Boo!

Yeah, yeah, it's Halloween today. Candy, costumes, soaping windows, hiding rotten eggs in my roommates' bedrooms...same old, same old. But for the radio kids, today is the beginning of a much more exciting holiday: Third Coast Eve. This is a time when we pack up all our best minidiscs, forget about the last two weeks of script rough drafts, and jump on a plane to Chicago for the annual Third Coast International Audio Festival. It's better than a bag full of those rock hard orange and black Mary Jane candies. And it's much cooler than that really humiliating picture you'd get of you in a cat costume with your arm around some guy wearing a refrigerator box that's supposed to serve as some witty double entendre, but really just looks like a dude wearing a refrigerator box. Not that I'm speaking from experience.

Some of us are headed to Third Coast to pitch our stories to the big names. Others have audio doctoring sessions with some of radio's heavy hitters. A few of us are hoping to get a better handle on what this whole industry is like. All of us will be listening to sessions on how to make our documentaries better. I'm just praying I win the free audio equipment from this year's raffle.

This comes for our group at a great time—I think we're all a little burnt out on our stories, and we all need some new scenery and fresh air (no pun intended. Ok, a little bit intended). So I can't wait to see what happens. Maybe it'll inspire me to make my story a whole lot better. Maybe I'll make some cool friends. If nothing else, this conference will keep me from eating way too much Halloween candy and dressing like a character from Lord of the Rings. And that's really all I can ask for.