Panic.

No, wait – there's nothing to panic about. I finished the edit of Red Carpet last night, and I won't have a chance to workshop it until Saturday, so that still leaves me one night to rewrite the outline and another to write the first six pages of the second draft.

Sweetwater Kill is as ready as it's going to get, so that's not an issue.

I have clothes to wear to the pre-party for the Tribute to Ray Bradbury, at which I hope to actually meet Mr. Bradbury himself.

My PDA is updated with my down-to-the-minute schedule for the entire conference, with alarms going off ten minutes before I have to be anywhere. I got my WIPs into WordSmith so I can work on them during downtime. I need to get used to writing on the PDA, I've avoided it for too long. I'm sure by the end of the week I'll be a pro.

It all seems to be coming together. I still have to print off copies of everything. Things are going so smoothly that I'm sure to run out of printer ink after the third page of the first manuscript.

I also wrote 1000 words of the second draft of an essay I've been working on for a while. It felt good to sit down and knock out some pages. It needs a couple more drafts, though, and I need to refine my thinking before it will say what I want it to say.

There's a lot to get done around the house, and I'll need to cram my family full of vegetables tonight because I know they'll eat nothing but cheese pizza for the next seven days.

I'm excited.

When I created my website (http://www.christie-johnson.com) it was with the thinking that a) some day I would need one and when the time came I would be ready, and b) that I could blog a bit about what's actually involved (for me) in working toward the goal of being published. I know I'm not the first, nor will I be the last. I read a *lot* of blogs by published authors and unpublished writers. I've found a lot of help in those blogs. But I'm not sure that I have a lot to add to the body of blogged experience, and frankly I'm not making progress quickly enough to make the subject interesting.

I can certainly blog about the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference, (http://www.sbwc.org) and the workshops that happen throughout the year. But I'm not a journalist, so I don't know how well I'll do. I'll give it a shot though.

Aside from that – SBWC and the trials of an unpublished writer – I'm not sure what I have to say. I don't want to talk about my personal life here. It's lovely, but happy people aren't all of that interesting, and my domestic commentary probably wouldn't be useful to anyone.

My other interests include first amendment rights, evolutionary science, skepticism/rational thought, and other secular humanist subjects, but I'm not an expert in any of those things – just a student. They might creep in here and there in the form of recommendations and links.

I'll think about it for a couple of days and see what I come up with. By then the conference will have started and I'll have plenty to talk about for at least a week.