel Olivas, and myself -- as well as a few other contributors went down to the Norton booth in the book fair and signed copies of the anthology for awhile. Later Norton sold out of all the copies.
I'd said before that I would try to get the entire panel on video. It happened, though the picture quality isn't very good. The sound quality, however, is pretty decent, and that's all that really matters anyway. Because YouTube won't let you upload more than 15 minutes of video at a time, I had to break the whole thing up into 6 parts. So below you can view part 1; to view the rest, check out my YouTube channel.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4obfFNZ_Ao