The main thing I did on Friday was to hit the Writer's and Donuts panel.

The idea for this get-together is if you feed them, they will come.

This may not be as true as it was when I was a starving student, but close to twenty folks showed up for the session.

Unlike last year, when folks sat at cafe-style tables and awkwardly tried to chat with each other, Richard Chwedyk played host and did a round of everyone introducing themselves. Once introductions were done, he initiated conversations about writing tools (amazingly enough, there were less than twenty editors used by the twenty people - but it was close), available resources (mostly Chicago area resources, since the bulk of the attendees were from Chicago-land), and just natter.

I'm of mixed emotion about the change. On one hand, it's hard to walk into a room of strangers, sit at a table with a couple folks you don't know and start talking. OTOH, it's hard to have any sort of meaningful conversation with a crowd of twenty folks.

Overall, I favor this year's hosted style. I didn't have much conversation at the event, but I did make some inroads that led to more conversations when I was folks around the con later.

I handed out copies of "Unintended Consequences" to a couple of the younger (15 year old) authors that came to the session. I'm curious as to whether the stories are too old or too young for them. The grownup critique groups think they are charming kid's stories, which means next to nothing to a real kid.