Coyote Con

Introduce Yourself!

This is your virtual blackboard. Post a comment introducing yourself. Tell us what you write and what sessions you’re looking forward to. Talk about your favorite authors, the most frustrating part of writing, or just say hello.

We’re glad you’re here!

If any link in your comment or name looks like spam (Selling viagra, for example; talking about your work is fine.) your comment will not be approved and your con registration may be canceled.

Sorry about the un-announced downtime! We had the opportunity to upgrade the servers and took it. It’s all back now. 

We now have hashtag support, so just like with twitter, if you use a hashtag, people can comment and follow along without it actually appearing on their activity stream.

We now have external feed support for groups. That means, if you have a group of novel writers, and a blog elsewhere about novel writing, you can automatically post your content from the novel writing blog to the group. This is NOT to be used to market an individual author. Please do not create a group for yourself about yourself and feed your posts from your personal blog here, but feel free to create a group about something of interest to you and feed an appropriate blog’s posts to the group.

We were working on additional facebook support, but it didn’t work out so well. Is that important to you? Let me know, either in a message to me or a comment on this post.

Don’t forget, you can write posts to appear on the blog, and they can be about anything of importance to you. Got a new book coming out? Post to the blog! Getting married? Post!

I hope you’re having fun. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to make the site worthwhile.

Now you can set your group notification settings to send you an email every time something new occurs, or in daily digest, or something else! Explore the site and let me know if there’s any other functionality you’d like me to add.

If you take a look at your profile, you’ll notice that you now have a tab for a “quick post”. You’ll now be able to post to the blog directly. Let us know your news, tell us what you’re up to, give us writing pointers, how to market our work, or do something better.

When you create a post, it will be sent to the queue for approval. As long as it’s an informational post (not just marketing yourself), it will be approved and we’ll all get to share in your excitement or learn something new from you. Choose from the categories “General” “News or “Events”.

You also now have the ability to give one another “gifts”, silly, cute little things you can use to let someone know you’re thinking of them. You give them with the points you make by creating posts, commenting on your groups, or just letting us know what you’re up to. We’ll figure out other great things to do with the points too, including free stuff from DP, or anyone else who wants to donate something special.

I hope you’re having fun. Let me know if you want something else. You can make a comment @deena, post to my profile, or send me a private message and we’ll see what we can do.

Drollerie Press authors will be celebrating their new releases and talking about their work tonight in the chat room. Come join us!

This has been a really rewarding experience, and I want to thank our tremendously talented guests, Joely Sue Burkhart for wrangling the writing challenge, and all of you who have been supporting your fellow authors on the writing loop and in the chat sessions. I’m so honored to have gotten to meet you all. I hope I have the opportunity to meet you in person some day.

Tonight’s guests are amazing people, as all our guests have been. Don’t miss “Race 101 for Writers” at 7 with Monica Jackson, Victor Infante, and Carole McDonald; “Writing to Scare the Reader” at 9 with Scott Nicholson; and “Comics and Graphic Novels” at 11 with Fraser Sherman, Teresa Wymore, and Cindy Lynn Speer.

We’re already looking forward to next year, and talking about what sessions we’d like to see. Please make suggestions! Comment on the feedback form if you don’t want to complete all 20 questions (they’re easy questions, though!), and I hope I’ll see you on Sunday evening for our wrap-up session.

Please be sure to join us tonight for Gary Braunbeck, the creative writing instructor, editor, and award winning author, at 9PM eastern in Raven. You won’t want to miss it.

Timothy Deal, Editor and Publisher, of Shroud, The Journal of Dark Fiction and Art is looking for Horror, Dark Mystery, Dark Fantasy, cross-genre Suspense and Thriller, up to 5,000 words, as well as Flash Fiction, and Serialized Novellas. Tonight at 9PM in Sun Wukong.

Gary Braunbeck will be our guest on THURSDAY May 27, at 9PM Eastern time, where he’ll talk about writing and horror. Come join us!

On Friday, we’ll be having Race 101 for Writers at 7, Writing to Scare the Reader at 9, and Comics and Graphic Novels at 11.

On Saturday, we have a session on proper manuscript formatting for submission at 3, the evolution of the ‘Zine at 5, Fairy Tales at 9, and 21st Century Author Survival at 11.

Sunday we’ll talk about writing erotica and erotic romance at 2, talk about the ups and downs of the MayWriMo writing challenge (and give away some prizes for Word Wars!) at 4, and talk about the bad folk of faery at 6.

I hope you’ll be kind enough to come to our last session, Sunday night at 8. We’ll be talking about what went right and wrong with CoyoteCon, what you’d like to see next year, and how we can improve. If you could also take a few moments to fill out the feedback survey, that would be very much appreciated. It’s 20 questions, which might seem a little long, but we want to make next year even better.

We have one more full weekend left, and we’re already thinking about next year. Please be so kind as to complete the feedback survey so we can more fully meet your needs during CoyoteCon 2011.