This month has been a very hard month for me. There are a couple reasons, but one of the more obvious ones is my lack of creative projects. Sand and Blood is waiting for the editor to have an opening (hopefully this month) and the first five chapters of it's sequel, SAL, is sitting at WisCon's writing group submissions. Flight of the Scions is still in limbo, but I suspect I won't get back to that until after SAL and SAD are both completed.

A week from Thursday, I'm heading up to WisCon for the weekend. This year, I decided to do some panels, but due to me not understanding the website, I didn't get a single one I really wanted to do. Instead, I'm on three panels I'm interested in.

Build a World is an improv-style world development. It was fun to see how it turned out last time and I think I'm pretty good at creating worlds and plots on the fly, so I thought I would give it a shot.

The Glitch Memorial Panel is to talk about one of my favorite semi-social games, Glitch. It's talking about the game in general and so I feel pretty comfortable.

The final panel, The Female Soldier in Science Fiction and Fantasy, scares me though. I haven't really focused on stories about female soldiers but it is a topic that I'm interested in. In specific, I'm interested in the difference in portrayals of females in fantasy and science fiction in general.

I've been trying to do research on this panel so I don't quite sound like an uneducated fool. This research is basically going through the novels and movies I have in my collection (plus about six more that I bought) and trying to get a general "feel" for how they are shown.

Though it is poorly written, I have thrown my initial notes up on a website SF/F Women. I'm trailing behind what I've read/watch verses what I've written up because it takes a lot of time and focus to try to analyze every female character.

There is a fear that what I'm doing is a waste of time, but I've found a bunch of new book series that I never read but enjoy, plus I think I have a better handle on both how military women are shown in these books and movies, plus how difficult it is to find military women in my collection. I have, um, a lot of DVDs and could only five 12 DVDs with examples.

So, that is why I'm not working on anything really creative. No stories or novels. It feels wrong and I'm getting anxious, but I really want to be able to speak for twenty minutes on any topic the other panelists and audience brings up.