Shore Leave, First Pages, Contests, and Writing

First, before I start rambling, I'm going to the Shore Leave convention in Hunt Valley, Maryland, this weekend.  I'm one of many, many author guests.  Why?  A) I had a short story published in one of the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds books, and B) I begged.  I'll be on three panels, but I'm planning on attending many more.  It's my only chance to be a minor celebrity and then sit and watch all of the popular Trek authors get mobbed with fans and books.  I love it.  Then I go back to bookkeeping...

More ramblings:

Well, there's one thing I'm learned in the past week or so -- first pages of novels are harder than I thought.  When I wrote my novel, I had a feeling that something wasn't quite right with the first few pages.  I knew I had an awful lot of "telling" rather than "showing" in the first page, which is a big no-no .

*Sigh*

What brought this on was that I "won" 1250 word critique by an agent.  (I gave money to a charity, and the prize was a critique by an agent.)   It was fairly complimentary, yet rather humbling.  I don't like to think of myself as a bad writer, but I do know I have room for improvement. 

I'm not sure if that's why I've been so hesitant to start anything this week or not.

Because I'm trying to improve, I'm trying to get critiques without bugging people.  Five stories of mine are up on Smashwords.com for free.  I have to admit that I didn't edit them, and the first one I uploaded was published before in a defunct webzine.  One of them got an honorable mention in the "Writers of the Future" contest.  The other others I tried, admitedly not very hard, to submit them to magazines.  Two have nice reviews, a third puzzled me slightly.  I'm looking forward to valuable critiques.  Probably won't get them from Smashwords, though.

Beats getting a form rejection.

Somebody described Smashwords as the world's biggest slushpile (unsolicited manuscripts to publishers are called "slush") and I have to agree.  (On the other hand, I just randomly picked out a story, without even looking, of a published writer I've met and respect, and I'm planning to buy his book -- but he was an editor.  Hi, Keith R.A. DeCandido!) 

Okay, time to tie this up.  What have I learned?  Writing the first few pages of a novel is hard.  Reviews and critiques are hard to get.  You can find real gold in the slushpile at  Smashwords.  Contests are sometimes winnable.  And I can, too, write!