The wonderful Kate Elliott has written a great essay giving advice about the business of writing to first-time fantasy and sf novelists — including yours truly, since I was fortunate enough to meet her at WFC last year and asked her about this via email later.

I was on a panel at the Intellectual Property bookstore next to UT yesterday, talking about the experience of a first publication. (Insert grateful wave at Small Beer Press folks here!) This panel was organized by UT’s Undergraduate Writing Center, where I worked last year, and went pretty darn well — the other two people on the panel had more publication credits, but many of the current MFA/MA students in the audience were in about the same career stage as I am, so the difference in experience worked well. What I enjoyed most, though, was the chance to talk about writing for a while. Since I finished the novel and got my master’s, I haven’t had many chances to do so — other than with a few close friends, and T., and my parents, while I was working on The White Silk Tent this summer. I don’t have much time to read writing blogs during the school year, or even to read books not related to my dissertation topic.

Anyway, it was lovely to read Kate’s essay, for just those very reasons. It gave me, along with some excellent advice, another chance to think and talk about writing.

This will probably be a recurring feature, because… yes.

• The scuzzy salmon-pink Chucks Robert De Niro wore in Great Expectations.
• Knopf rejection sheets for works by Joyce Carol Oates, V.S. Naipaul, Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie.
• David Mamet’s (extremely detailed) baby book, complete with report cards from pre-school–apparently he handled scissors very safely.
• Houdini’s collection of magic-related manuscript materials.
• Ms. for a minor Beckett work, which I needed to measure in order to answer a patron’s query.
• A rather accomplished landscape sketch by Charlotte Brontë, with a title written in by her mother.
• Publicity photographs of a famous blackface performer, in and out of costume and paint.
• Ink on paper self-portrait by Henry Miller. T. was disappointed to learn that the self-portrait was not at all pornographic.
• A small model concept car designed by Norman Bel Geddes that looks far more like a spaceship than like an automobile.

Not much to report otherwise; I’m studying French like a fiend, doing dissertation-related reading, and working up grant proposals for an exciting new digital humanities project in our department. More on that once we have a good demo up, I hope.