I'm at 5,300 with the story I'm working on, and am in the "build the tension up, up, up!" stage. I can probably wrap it up easily in another 2,500-3000 words. I'm thinking I could easily trim at least 1-1.5k from what I've written so far - a lot of it is stuff that I need to know, but don't necessarily need to have in the story.

I have not. I think I'll have to check it out.

Going to BayCon instead of WisCon? I'm glad that someone's helping balance out our cultural exchange program for that weekend.